I mean it’s literally Klopp’s own words, but I guess he’s just being dishonest.
We were forced into making so many changes so often that he felt he was required to keep playing the other key players as long as they remained fit. That limited the opportunities for those fringe players who played roles where the key players remained fit.
Klopp has been selective with explaining his reasons before. No doubt stability was seen as BETTER than changing things to include Origi and Shaqiri more. If Origi and Shaqiri fit the playing style better and/or brought more quality it’s not an automatic that the same decision is made. He certainly didn’t stick with stability when Jota came back from injury or when Fabinho was freed up he didn’t keep the stable CM that had been playing. Literally the only areas he actually really went for stability was not playing Shaqiri and Origi in attack, Ox and Keita in midfield and Tsimikas and Williams at FB. The FB one makes sense as of all the areas on the pitch they’ll have the most to do with the CBs and Williams is a quite attacking option whilst Tsimikas was brand new and not settled. Keita and Ox seemed to be potentially managing their health, was certainly mentioned with Keita. With the length of time they’ve been here, their availability and the ropey form of the starters there’s really not much to say about not playing Origi and Shaqiri more. If they’re not useful to us when we are doing really well or when things are going badly what are they here for?
Okay, who did he use more over Shaqiri and Origi?
Oh yes, sure. Apart from the fact that it’s not black and white, that it brings the whole machine grinding to a halt. It’s about compromises, something that the manager talks about a lot. If you have defensive instabilities, you don’t bring on players who (a) are too short, or (b) are not mobile enough to press as effectively. If our problem was a settled defence but with forwards who weren’t scoring, would you say not playing Matip, Williams, or Phillips is a damning indictment of them?
Except Jota is actually a forward with the required mobility to provide the defensive cover without compromising too much on the attacking ability. And would you say that Fabinho, the key to our solid and stable midfield for the past few seasons was not worth slotting back in? Also, speaking of which, a lot of Jones’ minutes came when Fabinho was playing centre-back, and we were out of other midfield options. He also happens to be a whole lot taller than Shaqiri.
Yes, and? That is literally just keeping the team as it is for most games, managing around the injuries that we had. I don’t know who else you think was in our squad, or what else was going on, but if you take away those players, added on to our injuries, that is by definition our only choices available.
Except they quite demonstrably have been. Not just the Champions League matches, but when Shaqiri won us the game against United in his first season? Or Origi scoring once and forcing an own goal against Norwich in the first game of the season when we won the league? Or when they combined to hilarious effect against Everton that same season, which by the way, if I remember correctly, allowed us to rest Firmino and Salah, something that apparently they can’t do now according to you? In fact, those successful seasons are precisely why I’d suggest why last season can’t be used to judge anything.
Or perhaps just missing his own point?
It should be added to the above that Shaqiri was injured for a good part of the first part of the season, and then came back to fitness only slowly during the second part. Maintaining consistent fitness has always been the problem with him, rather than anything else.
Shaqiri has been under used during his time here. He’s a clever player and it’s a shame we’ve not seen more of him.
That’s true. Whatever could have been done was a risk, even a big risk. So a situation that Klopp got us through even if it was luck.
I mean, let’s be honest. Football is basically just a matter of luck, and the difference that good coaches and players make is that they shift the odds in your favour. Some by massive amounts, some by smaller amounts.
Focusing on players, you have players who directly change the odds of you scoring or conceding through providing the final action, who are more visible, such as Origi, Shaqiri, or possibly the biggest example, Gerrard. For the more defensive side, that would be players like Alisson, whose save rate is much better than Mignolet’s. For the former category, these are the players who would often provide the final pass or score the goals themselves, and that makes it more visible. They can be a luxury to carry sometimes, when it seems that it’s all that they do, but you’ll be cursing yourself when you can’t convert your chances despite absolutely dominating the game, and you don’t have such players available.
Then there’s the less visible. No one can really describe what Keïta brings to the team, but our results are vastly different with and without him. The same goes for Henderson, although his role has been better recognised throughout the years. They help to solidify and cement our style of play in a particular match, and either help to control the game better, or with that solidity, help free the attacking players to be more adventurous. It’s also the reason why Benitez might perhaps get unfairly criticised for being overly defensive, taking off a forward for a midfielder when we needed a goal, or playing with a 4-2-3-1 when the vogue was 4-4-2. The goal was often to solidify the midfield and defence so the likes of Benayoun, Kuyt, Torres and Gerrard could be free to do their thing without worrying too much about conceding a counterattack or a goal.
