Today is not the day to be bemoaning investment in the team…
Brighton and Brentford have battered us the last two games, and they spend far less than we do. As I said Brightons midfield cost £17mil, Caicedo is on £3500 a week… That’s smart business and a sign of well of a well ran club, it used to be us.
The problem is we’ve moved away from the model which served us so well… Waiting for Bellingham whilst our midfield becomes dust has to have been one of the worst strategic decisions we’ve made.
Exactly. There are intelligent bargains to be had everywhere. Brighton’s midfield that dominated ours cost a total of £17 million as mentioned in thread earlier.
Klopps formation to me was bewildering in midfield as it looked like we setup as a 4 2 3 1, with Thiago in the centre of the 3 chasing Caicedo, wtf. He is our best player on the ball and we put him in a position where his job is to chase their players and to make matters worse, Hendo & Fab behind him, never played a vertical ball to his feet for him to have any influence.
That for me is the worst performance I have seen for many a year, how Trent stayed on the pitch was beyond me he got roasted and Matip was just as poor.
I am at a loss where we go from here, but firstly drop the underperforming players, however we won’t have many left though
He was largely responsible for their first goal. Coughed it up badly while trying to play out of the back and we couldn’t adjust quickly enough. It was the same sort of sleep walking he nearly got caught with against Wolves last week. On the second he allowed their CF to drop off and get the ball to his feet and so allowed him all the time in the world to then turn and pick out his pass. AT some point it looks like he’s dropping off to cover Trent’s guy running the chanel, but the situation only developed because Matip allowed the CF to drop off and get the ball to his feet unchallenged.
Maybe he only had a certain number of games he could play with the intensity our midfield was playing and he reached that about a year ago.Hes had a few games here and there since where he’s played well but overall he’s looked very leggy for 12 to 15 months now .
Hendo has been better suited to our midfield work rate and still has plenty more games left in him but not with Fabinho
I think he bit his tongue wrt to the end of match talk with the player because he wouldn’t have said anything that would have been helpful (which is what he said). He, and LFC more broadly, have to manage their assets and not disenfranchise them or a group. It will be these players that bring us to the next step - not a completely new 11.
We have so little creativity that it is frightening. Get the ball to Trent and let him have a swing… meanwhile even the commentators were on about the ball over Trent’s shoulder was on all game. The conundrum of playing Harvey and Mo on the same flank and in tandem with Trent bomming up is just bizarre - the three of them crowd each other out and there is absolutely no intricate/structured play between them. There are other examples but what’s the point - the coaches have to find the solution to either make that work or change it…
I agree, hence why I don’t know why we don’t try Trent in midfield… Get a fullback on the right whose primary focus is to defend and let Trent do what he wants (and is best at) and attack.
Because he is the player that plays the pass that beats a press or gets us upfield into offensive positions and should be dictating play, if you can’t see his role then no one can help
The hope that the World Cup break would help us get back to a badly started season didn’t really work…the two wins were not convincing (maybe not too deserved either, especially the Leicester one), and if anything, the wins before the world cup break were more deserving and it could even be that we had started to find rhythm and it got interrupted…(not sure about that either though, to be honest).
So now we find ourselves in a dire situation, and I don’t know what parallels can be drawn to the title defence season, and what we can do to turn it around…at that point it was Klopp putting faith in two fringe players that were our only genuinely defensive options for CB, and the two boys delivered heroically.
But we had glimpses of Klopp’s Liverpool in that period too, didn’t we? Fighting spirit, and despite being quite chaotic, fighting and finding moments.
As it looks like a turning point this season, as we are hitting a mighty low, is it going to be similar by Klopp this time round? What is the equivalent of that season?
On the other hand, as fondly as I remember that season, I am very aware it was hanging by a thread and could have very easily end in a different way…
(But same can be said about last season’s last day-reversed, of course)…
Not sure what to make of all this now… it’s just sad to witness…all I know is that I believe in Klopp (even at times like these when he is failing and I disagree with so many things I see happening). This is what helps me cope.
I’d be careful what you wish for. TAA in the middle may not be the stuff of unicorn farts. Playing in the middle comes with a whole load more baggage (not just the creative cases) and his positional play to date is not something that fills me with any comfort with regards to him being a sure thing as a midfielder.
Probably because the alternatives are a 40 year old who can barely stay fit nowadays, a 19 year old who’s hardly played, and Joe Gomez who’s good performances can be counted on one hand since 18/19.
Trent might be worth trying in midfield in the long term, I doubt it solves many of our issues right away though. We complain enough as it is that he doesn’t track runners, often lacks basic positional awareness and in the majority of the games he looks just as gassed out as the midfielders do. If we lash him into a midfield three now it is still getting ran over/through/around. A flat 442 with him on the right might work if we had two central players who could move, but clearly we don’t. The only senior one who has shown any life since the World Cup is seemingly doomed to only making 25 minute cameos when everything is already fucked up beyond repair.
I have no idea if Morton can be recalled, but I genuinely think I’d rather see a midfield three of Morton, Bajcetic and Keita than the three who keep being pushed out the door at the moment. At least there would be some energy in the middle of the pitch.
After the past several Liverpool performances, Pep Lijnders is going to have to write a follow up book titled ‘Indiference’, as our new identity seems to be just that. So sad to see. For a seasoned manage like Klopp to say that he didn’t see a performance like this coming is simply naive. The past performances certainly weren’t suggesting signs of an upturn in form.
