A bizarre game in some senses with both teams being pretty blunt. It was dull, really dull.
We keep going on about buying players and I believe we certainly do need some fresh input but if you look at the last week in isolation, with no knowledge of the squad you’d be seriously tempted to suggest that we need more than a couple of players, almost bordering on an entire clear out and start again. That’s obviously mad and not right but we’re looking way off at the moment, a shadow of ourselves.
I thought we should move Salah, not because he wasn’t worth it in the current market, but because he won’t be within 18 months or so. I could see the need for renewal in the squad, though I have to admit I didn’t think in June it would urgent by September. But he is now a luxury asset declining in value every time he plays.
Awkward thing about those contracts. You can’t take it away from him, and you can’t sell him without his agreement. ManU over the past 5 years is a potent illustration of what happens when you have grossly overpaid players you don’t even want to put on the field.
PSG will take Salah soon…
Definitely. But people expect it to work only in our favor.
Certainly feels that way but I’d like to know the “why” of it. He hasn’t been “right” for over 12 months but still scoring more than his share.
Likely at about 2/3rds of what he would have been worth last summer, unfortunately. At the time I thought it would be a brave move, because we would have been giving up on what I saw as a real but fading shot at the PL and CL with that team. As it turns out, that slim chance was more of an illusion. We should have started a rebuild last year. What we have to show for it now is a slim chance at Top 4 and a significant loss of value across the whole squad.
My guess is that the turnover/turmoil in personnel at the club meant that those who saw that dynamic were deferring to someone else to make that tough call.
That is actually another issue entirely. He turns 31 this June. His value would inevitably be declining. His transfer value will be approaching zero in 3 years.
Whether he is ‘right’ or not is a different question - my personal view is that Salah is a great player, but has a different sort of mental toughness than Mane does. Salah really needs a solid platform to work from, there are few players like him for turning a quick ball out of the defensive midfield into a scoring opportunity. But he gets beaten down over the course of a game when those balls are few and far between (especially because referees let a staggering amount of outright physical abuse go unpunished with him), and while he keeps fighting, that just isn’t his game. By contrast, Mane always had that ‘fuck you, I am scoring this’ goal in him in some of the really tough matches. How many of those games had a dynamic where the other side is on top, Mane gets a goal from almost nothing that he really had to scrap for, and then suddenly we are firing and Salah puts the game away with maybe a double?
Could not trust any of the midfielders to do anything meaningful with the ball so we kept passing back to Ali.
A bigger damning indictment of our midfield I can’t think of
Sane? The Bayern lad?
Think he is meaning Mane.
Gah…that is a bad sign, Mane, the other Bayern lad
We are a sell to buy club, with a manager that doesn’t want to sell any of his mates. And, I’m not buying any of the nonsense about a big summer spend. I’ll believe it when players actually rock up at Anfield, until then it’s just paper talk.
His mates? That’s what you think is happening?
Looks like it won’t be long before there’re calls for Klopp’s head.
Not from me, I love Klopp. I do however think he gets too attached to players and keeps them around too long.
We’ll twat Wolves and then Utd and last night will end up feeling like just another wank you didn’t finish.
Would that be the players that have rocked up for the last 4-5 seasons?
I wanted us to keep Mane and Salah, but if we could only afford the wages increase of one the Mane would have been my choice. That said, of all our issues currently, Salah is well down the list
Frustrating because imo this has been coming and it’s been obvious. You can’t manage a squad like jurgen does and have so little turnover. What 8 of our (debatably) strongest XI played in the 2019 CL final no? That’s fucking madness.
You can want klopp to stay but also be critical of his seeming blindness to the state of his squad and I don’t buy for a second it’s all ownership stuff. Seemed pretty clear that Jurgen didn’t think we needed a CM and eventually took ownership over the Arthur melo debacle. I don’t want another manager but his rigidity is causing us problems. Two things can be true.
Edit: imo this squad can get up for individual games, but the legs are too shot for any sustained run. You brought up 09/10 - I think that was structural, I think this is just the end of an era.
Im very critical of klopp, but still don’t want anyone else. I’ll probably end up typing that a million times
Different underlying causes absolutely, but similar dynamic. Key players like Xavi not being replaced, one more year on the legs of the rest of the players. Arguably more this time around though, so end of an era would be about right.