Stephen Hii

Darwin Núñez On Track To Be World-Class Striker By Paul Tomkins

2022-07-23T08:05:00.003+08:00

https://tomkinstimes.com/2022/07/darwin-nunez-on-track-to-be-world-class-striker/

By Paul Tomkins

July 22, 2022In By Paul Tomkins, Free, Player In Focus, Transfer Debate

I don’t spend enough time on social media these days to even be aware, until yesterday, that there was some kind of lowlights video of a blister-strewn Darwin Núñez’s first two very brief cameos in an unfamiliar, under-strength, undercooked preseason Liverpool side, but it sounds like the kind of dickish thing you’d expect to exist.

Preseason is not about results, but obviously signs of encouragement are always welcome.

Most players in their careers will have more lowlights than highlights. You could make a compilation of Thiago Alcântara giving the ball away cheaply, even though he is the best passer in the Premier League. This, after all, the age of out-of-context snark.

The majority of shots do not result in goals; plenty go off target. Strikers often lose possession. And penetrative passes are hard to pull off. (Albeit the purveyors of these compilation clips are surely less well-versed in the penetrative arts but world-class experts in pulling off).

To miss a chance – even a sitter – is normal. To miscontrol a ball is normal. To score four goals as a sub, against a top German side, is not normal.

It doesn’t mean Núñez will now score 50 goals this season, but it bodes well; as does Mo Salah, so sharp in the first half, giving him the penalty duty to help break his duck. Had Núñez not scored any, it still wouldn’t have meant there was trouble ahead, as even now players are working hard at their fitness, and playing the games themselves when half-knackered.

RB Leipzig gradually weakened their XI while Núñez was on (especially after his second goal), but Liverpool also sent on a few teenagers. Those teenagers happened to play lovely football, and again, that bodes well.

Harvey Elliott remains a gem, Fabio Carvalho is like a faster, harder-pressing young Philippe Coutinho, and Stefan Bajcetic has looked a thoroughbred to me in the youth team these past 18 months, but at 17 I didn’t expect him to be making waves yet in the senior side, even if he’s a fairly strong and decent-sized kid; it’s almost always a position for stronger, older players, but he is such a good all-round player that he could genuinely be Fabinho’s heir apparent (albeit he is still clearly a kid, who hasn’t quite filled out yet). All three kids contributed to Núñez’s goals, with Carvalho and Elliott assisting, and Bajcetic’s clever high-pressing a key part of the hat-trick goal.

The leaps and bounds made by Núñez in his short career are indicative of a player hungry to learn, who works hard and takes his job seriously. That kind of attitude means further growth is likely, especially when moving to a better team. He moves, he takes a little time to settle, then he explodes.

He has to handle the pressure of the club’s history and the transfer fee, but he seems to have the right mentality. As such, a barren preseason would only ramp up the pressure piled on by dickheads, so to score four in one half will surely put him more at ease; even if there’s nothing quite like scoring your first proper goal, as Peter Crouch found, a whopping 24 hours into his pitch-time as a Liverpool player, in his 19th game.

Crouch’s second arrived mere minutes later (albeit the first was then changed to an own goal), and the long goalless streak was not indicative of a player who, while never prolific (his aim was to link aerially and on the deck), scored at a healthy rate of better than one every three games thereafter (and closer to one-in-two given that his 42 goals came in just 93 starts, with 40 from 77 after those first two goals, against Wigan in December 2005. He left to start more regularly, which was a shame.)

Go back just under a decade and another new Liverpool striker scored freely in preseason, then became a flop. But Iago Aspas, who struggled to adapt to life in England and wasn’t selected much in 2013/14 because of the undroppable nature of Luis Suárez and Daniel Sturridge (and perhaps Brendan Rodgers not actually wanting him), has subsequently scored 120+ in La Liga for unfashionable Celta Vigo, as well at a one-in-three rate for Spain; suggesting that, along with his leadership skills and work-rate, that he was a terrific player for whom the timing wasn’t right.

Two decades ago, El Hadji-Diouf started with two early goals, but his attitude stank, and he quickly tanked. Three decades ago, Nigel Clough started with two early goals, but he wasn’t what Liverpool needed. Fast starts don’t mean too much; the late Besian Idrizaj, then a teenager, scored a preseason hat-trick by the 27th minute in 2007, but it was against lowly Wrexham.

That same preseason, new buy Fernando Torres scored only one goal, against Shanghai Shenhua, and missed a penalty against Portsmouth.

Torres scored just three league goals for the Reds by the start of October, but kicked up a gear after a hat-trick against Reading in the League Cup. Even then, he still had only six league goals as of a few days before Christmas (and 12 in all competitions, with three of them in the Champions League). Having missed a preseason penalty against Portsmouth, he scored two against them on December 22nd, to hit top gear. After that brace, in the second half of the season he tripled his tallies, to end the season with 24 in the league, and 33 in all competitions.

Torres hit top gear aged 22/23, and prior to the age of 22, Alan Shearer was not very prolific at all, while Thierry Henry was a goal-shy winger at the same stage. Torres was an icon at Atlético (but 13 was his top non-penalty league tally), and Henry was a World Cup winner, but like Shearer, both only became elite world-class players around the age of 22. It has thus always struck me as the coming-of-age stage for a certain type of striker.

Players mature and thrive at different rates, but they were three of the very best, and all of a similar physique: 6’0″-6’2″, and expected to do all kinds of things as a central striker beyond score goals.

Small young sprinters used to blossom earlier, but the all-round centre-forwards often seem to come of age at 22/23. And even wide players of a similar stature can follow the same path.

Even Cristiano Ronaldo, a skinny clever winger as a teen, only hit double figures in the league for the first time in 2006/07, when aged 21-22, and in the process doubled his previous best. A year later he hit 31 in the league. Gareth Bale, not a centre-forward but another with the pace and 6’1″ physique, exploded in 2012/13, from a career best of nine league goals aged 22, to 21 when aged 23 – not too dissimilar to Ronaldo, whom he soon joined at Real Madrid.

Aged 22, Robert Lewandowski, in his first season in a big league, scored just nine goals in his debut campaign with Jürgen Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund, in 43 games. Not exactly a world-beater on that evidence. Yet aged 23, he scored 30, and since then was never below 25, and reached as high as 55, before moving to Barcelona this summer, aged 33. He’s another who is of a similar physique to Núñez, and plays a vaguely similar way.

Núñez reminds me most of Torres. The later had slightly better control, but was maybe not as good in the air. If Núñez gets to be 80% as good as peak Torres, that’s a win; 70% as good as peak Lewandowski would also be a win.

A lot has been made of Sadio Mané leaving, but even he made a massive impact back in 2016/17 with just 13 goals; a tally he’d go on to at least double on a couple of occasions. By contrast, Mo Salah – in his mid-20s when things kicked into gear for him – started with 44 goals in his debut season, and hasn’t got within a dozen of that since.

