Football: Lamping on towards the finish line.

[Rorshach]

For Nunez, I'm not sure if he'll be a top player, but I think he'll be miles better than Origi. First times I saw him, he looked good (but finishing was a bit all over the place) - his runs fit the team well. Then he got sent off, the team started getting worse, results deteriorated and I reckon his confidence went a bit as well. Combine with being in a new country and a new team, and him being young, I think he'll improve with a full pre-season and a better prepared team.

[ljkeane]

7 hours ago, polishgenius said:

Liverpool moved Trent into midfield at half time against Arsenal, pulled that game back and have since won five on the bounce.


Imagine where they'd be in their season if Klopp had acknowledged that letting your best player do his best work was a good idea 9 games from the start instead of 9 games from the end. 

Pretty sure we started the Arsenal game with Alexander-Arnold tucking into midfield and reverted back to the old system in the second half but, yeah, overall it's worked out pretty well.

I think you're underselling the potential downsides a little though. Yeah, it's not a surprise Trent would be good at dictating play from midfield but one of Liverpool's major strengths over the last few years has been having two brilliant attacking full backs. Playing as we are now in attack one of them is a deep lying midfielder and the other is a left centre back of three, I don't think it's and absolute no brainer to do that.

1 hour ago, Iskaral Pust said:

Trent’s shifted role has helped him and Fabinho a lot, and it definitely could have come sooner considering the available examples of inverted FBs, but it hasn’t helped the defensive vulnerability of Trent’s RB role being easy to attack and pulls the rest of the defense out of shape to cover and makes Elliot or Henderson ineffective in the RM role . 

I actually think Henderson is the type of player we want for the right midfielder role if we're going to persist with this, we need someone comfortable drifting out to provide width if Trent isn't going to be doing it. The problem is just he hasn't got the legs for it anymore. A 25 year old Henderson or Milner would be great. It doesn't really suit Elliott.

[polishgenius]

1 hour ago, ljkeane said:

I think you're underselling the potential downsides a little though. Yeah, it's not a surprise Trent would be good at dictating play from midfield but one of Liverpool's major strengths over the last few years has been having two brilliant attacking full backs. Playing as we are now in attack one of them is a deep lying midfielder and the other is a left centre back of three, I don't think it's and absolute no brainer to do that.

It's not so much that this precise solution was the obvious no-brainer. But it was very obvious very early on that things were going badly wrong for TAA, because teams were targeting his defensive weaknesses and taking advantage of his isolation to cut off his lines of passing. There are other potential workarounds- adoping a 3-5-2 with true wingbacks would have been one, or moving Trent into midfield fully, which is more complicated for him but I suspect will be the long term answer if you can get a good replacement RB. But something needed to be done and Klopp left him hanging out to dry for far too long. 

 

1 hour ago, ljkeane said:

I actually think Henderson is the type of player we want for the right midfielder role if we're going to persist with this, we need someone comfortable drifting out to provide width if Trent isn't going to be doing it. The problem is just he hasn't got the legs for it anymore. A 25 year old Henderson or Milner would be great. It doesn't really suit Elliott.

 

 

It's one of the baffling things about Liverpool's season that nearly every team in the league has at least one midfielder who'd improve you in this respect or similar. For the style of play you have, it should not have been difficult at all to refresh that midfield. You just... didn't. 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

52 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

It's not so much that this precise solution was the obvious no-brainer. But it was very obvious very early on that things were going badly wrong for TAA, because teams were targeting his defensive weaknesses and taking advantage of his isolation to cut off his lines of passing. There are other potential workarounds- adoping a 3-5-2 with true wingbacks would have been one, or moving Trent into midfield fully, which is more complicated for him but I suspect will be the long term answer if you can get a good replacement RB. But something needed to be done and Klopp left him hanging out to dry for far too long. 

 

If Liverpool switched to a 3-5-2 with true wingbacks, you'd end up with way too many forwards for that system.

I assume you thought of something like

 

Matip-VVD-Konate as back three.

TAA-Robertson as the wingbacks

Henderson-Fabinho-Jones/Elliott/whatever in the middle (Probably Thiago when fit).

Salah-Diaz/Darwin/Jota/Gakpo

Sure you could do that, but there you probably want to trade one of those forwards for another CB option, and probably another option for the RWB. Gomez would probably work as decent CB there, but you'd really lack in depth there. 

Like you said, you can do that, but you'd create other problems elsewhere.

[ljkeane]

Yeah, our squad's not well constructed at all to play with wingbacks.

Firstly while Robertson would probably be fine Alexander-Arnold isn't really a great wingback. As Horse says we've got too many forwards as well and you'd probably want a real attacking midfielder in there too which we don't really have. It's also a formation it's hard to press aggressively out of, which admittedly we've been bad at this year anyway but what's the point of having Klopp as your manager if you're just going to give up on that. We'd probably have conceded less goals if Klopp had gone with that but I think our attack would have been significantly worse so potentially we're not better off.

