West Ham were knocking on the door, from some reports. £10mil I think was the rumored price.
Leadership takes many forms and I am talking about a very specific form of it that we klopp highly values and we know who at the club is said to provide that. It’s maybe a little chicken and egg, because if you have Milly and Hendo still at the club then maybe there isnt room for the likes of Robbo to step up, but in my experience you see the seeds of it in players before they’re required to do it.
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not very often theyll have the superclassico as the season opener.
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But they never followed it through so like i said nobody wanted him.
But it’s relative to what we were holding out for. We developed a reputation for getting good money for players who were surplus for us and then once covid hit it dried up.
There is lots of room for conjecture about what happened and why, but the end result is several players on the outskirts of the squad (or valued but physically unreliable) failing to be found an exit over the course of several windows. Maybe we’re ok with the way it played out and dont regret it, but it’s easy to piece together a narrative along the lines of us getting cocky in our negotiations and being unwilling to respond to the new market, the result being us retaining players who bloated our squad and salary commitments and handcuffed our ability to bring in new players as their replacements.
Maybe that is what Klopp meant when talking about risk…take what we can get for this guy who needs to leave for his own good and then lets throw the dice at seeing if we can find an upgrade in the market.
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Last year, we performed as well as we did and the midfield mainstays were playing the most are Henderson and Fabinho in terms of minutes and then what I think is lacking is Thiago and Naby sharing the number of minutes. Both of them added up to one Henderson in terms of minutes, meaning we had 2 of them available playing together with Henderson and Fabinho at any one time stats speaking. So to Klopp and the team, they might have bank on the same thing happening again and that the midfield can continue at least a season or two with the same mainstays. We can go on banging about injury track record but last season showed that it was possible to be at the very top with our top 4 midfield options and that might have influence our decision to not make midfield a must buy situation. In a perfect world we will be like Chelsea or those oil rich clubs, spend 200mil in one season and dump players in reserves and buy more if they don’t work out. But we are not and I am glad we are not. Am I happy with our situation, nope but there are principles the club worked with that brought us success thus far and I am happy to continue with that and trust that we can get our of this shite and yet continue with their principles.
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Maybe, but I’m still not convinced that the man who went the whole summer getting irritated when asked about new midfielders was talking about more risk in terms of bringing in a new midfielder…
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love him or not, you have to ask whether or not he got this decision right.
I agreed at the time. we have NINE midfielders on the books. But of those nine, the four between 25-30years old are broken or on their way to being so
Three are kids, and two are 30+
Melo should have been the stopgap, but being another broken body helps nothing.
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Yeah, I think there were levels to the discussion this summer that often got missed with people talking past each other. I think there were probably few people who didn’t have a personal preference for seeing some turnover in the midfield department. The difference was in accepting the implications of not moving on the players who were already taking up squad places, and what that said about how happy Klopp was to go again with those guys.
Most would have probably put me in the happy with not making more moves camp, but it seemed to me that that treating Nunez and Sadio’s replacement still left room for a 4 out total and 2 mids in strategy. If Minamino and Origi were the first 2, it required you pick 2 from Ox, Naby and Milner. The on incomings we could debate if Carvalho counted as part of the 2 (I think he does).
That didnt happen and it was clearly wrong. Not just in hindsight, because the stuff that people identified as the problem with the approach is exactly what has happened. So the question is not whether it was wrong, but who made the key decisions for us to take this path and why. And then what they have learned from the whole thing.
I think it was importantly different than the discussion from summer 20 after Lovren left, because that was about pure numbers - are we ok only having 3 CBs and using Fab as the 4th. This was more about varying levels of buy in over Klopps decision to go again with certain players or even belief in whether that was actually Klopp’s decision.
I do think the decision was right, even though right now with the benefit of hindsight many would feel otherwise. It feels very much like that kind of season where any number of people we bring in would probably end up injured too…
Regardless, the original point was the whole idea that gets repeated ad nauseam, that Jürgen was bemoaning a lack of investment in the whole thing about risk. Maybe Arthur was that risky signing that he wanted? Maybe the risk he wanted to take was in not bringing anyone in, that got overruled? The truth is, without any further information from those involved, we’ll only read into it what our personal biases want to see.
Think you meant “treating Nuñéz as Sadio’s replacement”, but if so, I thought I read that Diaz was supposed to be Mané’s replacement, not Nuñéz?
I disagree that it was wrong in anything but hindsight, but that’s because I have a fundamentally different view of the reliability of the players involved.
I’m not sure I would go with the idea that the medical/physio teams wouldn’t have thoroughly evaluated the condition of our players, especially ones who have had a hard time with injuries in recent years, before deciding what the strategy for the season would be. I’m not saying it definitely couldn’t be, but I find it rather hard to believe.
I saw this earlier, which suggests that this scenario was very much something that we foresaw as a possibility, so that’s somewhat comforting. In all probability, the club might have decided that it just is physically impossible to go again meaningfully after a quadruple-challenging season. I think Barcelona and Bayern Munich have managed it, but within the context of them not having a 2nd domestic cup.
I’m inclined to think that their planning usually is on a multi-season timescale, rather than within a single season, and they recruit accordingly.
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Don’t know who this Simon person is but they just stole my point!
Gini didn’t commit near the turnovers that Jones does.
18,000 mins vs 2,000. Gini’s is artistically more like a football, while Jones has created a prickly pear. Jones is also much higher on SH90. SH90 is short for shit over 90 mins, or have I got that wrong?
Gini almost never got injured. Hell, he didn’t even need resting!
I haven’t got a clue what that graph is? Same when folk post about xg? 
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Me too 
would be interesting to see this diagram using Gini’s 1st 2300 mins versus Jones first 2300 mins.
It’s a good comparison considering Gini was an attacking midfielder for Newcastle, I maintain Jones has a big part to play here for many years. If he can keep injury free then it’s maybe one less midfielder we need and allows FSG to go big on a Bellingham.
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I got curious and did some digging:
Wijnaldum: 17.8 miscontrols, dispossessions, failed dribbles, incomplete passes per 100 receptions
Jones: 17.6 miscontrols, dispossessions, failed dribbles, incomplete passes per 100 receptions
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