But who cares? His least prolific season saw the Reds win the league, and Núñez’s job is not to outscore Salah or anyone else: it’s to help Liverpool win games. Do that enough and you win the major trophies.

Goals or no goals, Núñez’s pace, work-rate and height will cause opposition defences problems, and by being a nuisance he will open up space for Salah, Luis Díaz, Diogo Jota and the not-to-be-written-off Roberto Firmino; just as the close marking they will require will free up space for Núñez.

Firmino played all 38 games when the Reds won the title, yet only scored at a one-in-four rate. But again, who cares, as Liverpool won a crazy 32 of those games. The team was peaking in 2019/20, but none of the strikers had their most prolific season. The team was as beautifully balanced as it could get.

If a striker just stood there, like some did in the old days (or Ronaldo now, aged 37), to do nothing other than poach, then yes, you’d judge him on his goals’ record. But that’s an outdated notion, given how few now do that, beyond someone too famous to be told otherwise.

A striker who creates the space for the team to score four goals is better than one who does nothing but bag one for himself. It’s even worse if he’s so famous and such an overbearing personality that he has to be constantly fed chances, only for the team to score markedly fewer goals, and win markedly fewer points.

Núñez will of course be judged on his goals by outsiders, but his pace, zest and relative youthfulness can force defences back, and his height allows him to challenge for headers in the box in a way that Liverpool haven’t had for years (i.e. heading at goal when challenging a big defender, not just when finding space to get on the end of what often has to be a perfect cross, which was all Mané and Jota could rely on). He can cause chaos, and goals for the team can flow from that.

While more technically adroit than Núñez, peak Firmino was a player you had to watch (and watch closely), rather than fixate on goals’ columns. If you spoke only about Firmino in terms of his goal output it was like admitting that you don’t really understand football; akin to asking “who is Max Martin?” when it comes to writing hit singles, because you’ve never heard of him.

Firmino has never been express-rapid, but a lot of his best work was a form of magic, invisible to the metric-counters: to vacate the box at just the right moment; to dummy the ball to allow Salah or Mané in on goal; to make a decoy run, and disrupt; to drag a defender or two into no-man’s land.

Núñez is faster, taller, and seems to be a better finisher than Firmino based on the last 18 months of improvement, but his initial gift could be about creating more space for Salah, or pulling into Diaz’s zone so that Diaz can switch inside.

It could be all the goals Klopp loves from counterpressing, by harrying the opposition into mistakes: the corners won by chasing a lost cause that Núñez might not be the one to directly convert, but Virgil van Dijk, Ibrahima Konaté and Joel Matip might. It could be from winning headers from long clearances, that no Liverpool striker will have done much in the past half-dozen years, and turning high, overhit crosses that others cannot reach into chances via knock-downs.

Firmino – always a fit professional – could be reborn, with a possible chance to start the season in the XI as Núñez continues to settle, and then, at worst, the Brazilian could be a key man to bring on as one of five subs, given that he can be a defensive forward or an attacking midfielder or fourth striker on the pitch, depending on the game state (and able to switch between the two roles, to balance the needs of the team). While not an impact sub per se, Firmino is the one who can change a game in the greatest number of ways.

Encouragingly, both Firmino and Salah look sharp in preseason, and won’t even be at peak fitness yet. Firmino has no goals, but again, you don’t judge him on goals. (If he scored zero in a season that could be a problem, but again, it’s about winning 30+ league games and going deep in Europe, and that happens with him on the pitch, it’s a sign of success.)

One area where Núñez will have less scope to score 5-8 further goals – the kind that can skew perceptions to a reasonable degree – is penalties, unless Salah is off the field, as he won’t be as beautifully generous during the season (unless Núñez is really under pressure and needs a goal, and the game is already as good as won). Fabinho is possibly the club’s best penalty taker, but Núñez is like Salah in being excellent too. As such, Núñez will probably now be the 2nd-taker, after Salah.

On Núñez, I like how, from all situations, he aims for the corners – a proper finisher’s approach. He’s not a hit-and-hope merchant who just blasts centrally and hopes to blitz the keeper. Three of his four goals against RBL were into the corners, and the fourth was intended to be, but the keeper helped it on its way.

The second was interesting as he gave himself the cut-across angle by taking the ball more to his right, to swing it back across his body. This is classic centre-forward play – the touch slightly away from goal, in order to whip it back with a swivel.

The third was more like classic Ian Rush, sliding in to divert a cross not straight ahead (and at the keeper), but to try and put a 45º angle on it, so as to again aim for the corner. There’s risk in this, in that it can easily be diverted wide, but it’s almost like Joe Root playing a shot to third man, just cutely enough to avoid the slips.

A low-quality (or maybe low-confidence) striker would have just slid in and tried to bundle the ball “through” the keeper, but Núñez went for the “finisher’s finish”. However, in order to open his Liverpool account from the spot, he went for power and some placement, rather than some power and full placement: a safer option, when the pressure is felt. It wasn’t quite fully in the corner, but it was a full-blooded shot.

I had previously noticed with his penalties for Benfica, when he was obviously relaxed and the main man in the team, that most almost skimmed the inside of the post, such was the placement. He did a wrong-footing shuffle, then arrowed them low and firm, side-footed, right into the bottom corner.

So for all his pace and power, I see a finesse to his finishing, even if his touch is not Firminoesque in its silkiness, and even if he doesn’t have Mané’s wonderful skill. (Then again, Mané never scored four in a game, let alone a half of football.)

These are all good signs, even if the pressure won’t abate on the new no.27 until he scores in proper games, and it will reappear during any droughts. He has a hefty price tag to justify, but he’s capable of doing so, even with dickheads making life harder, in the age of laughing at people much more talented.

Even if he scores just 10-15 goals, if Liverpool win major honours, then Núñez will be a success.

Paul Tomkins

The creator of this website; author of several books on Liverpool FC, and of one novel. Co-creator of The Transfer Price Index (TPI). Columnist on the official Liverpool FC website between 2005-2010. International man of mystery. Possibly bald.More by Paul Tomkins

The Cynic Never Fails, Never Cries, As He Never Loves, Never Tries by Paul Tomkins

2022-05-29T06:23:00.003+08:00

https://tomkinstimes.com/2022/05/the-cynic-never-fails-never-cries-as-he-never-loves-never-tries/

By Paul Tomkins

May 28, 2022In By Paul Tomkins, Free

You may have heard the following maxims before. Better to have loved and lost than never loved at all. Arriving is not the best part of a fantastic journey. The chase is better than the kill. And so on.

Better to have reached finals and been within touching distance of the title than to, I don’t know, get knocked out early or finish 16th. Spare me your giggling gifs, as really, people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones (and if you were battling relegation or mired in mediocrity, you probably won’t hit anything anyway.)

Better to have a chance of the title in the second half of the final game of the season than to not even be on the ride; to sneer and say that only idiots subject themselves to such high drama and tension. Better to be in the Champions League final than to watch it hoping a rival loses.

The week leading up to a final is something special, to savour. Beaten finalist hurts, but it’s better than beaten semi-finalist, beaten quarter-finalist. Better than not-even-qualified.

