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Liverpool FC Team Talk/Gossip/Rumours Thread 2015/16 - Mod Note in OP, 14/12
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Luckycharms_74 wrote: »Sorry I was out of action for 2 weeks with a slight niggle :P
Did I miss anything
You're as bad as Sturridge.0 -
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Listened to the build- up and start of the match on 5 live .
The presenters were like giddy school girls over see-ing and being so close to klopp. It was mad .
I had heard of him and he has been lauded here on boards but i never expected that the british media would be in such a frenzy over herr klopp.
Kinda enjoyed seeing such a box office draw at liverpool.
Lets hope the excitment around the club is taken full advantage of 0 -
BorneTobyWilde wrote: »I truly hope he's right. I've not seen evidence so far to suggest he will progress into a top goal scorer. Do we have time to let him find his feet over the course of games that are vital to our season.
I expect Sturridge &/or Benteke to feature in the coming games, Origi might well play on Thursday of course.
Klopp might well play Fermino as a 2nd striker too so Origi leading the line with Lallana supporting him shouldn't be seen too much going forward all going to plan with folks recovering from injury and hopefully staying fit.
Origi has shown that he is capable of coming in and doing a job at least imo from what limited games I've seen him feature in so far for us That's ignoring any "status"/reputation or otherwise he has from international appearance. 0 -
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I expect Sturridge &/or Benteke to feature in the coming games, Origi might well play on Thursday of course.
Klopp might well play Fermino as a 2nd striker too so Origi leading the line with Lallana supporting him shouldn't be seen too much going forward all going to plan with folks recovering from injury and hopefully staying fit.
Origi has shown that he is capable of coming in and doing a job at least imo from what limited games I've seen him feature in so far for us That's ignoring any "status"/reputation or otherwise he has from international appearance.
Is Fernino/Fermino the new Lovern/Nervol ??0 -
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Klopp’s Influence Already Clear
http://tomkinstimes.com/2015/10/klopps-influence-already-clear/By Paul Tomkins.
Jürgen Klopp’s first game ended up being a largely unremarkable contest, after an incredible week of hype and giddy expectations. The net result was yet another draw for Liverpool. It did nothing to prove that Klopp walks on water, and there was also nothing to suggest his task will be much harder than anyone imagined.
However, it was heartening to see harder work and better defending result in a long-overdue clean sheet. It was even more encouraging to see Klopp put his stamp on the team, despite only three days with most of the players, and so many injuries to contend with. It wasn’t full Klopp, but it was partial Klopp.
Success takes time – great teams are not built overnight – but a new identity can arise surprisingly quickly from a managerial change. You’d expect the additional effort that comes with trying to impress the new boss, but the team shape already looked better. This type of performance wasn’t beyond a Rodgers’ team – they did so at Arsenal (and at times away from home in the middle of last season) – but such tight defending wasn’t the norm.
It will probably be next season before we start to see the best of what Klopp brings to the table, but until then he can look to inspire a short-term bounce, add some defensive stability, and start working out what needs changing in January and then the summer. Things might fully click before then, but it’s unlikely.
While I loved the wave of euphoria that sprang up last week, it’s important to not get disillusioned if there are a few setbacks, and to judge the manager after a sufficient amount of time. (If it’s still not working in season four, then that’s different to week four.)
Klopp said before his first game that getting things tight at the back would be the platform to build from, and in that sense a 0-0 draw away at an in-form team represents a good starting point. And while keeping up the intensity of running will be a challenge, there’s also no doubt that this is a key characteristic of a Klopp side.
Steve McManaman, like all dark-agers, laughed at the statistic that Liverpool were the first team to outrun Spurs this season, at 116km to 114. Klopp wants his team to outrun everyone, having aimed for a combined 120km with his German teams. It’s a vital stat to Klopp, something his success was built on; McManaman, in all his infinite managerial wisdom, disagrees (possibly because it’s a statistic, and therefore automatically meaningless.)
“Chelsea and Manchester City won’t have been concerned about that when they were winning league titles”, he sneered. Well, they had the super-expensive teams with the greatest depth.
If Liverpool are to achieve anything of note under Klopp, then it needs some points of difference. Merely emulating the richer clubs on a smaller budget is the surest way to confirm the ‘par’ of finishing below them.
If Liverpool run harder than anyone else then that will be a start. The visit to Spurs saw the greatest combined distance the Reds have covered this season (a whopping 11km more than in the 3-0 home defeat by West Ham, and nine km more than the team’s average), and while it wasn’t full of flowing football, it was still one of the better displays of the campaign – and any improvement is to be welcomed. Crucially, it meant that Spurs’ passing success rate was greatly reduced, and they couldn’t do what they did to Man City recently.
