I told my dad about the situation on VvD…at that time, there was no confirmation on the seriousness of his injury (but heard about the 7-8 months out of action rumour).
My father, even though he does not follow football often anymore, and only really get the team’s progression by listening to me talking about the club whenever we sit together for lunch or dinner…He looked at me and say, “You know Klopp will have solutions to take care of the current situation. There is no need to be upset.”
This incident also underscores one of my pet peeves - I fully support protecting goalkeepers, but the officiating now has left that way behind. That contact was a clear foul for any other Everton player.
No application of VAR will work if you have people operating it who dont understand what they are seeing. The issue here is you had two refs with a clear look at an incident and decided it was fine because they have a massive blindspot to the role that keepers play in recklessly putting player safety at risk.
That’s quite possible. VAR came into play because Oliver thought it was a foul. It was logical to then check the severity of the foul but IMO because everyone’s passing theproverbial buck and the whole VAR procedure means no one is actually in charge of the game. Worth noting that none of the other officials actually contribute to the final decision.
We’ve never had three centre backs. When Lovren was sold we were left with Van Dijk, Matip, Gomez and Fabinho.
There was a debate about whether we needed another specialist centre back, but to my memory at no point did anyone argue we only needed three centre backs.
Sorry, but there’s absolutely no guarantee that going into the season with 4th CB would have not let us in a scenario when only that particular one might have been available. The argument then would have been we should have sold Matip and got 2 CBs worthy to be third/ fourth choice. Or maybe even second choice. What then?
We get 2 CBs, and sell Matip as well. And then Trent gets injured long term. We should have got a good enough RB and going in with one RB was a problem? There’s absolute no way this could have been right from one or the other perspective. Maybe wait to see how the season unfolds? Everything seems incorrect in hindsight.
Without getting into semantics, and the rig moral of he said she said, I think its fair to say the general consensus was that another CB would be good, but Fabinho would provide decent cover, and there are three youngsters, one of whom could do something.
History shows Liverpool don’t just go out and spend money just in case a player picks up a season ending injury. We would probably have brought one that suited our situation, but we didn’t. It’s always easy to come out after an ACL and say “told you so”. Not really productive or helpful.
