Asking difficult questions
It’s hard to watch this team, that has delivered so much joy to us fans in recent years, badly struggling and being further humbled week by week but it’s left the club facing some difficult questions.
The first, and I never thought I’d be asking this under this manager but… has Klopp lost the dressing room? At any other time in the PL era, under any different manager, that’s what I’d be thinking – the players want the manager sacked. I just can’t believe that though, that this group of players would turn on the manager who has made them superstars. What is the problem then?
Melissa Reddy’s article the other day was pretty damning. She spoke of tension between Andreas Kornmayer and the medical and sports science teams and to be honest, that doesn’t surprise me at all. Lots of us questioned our preseason schedule and the sheer volume of injuries we picked up during that time and shortly after, went some way to vindicating what many of us thought and it would be no surprise at all if the medical department felt similarly.
Then you have Julian Ward and Ian Graham, the latter considered the best in the business at the data analysis side of the game. Both announcing their departures around the same time and Reddy quoted a source saying “they no longer feel empowered to do their jobs to the best of their ability”. Fairly cryptic without context but let’s look at our most recent signings.
We’ll start with the obvious, our new record signing Darwin Nunez. Many of us have questioned before why we don’t move for some players BEFORE they cost mega bucks and it was reported that the club like to see how they perform in stronger leagues, to get the optimum amount of data on the player before making their move. Rodgers said he wanted Van Dijk while he was at Celtic but the club wouldn’t sanction the move, preferring to wait until he’d proven himself in the PL before making a record breaking £75 million move for the player. Fair enough you think and it worked out well. I also refer to Pep Ljinders addressing transfers in his much maligned book where he spoke of targeting “youth and game changers”. For £85 million, you’d be expecting a game changer but Nunez is anything but and has vast improvements to make to his game to become an aforementioned game changer. From what was reported in the press however, Klopp really wanted Darwin and so Darwin we got. The jury is still very much out though, not what you expect after such a significant outlay.
That brings us to Gakpo. Now we can only go by what is reported in the media but for months leading up to the transfer I read in a few different outlets that Pep Ljinders had “fallen in love with Gakpo” and that it was him who was the driving force behind a fairly head scratching transfer, given the state of our midfield. He’s another that the jury is out on, he may well end up a top player for us but he certainly hasn’t hit the ground running and has left most of us wondering if that money wouldn’t have been better spent on our midfield.
That leaves the lesser spotted Ramsay, alongside Carvalho who I really have no clue what the plan for him is. All I see is a player who isn’t physically ready for the PL and I’m really not sure where on the pitch he’s meant to play for us when everyone is fit. Could it be that Klopp and Ljinders are now the driving force behind transfers and Ward and Graham feel undermined in their positions? That’s certainly what it sounds like.
Speaking of Ljinders, I’ve said in the past that I’m not his biggest fan, I find him smug and full of himself in interviews and I do wonder how much control he now has over tactics etc. I can’t remember if it was Klopp or Ljinders who described their partnership as “A German inspired by Sacchi and a Dutchman inspired by Cruyff”. This was meant to be a good thing but it certainly doesn’t seem that way as we now seem to have a mish-mash of styles and neither is working. We no longer have the intensity of a Sacchi team and we’re about as far away from Cruyff’s ‘total football’ as it would be possible to get. I also think this Trent drifting into the midfield has Ljinder’s fingerprints all over it but we’ve no way of knowing for sure. Regardless, it’s a really frustrating tactic that costs us again and again down our right flank, yet we endlessly persist with it.
One thing that does seem certain is there seems to be factions that have developed at the club. If the rift between Kornmayer and the medical and sports science people is true, where do the players stand on that divide? Given the fact they’ve been dropping like flies since preseason, you’d suspect they’d be siding with the medical team so has that caused a rift? Are the players unhappy with the training schedule? Are they simply being overworked and worn out?
Whatever the truth is, it’s clear there are big problems behind the scenes and we’re now talking about squad revolution, as opposed to the evolution we’ve discussed in the past couple of seasons.
One thing I will say is, I back Klopp 100% at the moment. I’d rather see a clear out of the current squad than see the manager go and I think we all expect a big summer transfer window. There will have to be an upturn in fortunes on the pitch however because as much credit as Klopp has in the bank, he’s burning through it rapidly this season and if we have a poor start to next season, he’ll be under immense pressure.
Still more questions than answers then, for a fanbase eager for someone to blame for our massive drop off this season. Whatever side you happen to come down on, it’s clear changes have to be made and I don’t just mean with the players. When you have a mass exodus of backroom staff like we’ve seen over the past year, it tells you that something is very much not right behind the scenes.
I’ve given up trying to figure out the problem, thats what Klopp is paid the mega bucks for. I just hope for all our sakes that he does figure it out and the club make the necessary changes, even if that means taking a very ruthless stance with people both on and off the pitch. Until then, expect plenty more games of watching through the slits of our fingers. Walk on!
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