Molineux à Deux
As a coach, you gain a repertoire of cliches and soundbites relatively quickly. This is inevitable, since the best way to teach without overcoaching is through repetition of simple, easy-to-digest instructions. One of the main phrases I always come back to is this: an ugly win is still a win. At the youth level, especially, players with any competitive drive tend to get down on themselves if they have a bad half, a bad game, or a particularly awful mistake. Even if the team ultimately wins 5-0, it’s easy to dwell on the negative. The head of our soccer program has had a transformative effect by emphasizing to the boys that imperfection is part of the game. It’s not so much about managing expectations as realizing that team spirit and mental fortitude have a greater effect on games than how many Messi-tier players are on the pitch.
READ MORE: Anfield Nights by Jack Champagne
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As the Premier League gets harder and harder each season, it’s becoming a fact of life that weaker teams with better character can overcome a superstar roster more consistently than we could expect. The mark of a truly great team is the ability to win even when not playing at its best.
This is something that Liverpool has been heavily lacking this season. Despite the strong start of heart-arresting late wins, we entered a period where it frequently went the other way. On paper, Liverpool is the strongest team in the world. Far too often, they haven’t looked it. Flaccid draws against the likes of Fulham and Leeds have been demoralizing in no small part not only because they are games we should have won, but were games that we had won but for unsightly collapses in the last moments. For a team that prides itself on being Mentality Monsters, that mental fortitude has been noticeably absent in recent performances.
I recognize that I’m in the minority here, but I actually had a great time with our most recent outings against Forest and West Ham. Make no mistake, we looked dire at City Ground. The fact that we looked so dire and still managed to win against a team that has consistently been our Achilles Heel since Slot arrived at Liverpool was immensely satisfying. We left West Ham with an even performance across possession, xG, and work rate, yet still scored 5 times and ended the game with a +3 goal difference. This also marks the second time we’ve managed to beat Nuno Espirito Santo this season, whom we’ve struggled to even draw with previously.
They weren’t pretty wins by any means. Forest was a grind, and West Ham was a slugfest. But they were still wins. The response has been mixed, to say the least. Some saw it as a sign of progress; others saw it as merely a temporary reprieve from fundamental weaknesses.
Then, of course, we went to Molineux.
It’s one of those games you can’t even be mad at because it’s so insane. We’re shooting like it’s the OK Corral and didn’t get on the scoresheet once. Wolves take one shot on goal, and suddenly we’re behind. Salah gets us back in the game, and we lose at the last minute. Again. For the fifth time this season.
If I were managing Liverpool this season, I’d probably need a padded room by now. I simply cannot wrap my head around the mental fragility we displayed at a time when we should have been riding the high of the orgy of goals against West Ham just days before. We should have gone to Molineux expecting a grind. Wolves are fighting for their lives, to avoid humiliation if they can’t avoid relegation. They’re poised to punish lapses in focus. They did it to Arsenal. They did it to Villa. We should have expected that they could do it to us.
And yet, half of the red shirts looked like they were sleepwalking. Everyone, even this season’s consistent performers, played a tepid game. They came expecting to run riot and somehow forgot to run. But then we went back the same week and demolished Wolves. It’s truly baffling how we can play the same team on the same ground and achieve wildly different results. There’s really only one explanation: we showed up with a mind to win once and only once.
Our title defense is over and has been for months now. Despite this, we’ve seen no signs of quitting from the squad or the manager. Regularly, they emphasize they’ve still got a lot to play for, and they’re right. We’re still in the FA Cup, a trophy that Liverpool seems to be determined to win. We’ve already had a strong showing, but our toughest rivals are still in the hunt as well. We’re more than capable of defeating Arsenal, but haven’t yet demonstrated a capacity to defeat Manchester City. We were almost certainly going to have to clear this hurdle at some point if we wanted to bring the cup home. But now we have to do it to make it to the semis.
As far as the league season goes, we should be aspiring to do more than finish fourth. Liverpool needs to finish above Manchester United. We absolutely have something to prove here. We celebrated getting back on the perch that Alex Ferguson knocked us down from last year; it wouldn’t do to let them knock us back down with a diminished squad and a substitute manager. If there’s anything we can do in the League to show that we have turned a corner, finishing above Manchester United is about the only thing that will do it.
We’re still in Champions League contention, which is the big one. The national media seems to be dismissive of our odds of bringing it home, certain that it’s Arsenal’s to lose. I find that silly, in no small part because our biggest competition in Europe is Bayern Munich, not Arsenal. More to the point, we’ve consistently overperformed in Europe compared to the Premier League. We certainly feel more at home playing against our continental rivals than in the anti-football-dominated Premier League. We’ve already shown we’re capable of hanging with former champions and potential spoilers alike. Given how toothless the remaining English sides have been in the knockout phase, we’re probably the only Premier League team that has a real chance of lifting the cup. It’s simply a matter of sustaining a title charge.
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We’ve taken our lumps from Galatasaray already. Our best shot at winning the first leg in Hell was to score early and score often. We didn’t take our many, many chances to do so, and paid the price. We were never winning a battle of attrition against Galatasaray in Turkey, so hopefully we’ve learned our lesson for the return leg. We’ll have plenty of opportunities to prove that we want to win, and we have to take every single one of them. If we make it past the Turkish champions at Anfield, we’ve got another do-or-die fixture on our hands.
PSG knocked us out last year and are defending their title. We need to respond in kind. From there, our task only becomes even more monumental, with us likely facing Bayern in the semis if we make it that far. There’s a mountain to climb, which we can only do if we act like we want to.
It’s not enough for Slot and the players to just say they’re still going for the gold, though. It’s not good enough to talk about what you want out of the season to the press and show up checked out on matchday. If they’re going to keep insisting that we’ve still got a lot to play for, they need to act like it. Every game at this point is a must-win game.
The wins don’t have to be pretty; they don’t have to be dominant. But they do have to be wins. Recency bias aside, this is a winning side. We can win any match, even against theoretically stronger sides. It’s a matter of changing that “can” into a “will”. And that knife cuts both ways. Weaker sides will embarrass us if we fall apart. The latest example was facing pathetic, paper-thin Tottenham Hotspur, who, despite being in dire straits and on the brink of relegation, nicked a point in the waning moments. That’s the price you pay to be winners.