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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.