Two goals, clean sheet, not a great performance, but the points secured. As such it marked an improvement over the recent late dropped points from a winning position.
The manager is not beyond criticism, and the whole thing looks a bit flat, and the substitutes seemed late to me, again.
But this has been such an unusual season, and he has so much credit in the bank, that I’m reluctant to criticize him too strongly, at least not after picking up three points. We won. We kept a clean sheet. We are still alive in the hunt for top four.
A long long way from where we need to be. But better.
The forwards are really frustrating, Mane in particular (despite scoring) was doing silly things and giving free kicks away in stupid places. Jota seems to have been infected with the same low goals to chances virus as the rest these days. I heard Mane is converting 10% of chances, down from 25%, the latter not exactly world class stats, the current stat disgraceful for a forward.
We did ok defensively considering Kabak was missing, mostly as Philips was back. Midfield not as dominant as it should be, but steady.
Klopp got his subs right last night, leaving Thiago on clearly helped, swapping out forwards for Bobby and Oxlade also helped to sure it up.
Radio Merseyside said Thiago’s goal was the first we’ve scored in the PL from outside the box in five years, but I don’t think that’s true? Fabinho versus City? TAA versus Villa? In any case we haven’t scored enough from distance since Coutinho left.
My view is that Klopp has been far from his “A” game with regards to subs this season. Some inexplicable (of course to us outsiders) decisions, and a hair pulling passiveness at times to make the sub.
Naturally, sometimes you want to avoid disrupting the playing style, so keep players on the pitch (see the Newcastle game taking off Thiago causing disruption).
But in this game, after Southampton brought on Diallo and Obafemi midway through the second half, it injected them with more belief and physicality against our three tiring midfielders.
Maybe an earlier sub would help out more in these situations. Maybe can take off one of the front three, and put an extra body in midfield (such as taking Mane off for Curtis).
Anyway, we won this game, but over the last 20 games, with better in game subs, maybe we’d be in a better position.
Maybe, but the way they were discussing it on the phone in after the match, was that it was our only goal outside the box in that time. I think Ian Kennedy got it wrong, Craig Hignett questioned it. Either way, we don’t score many, and that’s probably because we don’t have midfielders scoring enough.