Pep Talk
Around this time last year, we were celebrating having done the double against Pep Guardiola’s Man City for the very first time. It wasn’t just that we beat them. We rendered them absolutely ineffective. Mo Salah was running circles around much younger men. Erling Haaland looked helpless as our midfield bullied him if he so much as looked at the ball. Omar Marmoush, being touted as the “New Egyptian King,” failed to make any impact on the game whatsoever.
You’d hardly know that happened just last season by looking at our current form against City. Not only did we capitulate to them twice in the League, but we got completely run over in the FA Cup. The loss isn’t what irks me. It’s the fact that we failed to put up any meaningful resistance each of the three times. It’s an embodiment of a season that looks set to go out on a whimper.
READ MORE: Molineux à Deux by Jack Champagne
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Sky Blues Reaching For The Sky
Things have changed at City, no doubt. The arrival of Benedict Lijnders in the dugout is the most drastic one, of course. The arrival of Donnarumma and Guehi has certainly done wonders for City’s defensive vulnerabilities. But all of that pales in comparison to the real inversion point between the teams. The City of last season was dull, unmotivated, seemingly unconcerned with winning. They came off their historic four-peat. Pep’s men took everything for granted and played like a team that couldn’t be asked. Meanwhile, Liverpool played like a team certain that the champion’s crown was theirs to lose. The result was inevitable.
Now the roles have been reversed. Man City played like a team determined to see Pep Guardiola off with at least a cup double. As has been customary this season, Liverpool showed up with a mind to play one-half of each half and got completely humiliated for their trouble. We got down one on a penalty, and suddenly the match is over. After nearly 40 minutes of playing a matched game against a team that has proven itself superior twice, we decided we were done. Weeks upon weeks of insisting upon the paramount importance of the FA Cup for this season, and it’s thrown away without a second thought.
Everything about this game feels clinically formulated to stick in my craw. Pep Lijnders looked far too ecstatic to have defeated the club that made him. I will probably never forget the look of utter pity on Pep Guardiola’s face when his side went 4-0 up. Ekitike swapping shirts after contributing nothing to a game that we were losing by 4 goals turned my stomach. I’ve seen worse games with Liverpool, but none were this miserable to watch. I don’t ever want to experience anything like this again.
Everything Bad, Everywhere, All At Once
I can tolerate a lot of things from the team I’ve loved for two decades. I can accept a mediocre or uninspired player. A bad season or a blown performance is not the end of the world. I can tolerate tactical experimentation. One thing I will never, ever abide is a quitter. I was Darwin Nunez’s staunchest supporter until the exact second he made it clear that he was done trying to make his Liverpool career work. At that point, he couldn’t be gone fast enough. I’ll praise Cody Gakpo’s off-the-ball work all day. But I’ve got nothing positive to say about his pouting after his blown chances. Ekitike’s swagger, typically my favorite thing about him, is excruciating to watch after some of the half-assed performances he’s subjected us to. And I’m frankly sick of the squad’s apologetic tone in every single post-match interview.
THE FUTURE IS HOME GROWN
I have the same opinion of it as I do of the meta-humor in The Simpsons. Instead of referencing how funny you used to be, just tell a goddamn joke. Why is the energy spent lamenting the lack of mental fortitude on the pitch not being spent on actually showing up? Talk is cheap, and inflation is getting out of control. Szoboszlai getting peeved about fans losing faith is embarrassing in light of that display. “The fighting spirit wasn’t there,” he said. Well then, where the hell was it? I’m going to vomit if I hear Virgil van Dijk say “it’s not good enough” one more time. No kidding. So what are you going to do about it?
Arne Slot is bearing the brunt of the criticism because, at this stage of the season, everything is his fault. There’s no point whatsoever in defending him. Everyone’s opinion on him is settled and won’t be altered until something major changes. And as much as I rag on the pervasive negativity, as much as I think the Slot Outters have lost the plot, I can’t really fault anyone for it.
Understanding The Slot-Outters
I can’t help but deeply sympathize with the emotional architecture of the anti-Slot position, even if it has degenerated into a bit of a circlejerk. This has been a season so devoid of enjoyment. The only real way to generate any passion is to fantasize about burning it all down and rebuilding on the ashes. Is the attitude constructive? No. Is it completely understandable given the circumstances? Absolutely. This is the inevitable response to a season that has not only failed to live up to expectations. It is an abject failure even without the context of last season’s success. We’re trapped in a horrible negative feedback loop.
The players and coaches all insist that we need to pull together, that they need support. Fans show up and do their damndest to provide that support, and are constantly punched in the gut for their trouble. Then they leave, jeer, jump on social media to piss and moan, and the club is on the defensive again. That siege mentality, that feeling that every result is a referendum on the season, is probably contributing to the timidity we’re seeing on matchday. But the only way to break out of that loop is to actually perform, or at least look like you’re trying. Whatever can be said about supporter obligations, the question to be answered is this: if the players don’t look like they give a damn, why should anyone else?
