Where To Turn Next?
I’m still trying to wash the bad taste out of my mouth from another disheartening result for the Reds over the weekend. There have been moments where cohesion has fought its way to the surface. They hammered Eintracht Frankfurt and exorcised the demon that is Real Madrid. In the league, we collected a clean sheet and two goal scoreline against a now-unstoppable Aston Villa. Outside of the glimmers of light, the whirlpool we seem to be caught in dragged us under once again. What defenses do we have when we look at the results in the league? Where do we turn next?
READ MORE: Are We Victims Of Our Own Success? by T. Alex Hauber
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I briefly caught a snippet on TikTok from the Anfield Wrap where the discussion had turned to the damage our big summer of signings has become. My first inclination was to scroll on, but then one of the pundits’ thoughts struck me. Essentially the idea was that Liverpool had taken a team that was deep and cohesive and made it neither. The styles don’t fit with what the game has developed into in the Premier League.
After last season, most teams went direct and big. It’s less beautiful in the sense of football as an art but it is effective. The en vogue strategy revolves around set pieces, long throws, and booting balls forward. Liverpool didn’t build into the meta. The players we signed are technical players. They operate in space and are meant to break down presses to move the ball forward. That style can be successful, as we haven’t lost everything yet, but the more technical players are being beaten out across the field by the more physically dominant play style. We also did not go for like-for-like replacements.
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Trent left and we brought in an attacking full-back, when we needed more defensive cover to defend against the new English style of play. We brought in two number nines, one for a premier league record cost, when we lost an incredibly talented winger. We moved to upgrade Szoboszlai in the center with a technical playmaker. It almost seems like we tried to recreate the success of the previous year’s system while also trying to adjust that system to a new style. Caught in between, we have achieved neither.
Is this a Slot issue? Probably. There is a lot we can applaud him for. He came in and took another manager’s team and won the league handily. What remains to be seen is whether he can mold that team into his vision. That might mean that what is next could be some serious cuts to players who don’t fit that vision. Up to this point Slot has been trying to fit new pieces of his design into a team built by someone else.
Sometimes a round hole can fit a square peg if you hammer it enough times. But it would be easier to take these new pegs and instead of deforming them trying to fit into an old board, build a new board they were intended for. Not an easy or enviable task, but with us in freefall, you sometimes need to make the tough unpopular choices to come out right in the end.