Drifting into a crisis#
I’m struggling for the motivation to write about last night’s game. In truth it was a complete shitshow from start to finish. The same problems repeating themselves over and over, Salah anonymous once more, Trent’s still in terrible form, Gomez had arguably his worst game for us. To be honest I could go through the whole team and pick apart their game from last night.
Saying that, some of the comments I’ve seen from fans… Salah and Virgil are finished, we’ve not replaced Mane even though Diaz has been our best player, play our back up LB in midfield, play our back up LB at RB, drop them all and play the kids etc etc. All knee jerk nonsense really. Here was me thinking all we had to do was sign any old midfielder too and everything would be fine…
Anyway, sarcasm aside where is it going wrong? Well everywhere really. We still look leggy and lack intensity in every area of the pitch. The lack of desire from Trent to get back into position and defend has been embarrassing to watch at times this season and our high line is proving a complete liability at the moment.
Our right side in particular is an absolute shambles. Trent is drifting into midfield as he did last season, except we’re not getting the trademark crossing from him, Salah seems to be hugging the touch line but looks like he couldn’t beat my old mum in a one v one at the moment and when he is finding himself in shooting positions he’s completely lacking in conviction. That brings us to Harvey and I don’t want to criticise as he’s been one of few players this season to have performed at all but according to Klopp, Salah hasn’t been told to play further wide so the only thing I can think of is that Harvey is occupying the spaces Salah wants to run into and also isn’t doing the defensive work that Hendo does to compensate for Trent pushing further forward.
Where do we go from here then? Well for one thing, for the love of god can we change to 4-2-3-1? Our right hand side has always been our weakness defensively but just now it’s just ridiculous the space that’s available and teams are passing their way through our midfield and beating the high line with ease. If we play with two sixes it can only help in terms of cover for our right hand side and tracking runners through midfield. The other thing is, all our forwards are fit while our midfield is threadbare so get your best players on the pitch, move Harvey into the 10 to relieve him of his defensive duties, or play Bobby there behind Nunez. We have so many options up front, I don’t know why we’re not trying any of them, especially as we’re really struggling to create any chances of note. We look like we don’t have a clue how to use Nunez at the moment and he continually drifts out to the left. I’d really like to see him hold a more central role, which he might if he had a proper number 10 behind him.
So what were the positives? It was a night of few to be honest but Diaz (McMOTM) once again showed a great attitude to adversity, much as he did after Darwin’s red card against Palace, he tried to grab the game by the scruff of the neck and scored an excellent goal. I wouldn’t mind seeing him do that BEFORE we’re 4-0 down or down to 10 men though. Elsewhere, Matip settled the defence and made a huge difference when he came on and Thiago was superb in the minutes he got. Having those two back will be massive moving forward. Arthur got some needed minutes under his belt as well but didn’t make much of an impression good or bad when he was on. That’s understandable however, difficult game to make your debut in.
Moving forward then. The likes of Trent, Salah and Virgil are too good for this form to continue, we just need to let them play themselves into some form but I do think we could help them by tweaking the system a bit. Teams seem to have us completely sussed at the moment, from journeyman left backs nullifying Salah, to teams playing through our midfield and beating the high line with ease. Our pressing game also seems to have fallen off a cliff, it wasn’t until Thiago came on that I saw any of our midfielders snapping into tackles with any kind of real intent.
Lots of negativity then and you can’t say it’s not deserved. That was humiliating last night, just as Old Trafford was and short of a freak game against Bournemouth and a lucky last minute winner at Newcastle, we’ve absolutely stank the place out this season. Conceding the first goal just seems par for the course now and we look utterly devoid of ideas in attack, once again relying on one of our forwards conjuring something special for themselves. This just isn’t sustainable moving forward.
To end on a positive, our injury crisis is starting to ease. The return of Jota, Matip and Thiago is massive for the team and if they’re fit enough, I’d like to see all three start our next game. Make no mistake however, Klopp has got a major job on his hands to turn this around. Wolves up next, Saturday 3pm and we really need to see a response from the players. It’s time the mentality monsters stood up and show the world what we’re really about. Walk on!
Recent Comments