I sat down before the game today to write this piece, in case the worst happened. (It did, and I feel dejected – but it won’t last.)

Obviously I didn’t expect Liverpool to dominate to such an incredible degree, and to lose to a Real Madrid side who rode their luck and whose best player, by far, was their keeper. The save from Mo Salah in the second half was ridiculous. That’s football, that’s life. The policing and organisation was a disgrace, but those who were there will talk more about that.

Anyway, you may not want to read this now (or at all), and prefer to retreat to a darkened cave. But a final defeat should not obscure how amazing this team is, and how superb this season has been; especially a defeat so unmerited. I wanted to create something that would transcend the post-match fog. Sometimes sport is unfair, and that’s all part of the package.

I’ve only been to two Champions League finals – Istanbul and Athens – and while the former remains one of the best two days of my life, the latter was great fun too, with a group of about ten Reds, beautiful weather, drinking and eating al fresco, and full of hope and anticipation in the Greek sunshine. Liverpool played well – actually outplaying Carlo Ancelotti’s AC Milan (after only outplaying them for six minutes in 2005) when losing 2-1 – but again, such is football.

Another cliché: you need to buy a ticket to win the lottery. This season, Liverpool bought a shit-load of lottery tickets for the fans. Basically it’s been a lottery-ticket-tastic campaign. It’s be a lottery ticket every game. No single game has been meaningless, beyond when the “group of death” was won early on the way to winning all six games, and even that set a record for an English club.

This team won 49 games this season (including shootouts). FORTY-NINE! Most clubs didn’t even play 49 games this season.

Surprisingly (to me) within hours of Manchester City winning the Premier League by a single point, I felt only pride at the Reds’ achievements, and I didn’t need to subject myself to what some gobby monobrowed ex-frontman had to say. I didn’t need to watch them – good, bad and indifferent City fans – enjoy themselves, but of course, enjoy themselves they did (albeit it’s just weird when all they do – the not-so-good ones – is focus on the defeated fans, but that’s the ‘banter loop of hell’ for you).

It struck me that, actually, I didn’t feel too bad – it didn’t hurt as much as expected, perhaps because it was only ever an outside chance on the final day.

And it struck me that it was 90 of the maddest minutes of football I could recall, in terms of a rollercoaster of emotions. And of course, that’s why people pay lots of money to ride rollercoasters: they’re fun, even if you hate the fucking things and want to get off ASAP; afterwards, the thrill remains. In those moments, life feels real.

Losing is part of life.

My favourite quote for life is from the Stoic philosopher Seneca:

We suffer more in imagination than in reality

With a few exceptions (being mangled alive in some horrific machining accident, having Roy Hodgson as your manager), it rings true.

Losing hurts, but rarely as badly as you expect, at least once the initial sting wears off. It hurts like hell but then, in contrast to a loved one dying or a long-term relationship ending (or even a beloved pet needing to be put to sleep), it passes quickly.

There’s always another season, another game, another win, just around the corner. Other big chances to win trophies, too, if you’re lucky.

(I’m feeling pretty raw as I reread this and get ready to publish it, but when the opposition keeper is the man of the match, it’s hard to be too crucial about anything.)

Of course, you can make it worse if you’ve been a dick all season on social media and people are now coming back to haunt you; or, if just unlucky, you run into the cockwombles, online and in the streets or pubs, from other clubs, whose fans go out looking for innocent Reds to abuse and mock.

For all those who mock Liverpool losing, this is far better than the chloroformic pall of dead seasons, over by January, sleepwalking until May when some weirdos will then focus on winning the transfer window (if they haven’t since the January one slammed shut).

Few seasons are this exciting, this much fun. Few will be as memorable.

Great teams are often remembered more than who won what when.

Holland 1974, 1978. Hungary 1954. Brazil 1982. Dortmund 2013, even, and Spurs 2019 – certainly more memorable than the Juande Ramos-won trophy of 2008. England in 1990, which, with Gazza’s tears in the Italian summer, has been mythologised. (I can’t say I’ll remember much about recent England performances as I stopped watching years ago.)

The best Liverpool teams of since I first went to a game in 1990 are the 1995/96 team, who won nothing the season after the 1994/95 team won a cup – but Roy Evans’ team was so exciting a year later; Gérard Houllier’s 2001/02 team was probably better balanced than the treble-winning team of 2000/01. The 2008/09 team was better than either of Rafa Benítez’s sides that reached the Champions League final. The chaotic brilliance of 2013/14, with Luis Suárez settled and unstoppable, was better than the cup-winning team of 2012, albeit it almost completed a memorable cup double.

Yet it would be wrong to define this team by its narrow failures, or to call it one of the best teams to never win certain things.

Indeed, this is a Liverpool team (with just a few altered faces) who have won the Champions League, the Premier League, the FA Cup, the League Cup, the World Club championship and the European Super Cup. It’s greatness is secured in those successes and moreover, the football played, the points tallies racked up in the league, the runs to major finals, the beautiful ride, the joyous journey. It all goes into the mix.

If you’re going to laugh, then did your team beat the Italian champions of last season and the Italian champions of this season? The Spanish champions of last season? Chelsea in two cup finals? Your local rivals 6-1 on aggregate and your historical rivals 9-0 on aggregate?

Did your team post 92 points whilst reaching a Champions League final, having got 97 in 2019 (when I first worked it out), which at the time made them the only team in England (and Europe’s top five leagues, I’ve since been told) to get over 90 points when reaching the European Cup final? No other team has done that, and now Liverpool have done it twice, whilst rising to be the #1 ranked team on the reliable Club Elo Index.

And did your team achieve whatever it achieved without petrodollar doping, or dodgy inflated financial deals?

If you love your club and enjoyed your team’s season, great. That’s your prerogative. If escaping relegation was better to you than being in the Champions League final, that’s your call (you just clearly wouldn’t know how the latter felt).

But don’t pity Liverpool fans. We’ve had an absolute blast, believe me. (Apart from some of the very-online ones who think that Liverpool would have won the quadruple if only more of this or that had been done.)

We got to watch Thiago, Virgil van Dijk, Mo Salah, Sadio Mané, Luis Díaz, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Diogo Jota, Fabinho, Bobby Firmino, Joël Matip and Naby Keïta: players in their positions with unique skills, wide-ranging brilliance and ongoing potential. We got to watch Alisson make incredible saves (as well as score the goal that put the club into the Champions League this season to start with).

We got to watch Jordan Henderson, Andy Robertson, Ibrahima Konaté, James Milner, Kostas Tsimikas, Joe Gomez, Divock Origi, Harvey Elliott, Curtis Jones, Takumi Minamino, Caoimhín Kelleher and others who, though still talented, drove on game after game, in many cases when coming in from the cold, to fill in, before time back on the bench. Some are not as gifted as the first group of players, but also, this group contains the two main leaders, as well as talented backups and youngsters on the rise. We got to see Tsimikas celebrate goals from the bench as if he’d been on the Kop for 40 years.

