I’ll not go into today 's performance as different aspects have been covered throughout the thread. Two incidents that did rile me though, I would like to discuss. On Brighton’s first goal our players were all appealling to ghe ref that Joel had been fouled. It happened in line with me and I think that yes he was fouled. What pissed me off though was that as the BHA player was busy fouling Joel the ball bounced of the BHA player’s head and fell in front of Joel. Instead of retrieving it he started appealling for the foul. Another BHA player collected the ball and it lead to a goal.
Similarly later on in the game Costas was being manhandled near the touchline. The ball rolled away from him and again instead of going after the ball he turnedvaway towards the ref to ask for a free kick. The ball rolled out of play for a BHA throw in which they took ages about.
FFS Reds you’re pro footballers. PLAY TO THE WHISTLE!!
Sorry bud. I love Klopp to bits, but he was all over the place this summer. He went from biting the head off anyone who mentioned buying a new midfielder, to admitting he was wrong about that, and then saying he’d like the owners to take more of a risk two or three days later.
No idea about the knock but the other 2 points are evident to see.
Brilliant servant to the club and has led as one of the main instigators for our recent success but we have to acknowledge (however hard it may be for some) when a player is finished.
Henderson isn’t finished. However, he needs to move to the Milner role - keeps standards high around the place, great character, not a regular starter but can be deployed to cover and come on to close games out.
Buy Kone to boss it at defensive midfielder.
Buy Bellingham to do the lot.
Bring MacAllister in on a Bosman.
Hendo as the old man.
Elliott as a youngster.
Bacjetic as a youngster.
Milner, Keita, Ox, gone obviously.
Question marks over Fabinho, Thiago and Jones, for different reasons and to one degree or another. But if we had the group listed above I wouldn’t be overly fussed if one or two from that trio moved on too.
It’s more changes than we will likely do, but I’m at the point where I’m getting close to being ok with changing almost all of them.
Watched the game first thing in the morning, which allows a bit of time for the result to sink in.
At first I was pretty pissed off with the equaliser, but after a walk I’m pretty much resigned to this new level. We get caught out of shape way too often but then there are individual errors, poor challenges, lack of urgency which means we are losing 1v1s all over the pitch.
Creating enough going forward, but the attack is still a worry with minimal cohesion and the big question - where and how does Darwin play?
If you want to know what I’d do, I’d rest Virgil as soon as Konate is available. Two games a week seems to be catching up with him and rotating the three of Matip and those two should see us through the next 12 games to the WC.
The big question is right back, I think we could do worse than to play Gomez there and play Trent right sided mid, where Hendo started today. Free up Trent, give him a new challenge, it might spark the team. It might not work either but worth a look.
Moving Trent might seem like a bit of a nuclear option but it doesn’t have to be. He’d be taking ip the same positions, but would have cover so could play with more freedom. The lad looks like he has the weight of the world on his shoulders atm, a real shame that free kick was saved. It doesn’t have to be a permanent change and doesn’t mean he can’t defend, despite whatever the media would make of it.
Another way to provide cover would be a back three with Trent as a wingback, but I’ve never seen Klopp really go for this, doesn’t seem like a real option to me.
The Darwin thing I have no real answer to, even with Bobby scoring two id prefer Jota as the centre forward. Not sure what the Darwin plan is and I can’t really see a viable way to get him going atm.
Might be giving Nunez 12months to settle… Keep experimenting with tactics while not losing too much ground in the PL… with a view to moving a few on next season (maybe even including Salah…?)…!
Something is definitely not right at the moment… Too many things look disjointed… Just hope as the season moves on, we get better and better
Fck, I realised how this can be misinterpreted. I meant other than the usual suspects and talks about midfield, Trent etc etc… This is ALSO a reason why we are conceding more than we used to (and not open in the middle) . Like I said all have hit a bad patch at the same time from a defensive standpoint but there were times when even if we were open in the middle it was most of the times not enough as Virg was a big impenetrable wall which isn’t the case now.
It’s got to the point where continuing to play Trent in his current role is negligence. The same goal is being scored against us game after game with teams playing around him. I’d move him forward and play either Gomez or Ramsay when fit at RB.
The midfield we started with yesterday is what I consider to be our best midfield on paper. That’s frightening considering the lack of control it gave us but it isn’t helped by the non-existent press that we are seeing which allowed Brighton to play out from the back comfortably and run at our midfield. Time and again our front 3 made token efforts to cut off that supply.
Could be 14 points behind Arsenal in a weeks time after 8 fucking games.