Martin Samuel said on the Sunday Supplement that running is no good if everyone else is doing it too, and other teams have more quality. The last part is true. But the fact is that everyone else isn’t doing it. When Spurs recently thrashed Man City 4-1 at White Hart Lane they also outran them by a massive distance. City had far more quality; Spurs did the running. On that occasion effort easily outdid talent, although City will find life simpler against teams that don’t work as hard.
And no one is saying that running 120km automatically wins you the game. Running without footballing skill is pointless; no one is going to bring Kenyan middle-distance athletes to the club. But setting such targets guarantees that the effort is there, to underpin the work that gets done with the ball.
A good start
While his options were limited due to injuries, Klopp picked the kind of side I’d hoped to see. He didn’t come in and rip everything up, instead making tweaks rather than sweeping changes. With the majority of the squad having been with him for just three days since returning from international duty, and the others only having a week, he wasn’t going to reinvent the wheel.
He kept faith with Mamadou Sakho, but trusted him in a back four, and also opted for Alberto Moreno at left-back. Sakho was a colossus, but yet again fell foul of the confirmation bias that dogs him: just listen to how little praise he gets for his great work, and then the clear, deliberate highlighting of the slightest error. (According to WhoScored, Sakho won possession in the defensive third more times – 12 – in the game against Spurs than any other player has in a Premier League match this season.)
Real football people, like Michael Owen, don’t trust him, as he looks a bit awkward. Rodgers is even said to have considered him shaky, as I noted last week. People think he gives the ball away, but his pass completion rate is excellent, and he often arrows forward passes into feet; his average pass direction was more ‘forward’ than Daniel Agger’s when the progressive Dane was at the club, and rather than the five-yard passes people say he plays, the average distance was 20 metres.
Owen also has it in for Divock Origi, whose case he has been on as doggedly as Stan Collymore in a dimly-lit carpark. If a 20-year-old English forward had held the ball up as well in the lone striker role, whilst being poorly supported by the off-colour Philippe Coutinho and worryingly ordinary James Milner, then he’d have been highly praised; instead, the good work was largely ignored and the mistakes highlighted.
Thankfully Klopp spoke up for his player, pointing out that he’s quick and technically gifted – indeed, a player he wanted at Dortmund – and that “we’ll have a lot of fun with him”. But already plenty of fans have closed their eyes, and minds, to the talent he has. We all have our biases but we have to constantly question them, to see if we’re analysing or just parroting.
For example, and as you’ll have noticed by now, I’m not Adam Lallana’s biggest fan, but even if I jump on his mistakes – and I do – I’m not afraid to quickly point out when he does well. And aside from one moment of dribbling back towards his own goal with two-dozen unnecessary touches – to be henceforth known as ‘Lallanaing about with it’ – he looked bright and sharp at White Hart Lane, with a nice turn of pace over shorter distances, although the lack of physical strength was apparent when he was easily bundled over. As ever, his best work was done on the edge of the opponent’s area with one or two touches.
It hasn’t convinced me that he’s the answer to all Liverpool’s problems, or that he cost a sensible amount, but if he plays consistently well then I’ll continue to reassess.
At this juncture, every little helps towards building a fuller picture. Wherever possible I try to give players the benefit of the doubt, and if necessary, clean the slate, but as seen with Dejan Lovren earlier in the season, a couple of good games can be quickly undone by one horrendous one. Then the balance tips back towards ‘bad’, as you recall the horrors of a poor first season.
But even Lovren, under a different manager, with a more compact shape and someone shielding in front of him, might not be beyond redemption. What we know is that no centre-backs looked consistently good in a Rodgers’ team. His open approach helped attacking players to shine, but did nothing but expose the central defenders.
One of my main gripes with Rodgers by the end was that he was a manager tasked with working with younger players – that was what the job entailed, and what he sold himself on (as well as the 180-page dossier and possession football) – yet placed less faith in them as time went by, and constantly fought for older players, with proven Premier League experience.
Once such player, James Milner, is possibly Liverpool’s 2nd-highest earner. At 29 he still runs incredible distances, but his lack of quality on the ball has been quite startling. He’s a better footballer than he’s appeared so far – as seen over the course of his career – but age, plus experience, plus expectation (key role, senior figure, big wages) appears to have got to him in the way that being a utility man in a title-winning side never did.