I don’t have the data, but I’m willing to bet that Shaqiri does have a tangible effect on our goalscoring, although with a slight bump in our goals conceded as well, and that’s perhaps why he missed out more relative to other players.
It’s not but some luck does factor in and that increases with the risks you take.
Klopp took his course with it’s risks, I thought some of that course was not good (like putting a new signing straight into the starting line up) thought others were good (like sticking to 433) but then who am I. Just a middle aged man with many opinions. Klopp is the coach and makes decissions and gets the job done.
At the end of the day all that matters is we had a bad/poor season yet still got what mattered.
Both can be true. For example similar to when Klopp was wrongly called a hypocrite for being so vocal about 5 subs for player welfare. Then to only use 2 or 3 in one CL game. Klopp wanted stability, he also wanted to look after player welfare, and he also needed immediate results. It was a balance of all three. One is not exclusive of the other.
However, if you take the basic premise Origi/Shaqiri, they were not selected because of the unstable backline. Then you would expect the minutes played to correlate with when our backline was more stable. Except the opposite is true. Origi and Shaqiri played exactly during the time when our backline was most unstable (that awful middle part of the season). Not the first third when we had a combo of VvD, Gomez, and Matip or the last third when the backline a more settled with a combo of Phillips with Kabak/WIlliams.
It is clear Origi at least was out of favor. The first third of the season he was below Jota, Minamino in the pecking order. The last third of the season we has not even making the match day squad (ie not one of the 9 subs). AoC was the man the typically replaced Salah and Firmino.
Shaqiri was relegated to the bench when Jota came back from injury. It did not appear to be associated with stability. Simply Jota being the better player. From 28 man squad, the three lowest were Origi 182 minutes, Kelleher 180 minutes, and Tsimikas 6 minutes. Shaqiri played more minutes (553) . But still a lot less than he would have hoped. Thats disappointing for experienced players. When you consider Origi has been at the club longer than anyone bar Henderson, and Shaqiri a pro during the middle of his prime.
From the 114 subs made, if you exclude:
*GKs, defenders and holding midfielders (Fab, Henderson, Gini and Thiago)
Klopp made 65 subs.
Except the reason he didn’t use all his substitutes was mainly down to reserving one or two in case of injury, as he has mentioned before.
Origi made his last appearance in the league 2 games after Matip got injured against Spurs. This was the start of the genuinely unstable period, which despite your characterisation, was more of the middle half of the season, since even then, until Kabak and Phillips really settled in, we were still changing our defense up regularly, except without the benefit of Matip anymore.
Meanwhile, Shaqiri lasted a little longer, into February when we lost Henderson. By that time, we were down to our last player who could be said to have been really experienced with our defensive setup. Despite your whole spiel about Kabak and Phillips, they only really started together from the Sheffield United game until the Leeds game, when Phillips got injured, and subsequently never played together again. Coincidentally, this is pretty much around the same time that we last hear from Shaqiri.
Considering that Jota is much more effective at pressing and generally so defensively, it’s not surprising.
Going off transfermarkt, which can only account for 105 of the 114 you’ve listed, there were a total of 40 substitutions where a member of our forward line came on. Diogo Jota, Takumi Minamino, and Xherdan Shaqiri accounted for a total of 26 those substitutions. In particular, Jota and Minamino were substituted on for 7 each, of the 20 and 19 games they were in the squad respectively. Shaqiri was substituted on 9 times of the 27 he was in the squad, and Origi 7 of the 26.
This suggests that the majority of our substitutions were more defensive in nature.
Origi and Shaqiri have been here years, Jota less than one year. If the target was stability then Origi and Shaqiri, the players fully bedded into the system, should have been the ones regularly used not Jota, the new arrival. And maybe more attacking subs would have been used if Klopp wanted to get the attacking options he had available onto the pitch? The fact he didn’t, even when we were struggling to score, is the whole issue.
I like Shaq and I really wanted it to work out here for him but at best he is an option from the bench. If we were a team that gave attackers free reign to hit from 20-30 yards he would do better but it doesn’t seem to be the way we play.
Best for both parties if he moves on I think, same goes for big Div.
On the subs, i used the stats from WhoScored. its only fair that you include the subs including Salah, Mane, Firmino , AoC and I would also argue Jones. Excluding those players from you analysis skews the interpretation of attacking vs defensive subs.