Largely our problems this year are just down to our pressing really not functioning well all season for a variety of reasons. So I think a lot of the focus for a lot of the season has been if we just fix that we'll be fine rather than making drastic changes. Ultimately that's probably been the wrong decision because it's never quite worked but I'm not sure a change to the style of play would have been a panacea earlier in the year either. I think this formation change has helped with our recent improvement but there's other factors there too. Curtis Jones has gotten fit and has been playing quite well, and being 22 he can actually run around. Fabinho has been playing better too, although that might be primarily down to having Trent alongside him. Jota and Diaz getting fit lets us rotate the front three so there's a bit more energy there too.

[polishgenius]

Lucky Mitoma gets to resit the Wan-Bissaka test today. 


ps why do we insist on posting our line-up announcements in numerical order rather than by position. Fucking infuriating. 
 

 

[ljkeane]

Mitoma didn’t pass the ‘don’t kick it into the keeper’s face when clean through’ test early in the game anyway.

[ljkeane]

Er, speaking of Wan Bissaka and Mitoma is that not a penalty?

[ljkeane]

He hangs his leg out and makes contact. I don’t know, looks like a penalty to me.

Anyway, this is quite good. Definitely better than the FA Cup game so far.

[Raja]

Yeah, that's not a penalty. To be fair, I didn't think the nunez one was one either but only seen the sky replays from the highlights

[Iskaral Pust]

3 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

If Liverpool switched to a 3-5-2 with true wingbacks, you'd end up with way too many forwards for that system.

I assume you thought of something like

 

Matip-VVD-Konate as back three.

TAA-Robertson as the wingbacks

Henderson-Fabinho-Jones/Elliott/whatever in the middle (Probably Thiago when fit).

Salah-Diaz/Darwin/Jota/Gakpo

Sure you could do that, but there you probably want to trade one of those forwards for another CB option, and probably another option for the RWB. Gomez would probably work as decent CB there, but you'd really lack in depth there. 

Like you said, you can do that, but you'd create other problems elsewhere.

 

3 hours ago, ljkeane said:

Yeah, our squad's not well constructed at all to play with wingbacks.

Firstly while Robertson would probably be fine Alexander-Arnold isn't really a great wingback. As Horse says we've got too many forwards as well and you'd probably want a real attacking midfielder in there too which we don't really have. It's also a formation it's hard to press aggressively out of, which admittedly we've been bad at this year anyway but what's the point of having Klopp as your manager if you're just going to give up on that. We'd probably have conceded less goals if Klopp had gone with that but I think our attack would have been significantly worse so potentially we're not better off.

Largely our problems this year are just down to our pressing really not functioning well all season for a variety of reasons. So I think a lot of the focus for a lot of the season has been if we just fix that we'll be fine rather than making drastic changes. Ultimately that's probably been the wrong decision because it's never quite worked but I'm not sure a change to the style of play would have been a panacea earlier in the year either. I think this formation change has helped with our recent improvement but there's other factors there too. Curtis Jones has gotten fit and has been playing quite well, and being 22 he can actually run around. Fabinho has been playing better too, although that might be primarily down to having Trent alongside him. Jota and Diaz getting fit lets us rotate the front three so there's a bit more energy there too.

That’s why we’ve been playing W-M rather than 3-5-2.  It keeps more forwards on the field and relies on Salah and Jota for width, while conceding the defensive wide space (or else lose Konate out of position to try to cover).  It gets 5 players into the congested central zone (Fabinho, Trent, Jones, Hendo/Elliott, Gakpo) to shorten the distance for pressing and to get better control of possession and progress the ball with short angle passes rather than hoofing it up aimlessly.  But if the opponent breaks through or around that control space then the defense can be badly exposed.  Robertson’s strengths are sacrificed for the formation and VVD’s poor form is magnified.  (Peak-VVD would have managed it but I don’t know if we’ll see him again)

[ljkeane]

15 minutes ago, Iskaral Pust said:

  But if the opponent breaks through or around that control space then the defense can be badly exposed. 

Yeah, to a degree. The space is down the sides of the three at the back but we were playing with two at the back before so it’s less than it was. I don’t think anyone really plays with a flat back four in attack anymore so there’s going to be a sacrifice somewhere to get numbers forward. If we stick with this system you’d think it’ll get better with a full preseason to work on managing the transitions.

The major issue for me is, as you say, it doesn’t particularly suit Robertson’s strengths or Tsimikas for that matter.

ETA: To be fair you don’t necessarily have to play Robertson in the back three. We could, say, drop Fabinho into the middle of the back three, pick another midfielder to sit alongside Trent and use Robertson to provide the width on the left. It should be an interesting Summer.

Edited May 4, 2023 by ljkeane

[polishgenius]

Lucky, lucky, lucky boy, Antony. 

[ljkeane]

This is a very Brighton performance.

[polishgenius]

Napoli are champions. 

[polishgenius]

lmao at Shaw getting a card for that yet Antony staying on earlier. 

[ljkeane]

Obvious penalty that one but, speaking of bottling red cards, isn’t that a second yellow for Shaw?

ETA: Wahey.

Edited May 4, 2023 by ljkeane

[polishgenius]

2 minutes ago, ljkeane said:

Obvious penalty that one but, speaking of bottling red cards, isn’t that a second yellow for Shaw?

 

lmao what. 

[Raja]

 

[ljkeane]

3 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

lmao what. 

Deliberate handball to prevent a chance. That's yellow no?