(Plus, how good was Konaté tonight? So unlucky to be on the losing side.)

If you enjoyed your team’s players more, that’s great – that’s what the game’s there for. But we can find no one to fault in this squad, lest we be looking to piss and moan. (No team is perfect; no player is perfect. But you rarely get this lucky. I mean, how many clubs’ 7th-choice striker got 10 goals this season?)

American sports analyst, author, podcaster, and sports writer Bill Simmons, writing a few years ago, summed up how I felt this week, when the joys of success were still a possibility:

“Then I remembered something. Sports is a metaphor for life. Everything is black and white on the surface. You win, you lose, you laugh, you cry, you cheer, you boo, and most of all, you care.
“Lurking underneath that surface, that’s where all the good stuff is — the memories, the connections, the love, the fans, the layers that make sports what they are.
“It’s not about watching your team win the Cup as much as that moment when you wake up thinking, ‘In 12 hours, I might watch my team win the Cup’. It’s about sitting in the same chair for Game 5 because that chair worked for you in Game 3 and Game 4, and somehow, this has to mean something.
“It’s about leaning out of a window to yell at people wearing the same jersey as you, and it’s about noticing an airport security guy staring at your Celtics jersey and knowing he’ll say, ‘You think they win tonight?’ before he does.”

And hell, he’s not even writing about football.

Most of us on this site are old enough to have lived throughout the entire fallow period that began in 1990, albeit even then, there were highs along the way, as discussed, up until the 2018 overdrive.

(While we welcome young subscribers, the site is not exactly full of TikTok videos, bantz and skilz. For instance, we still use esses at the end of words.)

Some on this site started watching Liverpool in the early Bill Shankly years, in the second tier, a club drifting when the Scot arrived. A handful of our subscribers even predate Shanks, albeit like WWII veterans, that generation cannot go on forever.

We’re not always right in what we say, but there’s wisdom here, in this crowd. We know an amazing team when we see it. Maybe some young fans or new fans are too unaware of the dark days; indeed, dark decades.

On here, we know that the cynic never loves. He never allows himself to. He – and his ilk – takes to his basement, and tells the world that all women are evil, and that the true way to be a man is to post mean memes online. (Not that all incels are equally sad and troubling, and being alone and feeling unlovable is not a nice feeling – albeit not one the world needs projecting outward in bitter ways; just as online trolls, in general, reveal their own sense of “lack”, and as such, are best ignored.)

The cynic never falls off the bike, as the cynic never rides the bike. He’ll never get back on the horse, as he wasn’t even on the horse in the first place.

As Theodore Roosevelt said more than a century ago:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Savour it, friends, as this is a rare frequency of forays to this final. It happened once before for Liverpool, 1977-1985. Then there were the two finals, 2005-2007, before more drought.

Now it’s three in five seasons, 2018, 2019 and 2022 (with Covid not helping to keep that streak even hotter.) If a generation is 20 years, then this isn’t even a generational richness; it skipped a generation. And that previous time was the first in the club’s history, albeit beginning one full generation (22 years) after the European Cup/Champions League became a thing.

Some clubs are lucky if they make it to one Champions League final, even with spending that’s literally off the charts (PSG, Manchester City). They stack the deck, and they still can’t do it. If their fans are happy, then all power to them. But they have no right to laugh at us; nor should we fear such laughter. They don’t get to be us.

For now, this sucks. It stings. We feel bruised.

Yet it will pass, sooner than expected. Life will move on, and football will begin again, because the football never ends.

Jürgen Klopp and his team will get back on their horses, as these are winners – winners of more games this season than in any in the club’s history, winners of every trophy going since 2019 – who will sometimes stumble, but will remount and, starting at dawn, ride, ride again.

Paul Tomkins

Finest of Teams – Klopp’s Liverpool – Lose Title By Finest Of Margins by Paul Tomkins

2022-05-24T14:29:00.004+08:00

https://tomkinstimes.com/2022/05/finest-of-teams-klopps-liverpool-lose-title-by-finest-of-margins/

By Paul Tomkins

May 22, 2022In By Paul Tomkins, Free

Club Elo rankings going into the final Premier League game today:

1 Liverpool 2,043

2 Man City 2,023

With the results meaning that Liverpool will still be ranked the best team in Europe (having beaten a higher-ranked side than Aston Villa today), and therefore the world.

Small consolation, of course, but vital context. Congratulations to those at City who merit it.

So, 358 points for Man City since the start of 2018, 357 for Liverpool, on a much lesser budget, with three Champions League finals thrown in (and the chance to win a second). No plastic flags, no tacky flamethrowers, no staged atmosphere, no sportswashing.

In the week, Barney Ronay of the Guardian, summed up a more-or-less invisible gap between the sides:

“Let’s face it, despite our best attempts to find clear air between them, these are two remarkably well-matched modern juggernauts. Both managers have claimed to be underdogs in recent weeks: Pep Guardiola because everyone supports Liverpool (narrator: everyone doesn’t support Liverpool); Klopp because of having to play so many games in all these damn tournaments we keep winning.”

For City to have such a bigger wage bill and much costlier squad cost (even more so when adjusted for football inflation), and to reach only a third of the Champions League finals, is a bit of a damning indictment of City, but only when compared to Liverpool.

Compared to everyone else, City are obviously exceptional; but their spending a ton of money cleverly, and being managed by a world-class coach, is difficult to overcome, even if other clubs, like Manchester United (and more recently, Everton), spend a ton of money stupidly.

In terms of finances, Liverpool are a super-middleweight and City are a bona fide heavyweight. Pep Guardiola is an absolutely elite manager, and he has a huge war-chest. It’s testament to Jürgen Klopp and the backroom staff at Liverpool that the gap is so minimal (albeit the two domestic cups won this season were also a case of fine margins; some you win, some you lose).

As TTT stalwart Andrew Beasley wrote in the Liverpool Echo this week, working with the inflation model I created with Graeme Riley in 2010, “It says everything for the Reds’ achievement in running the Premier League title race so close, no matter what happens on Sunday, that Manchester City have only once fielded a team which cost less than Liverpool’s most expensive XI.”

City had no games cancelled for Covid, and their injury crises seemed to be a couple of defenders “out for the season” a couple of weeks ago, who were then fit again anyway. As luck would have it, they faced an Aston Villa side likely to tire late on, having played on Thursday. That’s life.

Liverpool’s fortunes turned on a nightmare three winter games with Covid absentees that perhaps cost the title (particularly away at Spurs, allied to the truly horrific officiating in that game). Then there was that lack of a penalty that Everton got an apology for, but where a late spot-kick could have seen City drop two points (although I still think Everton would have found a way to miss it, but in general, 80% are scored). It remains a scarcely believable decision that took the mounting pressure off City. I mean, it only hit Rodri’s lower arm.