Also don’t think it’s correct to take Matips injury at Spurs as the point we lost defensive stability. That neglects it was Matips 6th injury of the season. He had only just returned. That we started January without a single centre back on the pitch. That we were forced to thrust Phillips and Williams into the first team.
This is highlighted by Matip and Origi only being on the pitch 61 minutes at the same time as one another all season I’m the PL.
Finally on Kabak and Phillips this was clearly a time of greater stability. No other centerback pairing played more together. The season ended with Phillips and Williams which was also a stable partnership (relative).
Shaq played 90 minutes of the first time Phillips and Williams played together. Other than that his minutes like Origi were largely in January and February which I think most people know even without looking at the stats was when our defensively backline was most unstable and our results were at their worst. Ie in those 2 months 9 different CB parings.
Why would you include Jones in this scenario? He is quite clearly a different player to everyone in this scenario. Ox is also versatile enough that we used him in many ways last season. Would you say either of them provide less defensive ability than Minamino, Origi, and Shaqiri (which was the original point being made)? Also, unless we go through the history of each and every sub to classify which were offensive and which were defensive tactically, it’s quite hard to actually come up with a definitive answer.
That’s a fair point to make, although I’d argue that firstly, we certainly treated Fabinho as a senior central defender. He was essentially our fourth choice in that position. The whole picture is therefore that while we still had our main 4 choices, we had relative defensive stability since all of them had played (and presumably trained) within the defensive setup for quite some time, not just as our central defensive players in Fabinho’s case, but with the benefit of familiarity with the system. They were also miles ahead in quality compared to the next tier of Kabak, Phillips, and Williams. During that period you mention, specifically January, whenever we didn’t have Matip available we still had Fabinho available. The Spurs match was the last one that we had Matip available, and Fabinho was injured. The next match, against West Ham, saw a centre-back pairing of Phillips and Henderson. We know from the manager’s own words, that Origi played that game to give us more height at set pieces, especially important since we were starting Henderson in central defence, and Shaqiri on the pitch. Shaqiri started the next match, but he was taken off in favour of Origi later on. We then proceeded to lose our next 4 league matches, which was perhaps the turning point when we might have realised something wasn’t working. I think it was also this time where Origi started to pick up a few injuries, despite what transfermarkt (which I am relying on for this information) states, as it doesn’t list his injury against Leicester for example. If I’m not wrong, Shaqiri also started picking up some minor injuries, although I’m sure the more cynical among us would say those were just excuses. After the Sheffield United game however, neither of them played that much, and I would say it’s no coincidence that that is also around the time we stopped playing Fabinho in defence. In fact, I would suggest that we started playing a lot more cautiously in attack, so we could transition towards defence much better, so as to protect our relatively inexperienced central-defensive pairing.
This is important, because of my next point. Shaqiri and Origi have one thing in common, that they are not the most agile of players. In a system where we need to play more defensively, we would need our forwards to be more effective with their pressing. However, this can only happen if they are able to shift their positions quickly, to sprint between the players they are supposed to be covering/pressing. This is something that the two of them are more lacklustre at, which was my whole point of their defensive weaknesses.
And those were 61 of the 181 minutes that Origi got in the league all season. I don’t know about you, but that seems to suggest to me that Matip played a lot more with Origi than he would have been expected to, all else staying equal.
Playing together often doesn’t make it more stable. I think most people on here would say that playing Sakho or Karius destabilised us no matter how consistently they got gametime. Also, you may well be mixing up cause and effect here. My whole point was that Shaqiri and Origi (and to a lesser extent Minamino) got sacrificed so that we could achieve better defensive stability. And exactly the point of the season which you claim to be more stable, was the point where they disappeared.
Assume he wasn’t risked yesterday as a move is in the offing?
That’s the narrative.
I know it’s moved on a bit but when Origi or Shaqiri came on last season I wasn’t expecting much and they seemed to even go below that.
I think it’s time both moved on and I don’t expect much from them. Minimino could yet deliver and Elliott is still so young the possibilities are endless with him but with these two it’s a bit like they eithier need a complete restart (Origi) or just something new as in Shaqiri.
I hold no grudges mind they have delivered at times and brought us joy
When ever Shaqiri comes to mind…
So too does that sweet left footed cross for Gini to power in his header against Barca
There was a time when we’d lose out on signing good players through quibbling over a couple of million. Now we’re risking losing out on selling them for the same reason - I suppose that’s something to cheer.
Personally, I’d just take what’s on offer for Shaq.