I would say one of which was brilliant (Utd) and two of which were mixed bags. In those games we had enough periods of quality in them to earn the points, but in both also showed periods of struggle that make clear we’re not yet where we want to be.
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3 games into a tenure to me they were, we were quick and clinical and scored at the right times, our passing was assured bar the first half against Ipswich.
They shouldn’t be serving up such a poor display over 90 mins. But again regardless what he inherited he isn’t Klopp and none of his team are the people around Klopp.
Players simply looked like they thought it would be easy.
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Post international break doldrums again perhaps?
Not our first time
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I was about to say I bet if you look at the post match threads of most post international breaks you’d see similar.
Remember some of those first half’s that stank.
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At least it wasnt a 12:30 kick off.
Still we always seem to return post internationals like we’ve been on holiday and only need to turn up to win the game.
I’m not imagining things am I?
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I remember a dire performance against Bournemouth on a Sunday. I know we won but it wasn’t great, I also think Luton away was a international break.
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Not to mention this romanticism that we somehow were completely dominant and steamrolled every team when we went on that incredible 110/114 streak and won the league.
We did not. Plenty of games we were just so lucky we managed to create just the right goal at the right moment. No doubt they had to be good, but the notion that we were somehow unstoppable because we were so good is false. Look at how few injuries we had that season for starters.
And for all the talk that no title contenders would lose to Forest, well no title contenders would lose 3-0 to Watford either, would they? They finished 19th that season, if anyone’s wondering.
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I didn’t mean that we hadn’t had this sort of games under Klopp. Over the course of 9 seasons, there were times when we looked just as clueless. But they were sporadic and far more rare compared to games when we created enough but couldn’t finish. Even during last season’s ending when we weren’t playing well at all.
Yeah, but hasn’t this just been one game?
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My original answer was directed to @Nikola’s claim that Klopp’s teams couldn’t score at times to save their live either. That simply isn’t the case as far as I am concerned.
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My point here is not to criticize Slot, but to argue that we saw enough in those first two games to make it clear we were still on a learning curve. I think the take home from those games was we faced challenges but had enough about us to get through them, but it was inevitable we would continue to have periods of struggles as we continued our transition and sooner than later have a bad response to it.
For me you look at a situation like Diaz’s big chances in the Brentford vs Forest game. Does the Bretford game turn into something more closely resembling Forest if he doesnt score on that breakaway, or vice versa, if he scores yesterday rather than hitting the post does the dynamic of the game change in a way where it looks like we’ve wrestled the sort of control of the game we were looking for?
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We can’t expect this guy to have every answer to each question asked of the team at this stage, it is whether or not, he learns from yesterdays dire display, which will be most telling in going forward
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I’m actually with @Nikola on this. I can’t remember who it was who used to post our xGF/xGA/GF/GA charts, maybe it was @Prolix, but there were genuinely periods when we were quite dire, but mostly coinciding with the injuries.
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To add to this, two worst players in the league in terms of finishing last season, as far as expected goals were concerned, were Diaz and Nunez according to WhoScored.com. Our guys couldn’t finish their dinner at times - there’s a well known compilation of last season’s misses that’s too painful to watch as majority of those misses cost us points.
Yesterday, our lads were also guilty of playing poor passes in the final third or not playing them at all. Slot will have to get down to the bottom of this - I think that international break hits heavier than in Eredivisie and we still don’t know how he’ll adjust the team to that or to weekend-midweek rhythm.
At least Diaz has improved quite a fair bit…Nunez needs to buck up sharpish or else the club would just replace him…
I’m not convinced this is new. We saw this a lot in those down seasons too. I think it’s something that will go away with training.
An unarguable stance. Liverpool FC need several world class strikers. Nunez has had flashes of brilliance. But then so did Heskey.
Would they though ? There would have to be a whole different player policy before that happened.
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Sorry to speak like an academic but comparing a sample size of 491 with one of 4 isn’t going to provide much valuable info
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