They could have been limited to the amount of time they did specific tactical training, but they would have had the full day Thursday, then a set period of time Friday morning before flying down to Brighton around lunchtime or early afternoon, then would likely do a light physical session down in Brighton to allow the players to stretch a bit after the flight. It might not have been the training sessions that Slot wanted, but they would have still been training.
He loves international breaks so he can disappear for 10 days to the party island of Ibiza and play the popular lad. The non-internationals get time off too, so he can stay popular with them. How much longer is this nonsense going to go on, Hughes?
Thursday is off, only players who haven’t played or haven’t played a lot normally train. Like he said. Then what happened on Friday in a tight situation like this with basically playing Saturday mid day (of course in that situation you cannot do anything on early Saturday morning apart from a walk/stretch or some light hotel sessions), it’s not something you don’t usually hear. Rafa recently spoke about having a 10-minute training session in a similar congested schedule and it was mostly tactical work (probably how the team would be structured in all phases of the game + set pieces, that doesn’t require a lot of intensity), nothing too intense. The rest is team meetings and video, which become more important in such situations.
I can’t believe he’s a French international. Sometimes he can’t do basic stuff and for such a big guy, he’s easily bullied by the oppostion. Nowhere near aggressive enough.
As I keep saying, Quansah’s move shouldn’t be viewed as a permanent sale. It’s more of an extended loan. We’re essentially paying Frankfurt to develop him for us.
It’s revisionist to see him as a brilliant centre back with no faults. In the second half of the last Klopp season, mistakes were creeping into his game and he was frequently at the scene of the crime on goals we conceded.
He did what many young players did when they break through - looked great at first, then dropped off as adrenaline faded.
Any talk of Slot being at fault for not giving him game time in 24/25 is countered by the fact that we won the league. There is plenty to criticise Slot for this season, but criticising him for the decisions he made in a season where he delivered the thing we wanted more than anything else feels a bit off.
The decision to (temporarily) move on Quansah only looks bad in hindsight - he would have definitely got plenty of games with Leoni’s injury, Gomez’ unreliability, Konate’s form, and the sheer resulting load on Van Dijk.
But when we allowed him to move, Konate and Van Dijk had just come off an imperious season, Leoni was a top prospect, and Guehi looked to be done.
No one uses that as the bar for whether someone is good enough to play at this level. It certainly isnt a bar we can use to describe anyone who remained in the defense after he left.
As for only being a bad move in hindsight - mistakes that are only revealed in hindsight are not as roundly questioned and criticized at the time as this one was.
It would cost us about 20m net to bring him back. That is a pretty absurd fee to pay someone to develop him when there are a lot of clubs who would have done it for free. The move was structured this way as a hedge against Slot not working out
There is obviously an argument that Slot is largely above criticism for his selections last year given that they led us to a title. But there are layers to it. I think at Liverpool most fans demand a manager not be a Mourinho type who burns ships to win in the present and leaves someone else to fix it. We view our manager as someone responsible for the long term health of the club and that means making decisions on players that go beyond “what do I need to do to maximize my chances of winning today.” I think people cut Slot a lot of slack over how imbalanced he was on that last season given how big the shoes he had to fill were. It would have been very understandable for him to have a “lets get my feet under the table and establish myself” perspective before he started worrying about how to manage the pipeline of younger players he had available. But the concerns with Slot go beyond his use of said younger players last season but his overall attitude to them. That was partly reflected in his needlessly harsh public comments about Quansah, but then more so in the situation that saw the club have to find exits for two young homegrown players (one who was about to become a full england international and one about to star at the U21 Euros) that we absolutely would not have been expecting to be making by that time when the previous season started.
That’s some mental gymnastics imo. Frankfurt bought him and pay his wages. We no longer pay anything to Quansah or Frankfurt.
Where did you get this line from?
He’s very unlikely to come back to Liverpool imo.
I thought he was a reasonable prospect with just some problems in possession. He would have been useful this season under another manager.
Quite possibly, but it was still structured for Quansah to find a route back here. Let’s not forget that the club agreed a fee, but also negotiated a pre arranged contract with Quansah himself. I think that signals a fairly obvious intent.
I think that the original plan was to bring him back in summer 27, at the point Virgil leaves. By that time Guehi would be established as the leader of the defence, Leoni would be a year older, and
I also don’t think it’s absurd to pay £20m net to send him to Bayer for two years. Loans don’t work out, even with safeguards. There is no guarantee that a club would play Jarrell week in week out at centre back if they only have him for a year, and get nothing back. We’ve had our fingers burnt with the loan system.
The economic of this deal are perfectly sensible.
Quansah is not going to develop to his potential playing occasional games
A loan would be reliant of the club playing him over players they actually own and can profit from.
if it doesn’t work out for him, we don’t have to buy him
If he does get himself to the level we need to start games at Centre Back for Liverpool, £20m is fuck all to pay in the grand scheme of things.
It could turn out to be a very astute bit of business. Of course if he does come back in a year looking ever inch the world class centre back, you’ll get people saying ‘we should never have fucking sold him!!’, as if two years playing regular football had nothing to do we his level at all.