AMERICAN SCOUSER TAKES ANFIELD
Arne Slot cannot avoid blame here. Hyping up Isak’s return was a stupid choice, a completely unforced error. Even I could have told you that it was too early to promise anything, and it colored the affair in an aura of disappointment before a ball was even kicked. The obvious lack of on-pitch leadership is as much a coaching problem as it is a squad problem. To the extent the captain leads the team, it is as the manager’s deputy. The fact that we looked so helpless in the second half demonstrates clearly that something is getting lost in translation between the locker room and the grass. Slot has consistently failed to effectively communicate what exactly the problems are.
Repeatedly, he has alluded to anti-football as his struggle for the season. So, here you are. Pep Guardiola, who has been duly anointed the custodian of True Football against the Gunner menace. Regardless, he had Liverpool’s number from the start, sitting low, exploiting defensive mistakes, taking advantage of Liverpool’s offensive timidity. Fine, we can’t break a low block. But why? Why has the season almost finished without having an answer to this One Simple Trick? If Slot can’t answer that question, then there are some bigger questions he needs to be asking himself.
Plenty Of Blame To Go Around
However, blaming Slot alone is a mistake. I see constant allusions to his supposed flaws in man-management. I hate this sort of criticism, in part because it’s completely mythical. The meme version of Slot is being compared to the ghost of Klopp, with nothing substantive to back it up. The examples pointed to are fairly asinine, anyway. There was a certain eagerness to make Slot the main antagonist in Salah’s departure story, conveniently forgetting that the popular narrative was that Salah was past his prime and needed to rot on the bench until his contract ran out. All it took was one poor performance for that lead to snap right back.
Alisson and Slot telling slightly different versions of the same story about the goalkeeper’s injury was taken as Alisson “firing back,” yet more evidence that there’s a locker room rebellion in progress. At a certain point, you’ve got to just admit when confirmation bias is starting to metastasize. More importantly, though, this talking point lets the players off the hook far too easily. It’s often said that none of the players would run through a wall for Slot the way they would for Klopp, but I simply cannot accept that excuse.
WHAT IF…
Read any of Steven Gerrard’s memoirs, and it’s clear that he wouldn’t have run through a wall for Rafa Benitez. The basis of their working relationship was a shared purpose: an unimpeachable desire to bring trophies to Liverpool. There’s simply no man-managing your way out of a squad who simply doesn’t care enough about winning to give their best.
Frankly, I don’t care who is in the dugout. If you won’t run through a wall for Slot, run through a wall for Liverpool. Do it for the fans who travelled all the way to Manchester to watch you throw in the towel after a half hour. Do it for the sheer dignity of not looking like a complete disgrace while wearing the shirt. If that’s too much to ask, Ryan Reynolds is hiring over at Wrexham. If you can’t be assed to play for 90 minutes without Klopp in the picture, then go play for Red Bull. I’m tired of players getting a pass for not doing the bare minimum because everyone’s made up their mind that Slot and Slot alone is the problem.
The Looming Spectres
At this point, it’s not even really about Arne Slot. If you handed this squad to Xabi Alonso, Luis Enrique, or whoever else, you’d end up with the same result. People call for the sacking of a manager not because it’ll fix anything, but because something has to change, and the manager is the easiest mid-season replacement to make. This is, in fact, why Alonso is out of a job, despite having done nothing wrong at Real Madrid. What we’re seeing at Liverpool is not tactical failure. We’ve seen what that looks like with Russell Martin’s Southampton and basically everyone who has coached Nottingham Forest this season, and this isn’t it.
I’m sorry to anyone invested in the narrative, but watching professional footballers forget to do simple things like block crosses or mark runners doesn’t exactly strike me as a problem with the game plan. There’s no formation or tactical system that will help players who constantly lose duels and fail tackles. A tactics board can’t save players who throw a game away after one lost penalty. Intensity and Identity are just buzzwords in the face of players who aren’t playing. Say what you will about the aesthetics of Slotball, but it cannot be blamed for the failure to do the basics. What we’re seeing is significantly more alarming, that the problems run far, far deeper.
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Tottenham Hotspur’s current death spiral is a prime example of what can happen if you simply expect the right managerial appointment to fix a fundamentally broken team. Spurs should be a cautionary tale to anyone who thinks Liverpool is too big to fail, or to anyone who thinks Xabi Alonso’s magic powers will make us start winning again. Spurs is stacked with players who clearly don’t give a damn whether they play Championship football next season, or else have already started planning their transfers. Running the managerial gauntlet has not arrested this complete apathy; it’s simply provided a new name to embarrass every month.
Slot is likely to be in charge next season, barring a major disaster. He has retained the confidence of the ownership, owing in part to their (correct, in my opinion) belief that this season is not indicative of his abilities as head coach. However, he’s going to have to win back the confidence of the fans if he wants the pressure to go away, and that’s an extremely tall order. Improvements have been made, but they have never been durable enough to make a real impact, and that’s a problem that needs to be addressed yesterday. If FSG is convinced that Slot is not the problem, they need to find the problem and find it fast. The club simply cannot afford another shameful display like the one at Etihad. No one who doesn’t firmly believe this should remain at Liverpool, no matter who they are.