(And as much as I rate Michael Oliver, he has just again made a mockery of time-added-on, as do most refs. Time-wasting is the way to go, then; even if City were likely to just retain possession anyway. Actual time-accountancy should be paramount, not just making it up, and then blowing early. But hey ho.)

Rodri’s handball didn’t matter in the relegation race in the end, but it did in the title race (even if we can’t say all results would then have followed as identically as they did, with cause and effect at play, but you can say that a last-minute penalty is a game-changing event, if converted). Plus, the early red card West Ham should have had in the Reds’ first defeat of the season proved another costly mistake by what is often the same group of officials.

Then there’s Liverpool not being able to run up a cricket score against Brighton as the keeper wasn’t sent off for about as blatant a red card as you can expect to see, when he leapt into the air to hit Luis Díaz in the face with (just) his hand and knee. That surely would have helped the Reds’ goal difference, albeit it wasn’t an issue by the 38th game, but might have heaped a bit more pressure on City at the time.

Unlike one or two recent campaigns, it didn’t feel like a season of constant officiating blunders against Liverpool, but there were some big ones that went against the team at key moments in games and at pivotal points of the season. All that said, for once Liverpool rank near the top for penalties won, so that’s progress of sorts.

But even so, Liverpool will yet again (as with every single season under Klopp, and as was the case under Rafa Benítez) rank lower on penalties won than on league position (when for Brendan Rodgers it was always the opposite: ranked higher in penalties won than league position).

Despite putting up attacking numbers that are off the charts, Liverpool have still won fewer penalties than Man City and Chelsea, and the same as Crystal Palace. At least Liverpool are not ranking mid-table for penalties won, as has often been the case in recent years; ranking 3rd is progress, but still not great when finishing 2nd.

Liverpool also had three first-team players go to AFCON right after the three-game “slump” (two draws and a defeat in a mad run of three away games: Spurs, Leicester, Chelsea), two of them key players. This was always likely to be the case. Again, that’s unfortunate, but also part of the drawback of signing African players; yet signing Mo Salah and Sadio Mané, both of whom scored again today, has been a massive success overall.

While the Reds excelled without them, Salah returned jaded (or lacking confidence), after several periods of extra-time in the African heat. Jürgen Klopp’s men then also played every possible cup game this season (one to go), to make for a monumental season. The possibility of the quadruple, while always unlikely, was taken 21 days further than any English team had previously managed. That is a staggering achievement (albeit not all achievements are measured in silver). But maybe it also added to the mental burden; the talk of quadruples tiresome and tiring.

Thankfully Luis Díaz made a startling impact upon his arrival at the start of February, as the Reds again showed the value of adding quality rather than quantity (so as to make it easier to integrate). What a joy he’s been. Ibrahima Konaté, still unbeaten, took time to adapt during a promising start, but by the run-in looked increasingly assured; at least until today, when some nerves got to the young Frenchman – albeit he recovered well, and is surely the best young centre-back in the world right now (and 22 is still pretty young for the role).

The early season defending was an issue, but one that was a hangover from the injuries of last season. As such, Konaté wasn’t the solution, as he had only just arrived – and needed time to settle.

When I recently analysed certain defensive metrics for Virgil van Dijk, he was relatively mediocre in the first 15-or-so games. Indeed, as the most consistent elite defender on these metrics since 2016 (every season his figures were almost identical), his figures were suddenly those of a merely average stopper, way below his normal numbers.

Since game 15, based on the metrics I was combining, he’s been the best in the Premier League. Liverpool had enough to get past Wolves today without him (as they did in midweek), but a sharper van Dijk earlier in the season would have helped.

And while last season was not just about van Dijk’s injury, given that Liverpool were down to their 7th and 8th choice centre-backs (and were still top two months after his injury, before the others also got crocked), obviously an elite-form van Dijk remains the best on the planet.

Indeed, even at 30, there are signs that he’s every bit as good as his best at 27, with his form in the months of 2022 generally his best in England on the metrics I covered. The recovery pace was clearly back in 2022, when it wasn’t necessarily present in the autumn of 2021, especially after – crucially – missing the early part of preseason. He was playing catch-up early in the campaign, and the Reds maybe shipped a few too many goals at that point.

(More about van Dijk’s resurgence, amongst many other things, in the new Liverpool FC book I’m writing – which I started in January, when the season looked to be falling apart, the Reds well adrift in the league to the point where I called it City’s title. The research for the book I was supposed to be writing has been collated for a few years, yet the more interesting this season got, the more focus had to go on that. When the book is released and the final emphasis is obviously dependent on what happens in Paris, but it should prove interesting either way. TTT subscribers can still preorder the special edition of the book.)

Thinking back, Liverpool started the season with great attacking gusto but not quite the right balance, with a new attacking emphasis in midfield (more of a 1-2 midfield, instead of a 2-1), and the defenders taking time to get up to their old speeds after injury. It took a bit of getting used to. The football felt more gung-ho than it had at any point since Klopp’s early days: great fun, but a slightly vulnerable centre.

Indeed, that was how today’s game was, until – yet again – that weird atmosphere descended when the entire stadium started celebrating and the Reds, playing Wolves as they had in 2019 when it also happened, suddenly went from all-out attack to nervous (that day was the weirdest I’ve ever experienced Anfield). It must be very odd for the players, as they usually garner crowd reactions from their own play. Almost instantly it lifted Wolves, and confused Liverpool, who seemed to think “do we still attack?” having just been having about 15 attacks per minute.

At no point did the Reds go 2-1 up while City were behind or level, and so, it was different to 2019 in that sense; but then, as now, I would always expect a top team, when going behind early at home in a title-decider, to come back, and the away team to eventually wilt.

I expected it of City today at 1-0, although at 2-0 it felt like City (as at West Ham) were then more likely to draw than win. Of course, Wolves did the same: early goal, then lost 3-1 at Anfield. If Wolves had gone 2-0 up early enough today, I feel that Liverpool would have likely won 3-2.

(It’s hard in these circumstances, but it feels like the later goals are scored against the favourite, the better. Scoring too early allows pressure to build as the underdog sits back, and the pace of modern football can make for relentless attacking.)

Back in the autumn, Harvey Elliott was excelling until he got his ankle and leg broken; the balance on the right side rather beautiful up to that point, with Mo Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold benefiting from the young midfielder’s vision and tenacity, playing in glorious triangles, and the Londoner bringing fresh energy to the team.

Thiago Alcântara then missed all of October (and was not fit enough to start in November in the defeat at West Ham), and then was out again from mid-December through to February, and thus the mini Christmas/New Year slump.

In some ways it perhaps left him fresher for the run-in, but his control was missed in midfield. Having to play away at a hungry and refreshed Spurs without van Dijk, Jordan Henderson, Thiago and Fabinho, amongst others – and a teenage Tyler Morton anchoring the midfield – meant that, actually, a point was a good result; but City weren’t having to play teenage rookies in their toughest away games. (Cole Palmer started one game, at home to Everton.)

And now Thiago is injured again, six days ahead of the Champions League final, with Spain giving their team a two extra days to recover.

