Being realistic we have two goals left this season… Top 4 and CL.
Maybe at a push our form improves immediately and we might progress past Wolves in the FA cup. Jurgen might be looking at what we have at the moment and when others will becoming available, or at least playing back into form. He may think we have got enough here to challenge for what is left in front of us… act in the summer if he needs to
Not much, if anything.
It’s harder to get rid of players when your side and wages is among the top of football’s foodchain.
Harder for the buying side, harder for players to finally accept something lower (which is bound to happen, maybe Keita manages to attract something nice).
Plus their situations like you say, form and availability in recent times. Clubs rather look elsewhere for something new, for new Chamberlains and Keitas.
which makes Salah’s £350k/wk all the more outrageous.
Why he deserves it…will be in top 5 goal scorers for pool when he finishes
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The long term planning which left us with Oxlade and Keita as our “prime” age midfielders must be one of the worst decisions in a long time. Both injury prone, both leaving in the summer, both avoiding injuries to get the best move possible…
It’s meant a complete over reliance on Hendo/Thiago and Fabinho (too old) and Elliot (too young).
Age is not everything, Ox and Keita were never really our prime midfielders. You cannot plan everything. Some of the best midfields are not made of all 25-year olds. But it’s true that we needed to add some fresh blood and still do. Plus, how many times we’ve heard that either Jones or Elliott are ready to step in, that Klopp will (or needs to) change to 4-2-3-1 and whatever. Countless times over the last few years.
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Has to be tempting to give Bajcetic as much game time as his body allows until the end of the season. We should really be looking to move Fabinho on after this disasterclass of a season. He’s not our only problem, but he is the root of the problem.
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Nah, our defending as a group is, which is our principle. Plus the fact that we’ve looked physically below level for almost half the season. Also, not in sync enough. Fabinho himself, yeah. Salah has improved on his weak start and even Trent has improved to a certain level. But Fabinho just can’t seem to do it. This side on paper isn’t one to finish 10+ points below CL football. Looking so out of sync and physically half dead in January. That is a good question for the coaching staff and the players themselves, something or some things went pretty wrong.
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I think the reasons for us having terrible defensive solidity start with Fabinho. I’ve gone into detail on this previously so won’t bore everyone again but he’s being asked to cover more of the field than previous years and has been exposed as physically and mentally incapable.
Bajcetic at the very least has better press-resistance and is more able to cover ground. I’d expect a tonne of mistakes but I can accept that of an 18 year old - not so much from a 28 year old.
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There’s part of the answer. I do remember seeing similar holes in Fabinho’s game (when he was good) when the defending in front of him wasn’t good enough. The odd time when saw and thought/commented “wow, he can be slow”. No hiding from the fact that he as an individual is among the most underperforming players so far this season. He doesn’t have much to his game (aspect by aspect, he’s not a “rich” midfielder), but he had a specific job behind all the action in front, which is now lacking.
Away from home, particularly when we’re short on forwards, we do need to change our shape.
Personally I’d prefer us to go to the 442 we saw against City. Sit deeper, be more compact, and at least make teams work to create chances.
If we do that then even Fabinho and Henderson might look like footballers. And if we do try the 4231 again, Thiago needs to be in the ‘2’ next time.
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Thing is if we were compact and tough to break down against Brighton and Brentford I’d have been happy with 0-0.
If it cancels teams out so be it until we can work on something out. It’s going have to be that way.
2 points in those games wouldn’t be the worst. At the very least the ability to become defensive when defending a lead.
Absolutely no point in over committing at 2-1 up.
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Yeah, I agree.
Even against Villa, it was not a strict 4-3-3. Hendo was more like a tucked in right “winger” and Salah was more released in a front two. Wasn’t a perfect performance, but it was better than some of our last ones. Leicester was too wild and Brentford again posed us problems at set-pieces and long balls.
Right now, I don’t trust neither Fabinho nor Henderson to be the single pivot in a run of games. I’d probably bench Fabinho for at least a game or two and then see if Hendo & Thiago can regain a bit of control there. Having Bobby back would help a lot, also. But who knows what’s up with him.
On the sides, well, we’ll have to mix it up a bit. We don’t have ideal solutions for these roles, but it’s more important to have security centrally.
Play a bit more compact for a few games/weeks, then when we have Bobby and Jota back, see if we can revert back to 4-3-3, if our defending from the front can improve with those two players who have experience with us and know what to do.
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Klopp made a comment that I’m not sure how to interpret now. He said something along the lines of, “we changed the system to give the boys a hand” which, initially I thought of it in a broad sense, i.e. the whole team but could it have been more specific and be referring to the midfield? What was it that was different. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was changed other than Elliot out…
We looked leggy even by the end of last season. We started the season in the same way. Like it was our 66th game of a long season not the beginning of a new one. Athletes can dig a deep hole for themselves by continuing to demand work from their body when they’re not sufficiently recovered. We look like we went too aggressively in preseason for how badly recovered too many of them were from last season. When that happens the only way out of it is to back off on the intensity and overall amount of work you ask yourself to do, but the season was already on us, with a stupidly packed schedule so we couldn’t. And then players started falling giving us even fewer opportunities for the players who were left to get the recovery they needed.
The general rule with this stuff is the longer you keep going once you’re in the hole, the longer it takes to get out. We look like we have pushed a couple of players to the point they’ll never get out of it.
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The orientation of the triangle (double pivot with one ahead, instead of the normal single pivot with 2 8s), and that pushed Thiago further forward.
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Yeah, but that was more understandable.
Usually, we showed signs more towards the end and boy, last season was a really rare one. Top teams rarely get to that number of 63 official games.
But I’m not used to seeing us starting so slow and heavy. Usually we come out really fast and fresh. Then we can have a bit of issues in the first month or two, more results wise. And then post-international breaks we start improving and peaking.
Of course, I have part of the answer in what I’m typing now. Accumulation of mental fatigue, physical also, it can all be true.
It was a weird season, so close to perfection and albeit still highly successful, maybe a bit anticlimax of an end. Parade was amazing, there was also the whole Paris drama. I don’t know.
I want Klopp to have the chance for a proper pre-season this summer and then we’ll see if it’s something deeper than that.
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We started under Klopp as a team who countered. Let’s go back there. Be solid. Use Nunez and Salah on the break.
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Agree with all of that, I think it’s safe to say that our preparation for this season was wrong.
To compound these mistakes we decided to open up our formation, make the pitch as big as possible by having our wide players as wide as they can go, and push everyone forward bar two or three to turn our matches into basketball games. Early on in the season Trent was playing as a #10 at times, Salah and Diaz on the touchlines, the #8s pushed so far up.
In hindsight, it would have been sensible for Klopp and Ljinders to accept a more pragmatic approach for the first half of the season. To me, it looks like they’ve had this idea of developing a ridiculously aggressive style of football but they’ve picked literally the worst time to implement it given the age of our squad, what we went through last year and the condensed pre-season.
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It felt like Henderson and Fab both got dragged upfield and out of position quite often. Maybe I’m just selectively remembering stuff… was a poor performance and outcome either way.