He may still come good – it’s far too early to write him off, even if he won’t get several seasons of leeway (and at least his legs haven’t gone, unlike Rickie Lambert). And I actually thought he’d be one of those rare exceptions: a really good acquisition aged 29 or over. The problem is that older players often appear to make sense when you buy them, but such a low percentage seem to succeed.
I’ve previously argued that teams with an average age below 25 rarely do well, but perhaps Klopp’s methods are actually dependent on youthful vitality. This could be something I need to reconsider; another point of difference, and one linked to the high-running style that not only needs stamina, but also a willingness to heed the manager’s orders. You can imagine a few older players thinking “no thanks” to all that running.
Klopp genuinely gets the best out of younger players, and younger teams. I looked up his Dortmund side from 2012/13, when they reached the Champions League Final, and the top ten appearance makers (all competitions) by outfield players averaged just 23.5 years of age, and the oldest of the ten was just 27, with only one other player older than 24.
And this didn’t include Sven Bender, 23, Jonas Hofmann, 20, Ivan Perišić, 23, Julian Schieber, 23, Moritz Leitner, 19, and Nuri Sahin, 24 – six additional players who were in the top 18 appearance makers. There were just a handful of older players in the squad, and yet this was his fifth season as manager and came straight after back-to-back titles.
The year before, when they won the double, the top 15 outfield appearance makers averaged an astonishingly young 22.9! And although the goalkeeper, Roman Weidenfeller, was 31 at the time, 22.9 also happens to be the average age of the youngest team to appear in the Champions League: Klopp’s Dortmund, early in that season.
At the weekend he was limited to picking what was left to him, with Joe Gomez and Danny Ings, two of the younger players, out for the season, and Roberto Firmino and Christian Benteke not quite ready to return. It wasn’t an old XI, but it wasn’t young either.
The key is that Klopp didn’t fill Dortmund with proven older Bundesliga players, even when their finances grew increasingly stronger. He didn’t talk about trusting in, and wanting, young players with hunger, only to chase others; Rodgers wanted Ashley Williams when 29 (and 30), Clint Dempsey, 29, James Milner, 29, Kolo Toure, 32, and Rickie Lambert, 32.
And aside from Milner, most or all of these arrived (or were targeted) when Gerrard was well into his 30s, and with Glen Johnson, Jose Enrique, Daniel Agger and Martin Skrtel all in their late 20s. In some cases Carragher was still around, also well into his 30s. (And at the same time, Rodgers didn’t want Daniel Sturridge when aged 23, and was prepared to offload Jordan Henderson when he was 22.) Rodgers was constantly pushing for more experience.
By the end this was probably more understandable, as he could no doubt sense he was running out of time, and needed results right away – but that’s the problem with allowing managers too much influence over the buying, when their aims are short-term.
The received wisdom that you ‘win nothing with kids’ stood strong even in 1996, when Alan Hansen made that famous remark, because half that Man United team was comprised of older pros, most of whom were top-class. But Klopp achieved success in Germany with a ludicrously young team. I know that Ajax have done the same in recent years, but the Dutch league is perennially robbed of most of its best players once they mature, leaving a surfeit of kids. It’s not the strongest league. By contrast, although the Bundesliga doesn’t have a lot of “mega clubs”, it’s certainly a top-class competition.
If young players really is where the hunger is at, and also where there’s the best value (which is clearly true), then Klopp seems a much better fit for the club than Rodgers. This is something that I don’t think has cropped up much, if at all, in the assessments of why Liverpool would replace Rodgers with Klopp. (Of course, it may be that Rodgers is ultimately proved right, and that he ends up looking a better manager with hindsight; but the German’s ideas seem more interesting, and more appropriate, and he seems to have the ability to implement a clear philosophy.)
Of Liverpool’s “elder” trio of Lucas (28), Milner (29) and Skrtel (30), only the Brazilian midfielder played well at Spurs (and how refreshing was it to see Lucas walking off at the full-time whistle discussing tactics with Klopp; again, a point I made in my last article was how, in hindsight, Rodgers seemed fairly passive on the sidelines.)
Milner and Skrtel were two of perhaps only three players who were poor, with the other being Coutinho (who worked hard but didn’t use the ball as well as he can). This means little as it’s just one game, but perhaps experience is an overrated commodity – at least to a manager like Klopp.
While Klopp was almost resigned to picking the only eleven fit senior players, he may actually have a much harder time selecting his side when everyone is fit. It’s obviously a nicer problem to have – too many players to select, rather than too few. But how will he work Benteke, Sturridge and Firmino into the XI? And that’s without considering Jordan Henderson. (The good news is that he’ll find the best solution without fear of upsetting those he leaves out, and without any possible ulterior motives.)