The miracle, having been 14 points behind and still facing AFCON absentees and injuries, was to get the gap to just one point going into the final game, whilst winning both domestic cups and reaching the yet-to-be-played Champions League final. Seriously, City nearly blew it. Liverpool have been the better team in 2022, across four competitions.

City got lucky, blowing that lead and not blowing more thanks to the decision at Everton, but clearly they’ve made plenty of their own luck by being such a good team (even if the way it is funded is nauseating).

For them, the situations where they choke tend to be in Europe, at key moments. Even then, the madness of fine margins: had Jack Grealish not been denied twice in incredible circumstances in the last minute when 1-0 up (and 3-1 up on aggregate), they’d have been facing Liverpool in the final, instead of it being Real Madrid. City then threw away two quick goals, then a third; just as they did to Villa today.

You can argue that City are better than Liverpool because they won the league, but pound for pound, and spread across the Champions League as well as the Premier League, you’d have to say that Liverpool have been the better team since 2018. They have achieved more for the money spent, and played the more exciting football. (Not that City’s football is dull: I think it’s technically excellent, and can be exciting. They have an incredible squad, albeit you can’t separate that from the money it cost to assemble.)

Back in 2019, Liverpool became the first English club to reach a Champions League/European Cup final while racking up more than 90 points (38 games). This season they’ve just done it again, to become the second. It’s the third 90+ point finish in just four seasons. City fans can enjoy their success, but this also shows how amazing Liverpool are.

All this is why Liverpool are still ranked as the best team in the world right now (just ahead of City), and have been for a large chunk of 2022. City get to lift the title trophy, and that’s life; just as Kepa missing a penalty won Liverpool the League Cup.

One final thought is that this Liverpool team is almost always at its most dangerous and devastating after disappointment.

But with just six days until Paris – a nice enough turnaround time if there hadn’t already been so many games (and new injuries) – it may be hard to find the energy for one last push.

Madrid, also with a squad costing much more than Liverpool’s, should not allowed to treat the game as plucky underdogs, with more time to prepare, too.

But whatever Liverpool have left in the tank on Saturday, you’ll know they’ll give every last drop of it.

Paul Tomkins

Huge Change At Liverpool – But Michael Edwards Leaves His Hand-Picked Legacy With Julian Ward by Paul Tomkins

2021-11-12T10:02:00.004+08:00

https://tomkinstimes.com/2021/11/huge-change-at-liverpool-but-michael-edwards-leaves-his-hand-picked-legacy-with-julian-ward/

By Paul Tomkins

November 10, 2021In By Paul Tomkins, Free

Edwards to leave in summer of 2022, his protege Julian Ward to replace him. Reasons for Edwards departure explained below, along with profile of Ward.

A few weeks ago I was informed that, in need of a break after just passing his tenth year at Liverpool – and following a few hectic and stressful years that spanned the greatest imaginable successes and the utter left-field madness of a global pandemic (that made everyone’s job much harder) – Michael Edwards would be leaving at the end of the season, to be replaced by Julian Ward.

It was made clear that, currently, Edwards has no plans to go anywhere else; no taking the secret recipe to any rivals.

(I also assume he’s also not free to immediately take on another job, even after his contract expires, but I’m not entirely sure on that; but it’s not his intention at this point. However, if he is free to do so, perhaps Newcastle United, who would clearly love to have him, are not yet classed as “rivals”. Things change quickly in football.)

Liverpool were flying when the pandemic hit, and have been affected maybe more than any other club, as the team was at its very peak (in terms of age as well as brilliance), and then the sudden loss of in excess of £100m in income – and no clear end in sight – made contract renegotiations almost impossible, and slowed down transfer activity.

Given that there will be a predictable backlash, it’s worth making it clear that Edwards feels he is leaving on excellent terms with FSG, whom he knows backed him, and where there remained a complete synergy of vision. It’s not the case that they did not want to keep him on beyond the end of his current contract.

Indeed, Edwards himself believes that the “FSG way” in football was left in his hands to create; with the help of Mike Gordon, the most football-savvy of the owners, and obviously the super-smart analysts that includes Ian Graham, who also arrived a decade ago. After all, FSG are not football experts; but they found Edwards and Graham, via Damien Comolli, and then trusted Edwards to shape the way things were done.

You may dislike some of their ownership ideas, but Edwards leaving is not something that the owners can be blamed for. (Of course, they will be, as that’s the way a certain portion of the fanbase operates.)

The “Edwards way” can continue in Edwards’ absence; indeed, it has been designed to. Vital members of the brains’ trust, like Ian Graham, remain in place. The methods won’t change. The same would be true of hiring a new manager (albeit Jürgen Klopp is obviously unique, in being one of the “all-bases” managers who also have the gravitas to be taken seriously by even world-class players).

Edwards has no doubt that, in Julian Ward, he’s handing over to an ideal candidate; a man who has mirrored his own career from modest playing days and moving up through the different levels of behind-the-scenes work in scouting, analytical and personnel specialties; a man he has had shadowing him, and learning the ropes, over what will eventually be an 18-month period by the time the changeover happens. (Indeed, ward is even shared in their names. This part may be coincidental…)

Ward speaks various languages (particularly the vital languages of Spanish and Portuguese, which help not just with Spain and Portugal but all of South America), and that will help in the international world of negotiations. Jürgen Klopp is also a big fan of Ward’s from their work together over the years.

Edwards, perhaps like Peter Robinson, will go down as a rare behind-the-scenes legend; no statues will ever be built for them, but they helped lay vital foundations.

Ward can now take that, and build further impressive layers on top.

In an open letter to supporters posted on Liverpoolfc.com, Edwards said:

“To be part of this club during this period has been a privilege due to the people I have been fortunate enough to work with and the success we have enjoyed.
“I had always planned to cap my time at the club to a max of 10 years. I’ve loved working here, but I am a big believer in change. I think it’s good for the individual and, in a work setting, good for the employer, too. Over my time here we have changed so many things (hopefully for the better) but someone new brings a different perspective, new ideas and can hopefully build (or change) on the things that have been put in place beforehand.
“Julian has been building up the skill set for this role for many years. Last year, he took on the role of assistant sporting director and over the past 12 months he has been introduced to other facets of the role that are vital to its success. I believe he is ideal for the role.
“Over the coming season I will continue to support him as we complete the leadership transition.”

Plus, Jürgen Klopp said:

“I wish Michael and his wonderful family all the best, for whatever they choose to do next.
“I know he isn’t leaving immediately or in haste, which is cool, so we still have some time to work together. If we are as fortunate and blessed, as we have been so far, maybe we can create more special memories for our club in this remaining time.
“He has been a constant presence during my period at LFC and his contribution to our success is clear for everyone to see.
“I have complete trust in Mike Gordon and the wider ownership group in their vision for what comes next. Julian and I have worked closely since he became loans and pathway manager, plus even more so in his wider role during the past 12 months.
“We have so many brilliant people here, all of whom contribute to what we have achieved and I have nothing but confidence we will continue to develop, progress and improve as an organisation.”
(See link for further statements from LFC.)

