Thankfully Konate hasn’t under-performed this year. At least, according to rumor, we have buy-back for Quansah.
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Am I reading too much into the way the deal with Leverkusen was structured? They left the door open for him to return some day, no? I always got the feeling that Slot didn’t rate him but Quansah spent the remainder of his Liverpool career post-Man United draw having at least one glaring error in virtually every match he played. To me, that suggested he should have gone out on another loan and returned as a more experienced, calmer player.
As for other academy graduates, of course they would have been a better option than the likes of Chiesa but it’s a moot point, I guess - not because they needed moves away to become players they are right now but because Slot probably wouldn’t have been able to make them have any meaningful contribution this season.
Let me just say it: It appears as if he has a tendency to treat players who earn little, or are at the bottom of the payroll, as if they’re worth less. And if that’s not the case, then maybe it’s just a bad coincidence.
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And someone doesn’t need to be at a level where they are ready to be a long term starter to get something useful out of them during a season. That one CL game Morton played last year he was one of the few positives and showed that he wasn’t going to let you down if you throw him in alongside the seniors for half a dozen games.
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Yes it was a very unusual deal. Seems very much a case of the club wanting to support the manager’s needs by replacing someone he wouldn’t use but independently rating him far more than the manager did.
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But a lot of these errors weren’t just down to him, how can he be to blame when Virg blasts a ball at him and goes in for an OG also, a penalty conceded when Szob sells him short with a poor pass.
What he didn’t have was any luck apart from bad luck.
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I think what he needed was a coach who put a bit of faith in him. The way modern defenders are asked to play you will get a few mistakes but Slot lost Quansah on the first day of the season. I would imagine he was coming into those games at the end of the year knowing any little mistake would probably see him dropped again and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In retrospect his game against Ipswich wasn’t even that bad of a performance, especially compared to the absolute shite that has been served this season.
Hopefully he comes back. It would be frustrating to see him starting for another Premier League side one day.
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I always rated him far higher on the ball than Ibou and when you look at us this season, both Ibou and Virg have made a lot of errors due to bad passing.
Unfortunately for Jarrell, last year it seemed if he did give the ball away it seemed to lead to a goal, which isn’t the norm.
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sacked by msn messenger?
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One of the first times you really saw a contingent of people raise eyebrows at Slot’s public comments was after the Chelsea game at the end of the season. That was the “he’s always at the scene of the accident” comment. He had been involved in their second and third goals, but it was senior players who had let him down or made the bigger mistake in both (virgil on the OG and Dom on the penalty)…and yet it was the young player at the end of a challenging season for him individually who he called out. It seemed beyond unproductive even then and closer to needlessly mean.
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The thing that really argues against this as the principal issue is how disjointed we looked even at the start of the season. Sure, Isak was not on board yet and we ran into issues with the RB slot by as early as the second game. But the knock on effects of that you describe you would not expect to kick in for several games, maybe several months yet we had maybe only one properly coherent performance by the end of October.
Jota is the elephant in the room and so maybe that explains all of that, but I think if you are someone who believes Slot bungled implementing the change he wanted to see in us and in doing that we lost the last of what was good about what he inherrited and now he’s stuck unsure in how to even go back to square one, then everything we’ve seen this season flows very naturally from there with very little that is not explainable by that.
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Got a nudge on it.
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Well said, I called that out at the time. It was scandalous. Yes, we can bring him back, and hopefully we’ll do it, but there was no need at all to let him go.
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I think the way Slot treats youngsters is the shambolic. Far too easy to criticise Quansah and the response to the Ramsey questions the handling of the departure of Elliott and the subsequent responses. Shame he doesn’t have the nuts to be like it with senior players maybe the season wouldn’t have gone to dog shit.
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Exactly my take on that, his terminology was completely wrong, just say the luck isn’t going the lads way at them moment and very little he could have done in either situation.
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The fact that Slot refused to play Morton and Quansah in the last 4 matches (Klopp would have certainly started them in the same situation) when we had already won the League says a lot about his treatment of young players.
You cannot say for certainty that Morton won’t make it because Slot never gave him any chance - especially when we never bought a Fabinho replacement. The idea of a young TAA having to play under someone like Slot in 2017-2018 instead of Klopp really frightens me.
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WTAF?
surely thats not standard?
i get the turnaround was short, but surely…
id actually understand NO minutes on the pitch together as opposed to 20 minutes
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I don’t disagree. I started the post by saying that Slot deserved significant criticism. I’m just also highlighting some of the other factors outside of his control which I believe have compounded his difficulties. But he also deserves criticism for the reasons you describe, and that’s why I’m inclined to sack him despite some of the other mitigating circumstances he faces.
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Don’t think Edwards would have had that sort of power and influence at that point, if he ever did.
My intuition is that it would have been Werner or Gordon
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