Henderson runs as much as Milner, but has a lot more quality. The former Sunderland man grew into what was expected at Liverpool, having arrived aged 20, and yet you’d think Milner, with all his experience, would make a smoother transition. Milner has been no better than Henderson was four years ago as a slightly overawed rookie burdened with what seemed like an excessive price tag, and possibly worse. As I’ve said before, based on this evidence, if Milner was foreign people would say that he needs time to adapt to the Premier League, or even that he’s not suited to it.
Driving force
As with any manager, poor results could erode Klopp’s authority, but right now he is the absolute master of his domain (and no, that’s not a Seinfeld reference). What he says goes.
I love that he berated Jordon Ibe for being too slow to get ready as a late sub – it baffles the hell out of me why subs aren’t already prepared, as they should be eager to enter the fray. Once on, Ibe was sufficiently lively. To paraphrase football parlance, the rocket was well-and-truly (metaphorically) thrust up his posterior.
It’s vital that Klopp removes all sense of cruising in comfort zones from players, in a league where they are often overpaid and get complacent. Wives and girlfriends have been barred from Melwood, and there’s talk of extra training sessions, with days off cancelled. Not as punishment, just as an extra level of professionalism.
His demands on the players seems reminiscent of what Diego Simeone has done in Spain, and while it will be much harder to win the title over here given the greater number of richer clubs, both Dortmund and Atletico are the touchstones to recent overachievements on a limited budget. Harder running and clever set-pieces are ways to eke more out of the resources.
It also remains to be seen how this works with the furious pace and scheduling of the Premier League and three cup competitions, and whether it leads to an excess of injuries. However, as I noted in a recent piece, most footballers, while in far better shape than 30 years ago, aren’t as fit as as top athletes. There’s room for improvement.
If Klopp can get the players fitter, and make them press harder and for longer, then the quality should show through. I like the idea of teams dreading playing Liverpool, because the Reds work ludicrously hard and have quality on the ball. If Liverpool can stop being a soft touch, we might end up getting somewhere.0 -
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Magico Gonzalez wrote: »Lallana looked totally spent after the game, he's going to have a hard time with this system which demands so much running.............
Be grand, he has until Thurs to recover, squad game and if Lallana is playing than you'd imagine either Firmino, Ibe or Allen aren't so he shouldn't be playing too many 90 mins games in quick succession. As well as nice touches there's goals in Lallana imo.
The upcoming two games will be interesting from a squad utilisation point of view, Sturridge will be appearing on Thursday I expect, hopefully alongside Origi.... if Coutinho is rested than Lallana might be seen as a #10 so maybe a little less running for him.
Really looking forward to Thurs' game 0 -
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One pundit made a great point at the weekend highlighting the level of expectation at Liverpool.
Liverpool - manager sacked after 8 games, having a bad start - 13 points
Tottenham - in a run of good form - 14 points............
I think we need to be mindful of that (it was 12 points though not 13 ), performances were quite bad but at times there were positive signs, also that 8 included Arsenal, Man Utd, Everton (away) and a form team of West Ham.
Slow and steady improvements in performances as the players become accustomed to Klopp's expectations are fine imo, all going well we'll creep consistently closer to 2ppg (no doubt with a bump in the road along the way).
We were 3 points off Top4 when Klopp came in but a few teams between us and 4th, need a month or two for the dust to settle (or unsettle I suppose) to see where we are. We might well go on a very good run of results too and rocket back up the table I'd never discount that with the firepower in the squad if their fit and available. 0 -
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I think we need to be mindful of that (it was 12 points though not 13 ), performances were quite bad but at times there were positive signs, also that 8 included Arsenal, Man Utd, Everton (away) and a form team of West Ham.
Slow and steady improvements in performances as the players become accustomed to Klopp's expectations are fine imo, all going well we'll creep consistently closer to 2ppg (no doubt with a bump in the road along the way).
We were 3 points off Top4 when Klopp came in but a few teams between us and 4th, need a month or two for the dust to settle (or unsettle I suppose) to see where we are. We might well go on a very good run of results too and rocket back up the table I'd never discount that with the firepower in the squad if their fit and available.
I was referring to the current standing in the table.
I agree some very tough games out of the way and by the end of next month we will have played each of the Top 5 of last season away plus trips to Stoke and Everton out of the way.
There are no easy games in this league and that has never rung more true than this season, however with the quality I believe we have we should be able to put together a challenge for Top 4 in the 2nd half of the season.
I'm damn excited I tell ya.0 -
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