Julian Ward Profile

As you can see below, Ward has an extensive and varied CV, that covers so many different areas, and ends with him shadowing Michael Edwards whilst completing a PhD in Applied Sport and Exercise Science, Talent Management Strategies in Professional Football.

Julian Ward, born in Aintree in 1981:

Played football for Morecambe between 1997 and 2001.
BSc (Honours) in Sports Science from John Moores University (1999-2002)
Became a Performance Analyst at the FA (2001-2002), delivering pre-/post-game performance analysis for England U17/U19/U20 international football teams.
Left the FA to become a Football Consultant at ProZone (2002-2003) – in the capacity to deliver opposition scouting and analysis for Preston North End.
Employed at John Moores University as Sports Scholarship Manager (2003-2005)
Started playing for Larne Football Club in Northern Ireland from 2005 till 2007.
Big Break: Became Head of Analysis and Technical Scouting for Portuguese National Team (2008-2010)
In 2010, moved to Manchester City as South American Scouting Strategist (2010-2012) – Talent identification, player recruitment and pathways for player development considered elite (Non-EU)
In 2012, moved to Liverpool FC from Manchester City. Joined as European Scouting Manager (Spain and Portugal) (2012-2015)
A new role was created for him as Loan Pathways and Football Partnerships Manager (2015-2020)
Promoted as Assistant Sporting Director in December 2020.
Doctorate in Applied Sport and Exercise Science, Talent Management Strategies in Professional Football (2018-2021)

Big Break (2009)

• Ward on his big break with the Portugal national team.

• More on Ward on his big break with the Portugal national team.

“Julian landed his dream job as part of a four-strong scouting team in July last year when Portugal manager Carlos Quieroz, the former Manchester United coach, signed him up last year after his appointment.”
“It can be a small world in football,” explains Julian.
“Someone I worked with for the England FA was appointed to a job at Manchester United and Mr Quieroz got to know about me when he was looking for a person familiar with the software and the technical programmes they used.”
“I went to the World Cup in Germany with my brother Dominic but we camped out over there and it will be a very different to see it from the inside.
“Being part of a professional set-up, you are learning so much every day and for me it’s about being a sponge and soaking up as much knowledge and experience as possible..

About Ward’s playing itch while working:

And at one time Julian had hoped to make it as a professional footballer in his own right.
He played as a midfielder with Morecambe and Southport in the North-West and other clubs, which helped subsidise him as a student… until work got in the way.
“I miss playing football and still get that feeling when seeing the Portugal guys even training, but I am lucky to be able to work in the sport at this level.”
Julian graduated with a Sports Science degree from John Moores University in Liverpool, where there was a strong connection with Premier League clubs developing computer-based tools used to analyse match data and performance.
Many of the students spent time at clubs such as Liverpool, Everton and Manchester City as part of a mutually beneficial relationship and from Julian went to work with the England FA youth set-up.

Article from 2020 on The Athletic about Liverpool’s scouting that includes Ward.
Ward on his loan pathways and Football Partnership Manager, from LFC’s official site.

“…Around September 2015, we realised that there was this bridge that we had to create to help players make the step from U23s football to Melwood and first-team football…”
Consequently, a new position was created: loan pathways and football partnerships manager.
It’s a role Ward was asked to take on and remains in to this day.
“I became responsible for making partnerships and networks with clubs around England and Europe,” he explains, during a recent conversation at Melwood.
“It’s my job to work with our coaching staff and sporting director to make sure we have a network of good options in place for when the younger lads are ready to go out into senior football, or when fringe first-team players need competitive game time.
“We also need to put in place support processes to manage each player’s pathway once that decision is made.
“We need to first identify positive environments for players to go to and then make sure that when they go, they are developing remotely.”

On different types of loans:

There are, Ward explains, three different types of move when it comes to players leaving Liverpool on loan.
Along with ‘established first-team players who need game time… the club also sanctions temporary transfers for non-EU players…
“They’re all top talents within their generation, they all play for their respective national teams at U20 level, but we know that work permit-wise it’s a bit of a longer journey so we try to get them adapted to life and football in Europe and started on the process where they gain competitive experience,” Ward says.
“Hopefully that will increase their profile and credibility so when the time’s right, we can make that work permit application and bring them back into the fold.”
The third group involves the club’s ‘elite Academy players, who have proved themselves at U23 level and are looking for that next challenge’.
“The bar’s really high.
“To nudge out of the way a Mo Salah, a Sadio Mane, a Firmino, our young players have got to be able to show that they can compete with senior international players, not only in games but in training.
“We’ve got to make sure that the competitive experience they get is a positive one, right through the U18s and U23s and then when we feel they’ve reached a level where the next stage is playing for points and under pressure, a bit of exposure to the senior aspects of the game, then we have to look at other environments.”
…
“With the first or second loan, the players earn it by their performances in the U23s. They generate interest and the clubs across the Championship, League One, League Two are always in good attendance at our U23s games.
“We discuss each player on a regular basis and try to judge whether they’re ready to go out, whether they’re needed to be part of the U23 or Melwood group, and we have to then balance that up with the other options in terms of loan interest.
“Then we’ve got to try to make sure that we get the right coaching environment, the right competitive level that allows the player to continue on that journey of development.”

On loan player monitoring:

By no means does Ward’s involvement end once a player leaves Liverpool on loan, though.
“I coordinate the communication between the clubs,” he continues.
“The different departments across our club are connected with the loan club where we place a player – whether that be medical to medical, sports science to sports science, analysis to analysis or coaching to coaching – just so that we can make sure that when a player leaves us, the club they’re going to are fully furnished with where they’re at in terms of technical and physical development.
“The very first week of the loan is about connecting different key contacts in the relevant departments so that the training load the player’s been exposed to prior to going out on loan can be communicated, as well as any medical issues and also development points.
“We look at areas of their game that we think ‘OK, this is where the player is at the start of the loan, by the end of the loan we’d hope to see some progress and improvements in these three or four specific coaching areas’.
“Then, the clips from all the players’ games are fed back to us within 24-48 hours and I liaise with our scouting department and coaches to make sure that we get regular live viewings of games, but also we get out to the training ground to see them working in their environment Monday to Friday.
“That’s well established now. It’s a combination of putting good communication processes in place and planning with the coaches and the scouting department to make sure we’ve got coverage so that the players still feel connected to the club.”

On Transfer Windows:

Ward’s work throughout the year helps to ensure the club are fully prepared for all eventualities when the summer and January transfer windows come around.
And, while ‘last-minute’ interest in Liverpool players is commonplace, he says the club are ‘very reluctant’ to get involved in such business as they strive to conduct background checks on all potential destinations prior to authorising a loan deal.
“My job prior to the windows is to have a good knowledge of the squads, have good relationships with coaches, heads of recruitment, sporting directors and get a feel that they know our players,” Ward states.
“With our games being very accessible with getting to Prenton Park or watching them on LFCTV, when a coach or head of recruitment phones up asking about a player generally they know the specific characteristics of them and we hope that starts the process.
“We’ll go and look at what kind of opportunities there would be for those players to play, whether there’s a lot of senior players in their path or there are two or three places where they can go and stake a claim for a place in the team.
“We do that due diligence ahead of the two windows and then if Jürgen, Alex and Michael think the time is right then the options get filtered down to positive ones, the stars align and the button’s pressed and the player goes out on loan.
“Obviously the player’s involved too. We keep them up to date with what we think is the plan for them between pre-season and Christmas and then the level of competitions that we’re in can change during the season.
“We have to balance that games programme with each individual player’s point of progression.”

• The Athletic on Ward’s promotion and his replacement, from December 2020:

Ward “…has proved to be a huge asset for Liverpool since arriving from Manchester City as the club’s European scouting manager for Spain and Portugal in 2012.
He was appointed loans manager in 2015 and since then his responsibilities have continued to grow.
Ward has massively impressed Gordon and Edwards with his knowledge and expertise as well as the relationships he has developed with staff, players, agents and rival clubs. Led by Ward, Liverpool have proved adept at using the loan market to develop young talent and enhance their value.
He has previously assisted Edwards on a number of transfers and contract renewals at academy level, and Liverpool see expanding his role as a logical next step.
He already enjoys a close working relationship with Edwards and that will be enhanced going forward.
Internally, Ward will be a key link between all of the different departments at Liverpool, from Jurgen Klopp and his coaching staff, to the medical and sports science team, and academy director Alex Inglethorpe.
Externally, Ward will be tasked with building on the extensive network of contacts he already possesses as he deals with players, agents and clubs to assist Edwards when it comes to selling players, buying players and contract negotiations.
The promotion of [David] Woodfine to the role of director of loan management is also important. Like Ward, he’s rated highly by both Gordon and Edwards. This is reward for his fine work as head of football projects and scouting operations since joining the club from West Ham United in 2014.
Liverpool are proud of their record in the loan market and believe that will be maintained with Woodfine at the helm. The transition period from Ward to Woodfine is already underway ahead of the January window.

The Future

Here’s to the next chapter in Liverpool’s story. The coming years will be testing, as key players age-out and Jürgen Klopp presumably still leaves, as planned, in 2024.

As such, Liverpool are getting their reorganisation done now, ahead of those further transitional challenges, so that they don’t all collide; a potential parting gift from Edwards, to get his own succession sourced and sorted so successfully (it seems) without waiting until chaos reigns, and reactivity becomes the order of the day.

Other clubs wait too long; Liverpool get things sorted.

Paul Tomkins

Liverpool Continue To Show the Value of Not Signing New Players by Paul Tomkins

2021-11-07T16:48:00.001+08:00

https://tomkinstimes.com/2021/11/liverpool-continue-to-show-the-value-of-not-signing-new-players/

By Paul Tomkins

November 5, 2021In By Paul Tomkins, Free, Transfer Debate

In a recent Athletic article, I noticed the following statement relating to Spurs’ regression in recent years:

“Not signing a player in the summer of 2018 and then reaching the Champions League final the following season was nothing short of a miracle. It wasn’t sustainable. The two years since Pochettino’s sacking have only served to demonstrate that.”

So, can I just reiterate that, while spending money signing players is important (I’ve written books, academic papers and contributed to EU reports on the subject), the “sign-nobody summer” can actually often be a blessing and not a curse.

Obviously it’s not something you can do every summer, or perhaps even in successive summers (or seasons).

Spurs signed no one in 2018 and had their best-ever European season, yet it is painted as luck, ignoring the value of team understanding, which is vital for passing, pressing and team-bonding. As I’ve detailed before, most teamwork continues to further develop and blossom up to four years spent together. After that it can plateau, but obviously individual players can continue to develop, especially if they were young at the outset.

In the summer of 2019 Liverpool signed no one (beyond a reserve keeper). They had the best league season in the club’s history, and were the fastest team to win the title in English football history.

Again, just luck?

Last season Liverpool signed three first-team players, and they proved a mixed bag; all three spent months out with knee injuries. In total, nine players made their league debuts for the Reds. It was a season of chaos and turnover, in part wrecked by injuries.

This summer, Liverpool signed just a single (promising) player, who has made just three league starts, meaning that 98% of the Reds’ players in the ten league XIs this season were already at the club; and 100% of the four Champions League XIs.

With a midfield injury crisis, the Reds are still within a win of the top of the league table, and have romped their Champions League group.

You could of course blame the midfield injury crisis on not buying more midfielders in the summer, but you could pay £100m for a new midfielder, and if a 15-stone defender launches two-footed and breaks his leg and dislocates his ankle, it’s not going to help much. Naby Keita, the Reds’ most expensive midfielder, could have suffered the same fate when a a 15-stone midfield launched two-footed into him a couple of weeks back. (As it was, one of Keita’s muscles was about to ping again.)

Liverpool bought a very special midfielder last season, and he almost got his knee snapped in two. Liverpool brought back a special young midfielder from loan this season, and he got his ankle blown apart.

Harvey Elliott was the solution – not a new £100m signing. He was the Reds’ best player this season until the dangerous lunge that sent his foot one way and the rest of his leg the other.

If someone had snapped Trent Alexander-Arnold’s leg in two when he was first making waves at the same age, then paying £50m for another right-back would have been a short-term fix that could have created a long-term problem (i.e. Alexander-Arnold would not have had a place in the team to develop, upon his return).

This may be a counterfactual statement, but the thing is, you never know. You can never know which players will get random, violent, impact injuries, in advance of them happening. You can’t stockpile players – as Klopp has explained – in case you have a ton of injuries. It’s too costly (wages and fees), and it’s too disruptive (too many unhappy players pissing in the collective pool).

You can focus on traditionally durable players, but Virgil van Dijk was about as durable as it gets, until he suffered a force that must have felt like a lunatic riding a motorcycle into his kneecap at 50mph. (And Elliott managed a full season in the brutal Championship last season, aged 17.)

In the summer of 2020, Virgil Van Dijk was worth £150m, barring Covid-based market vagaries. Had Liverpool spent £150m that summer to buy him (because, say, he was at Bayern Munich), then that would have been £150m spent in the rehab centre at the new training complex if the same collision occurred. Supreme injury record, then bam.

Another example. Man City spent over £130m in 2019 and didn’t win the league that season. The season before, when they did win the league, they signed only Riyad Mahrez, who started just 14 league games, or one-third of the campaign. Basically, they won the league with the same side.

This summer they’ve spent £100m on a single player, yet are dropping a lot of unexpected points, and that attacker has just one league goal. This season at least, in just over a quarter of a campaign, City’s results have regressed with Jack Grealish in the side.

(Which isn’t to say that City and Grealish won’t start to rack up more points and goals, but does suggest that the £100m player is not an immediate perfect solution, even at that price. Another thing my research shows is that it’s the season after a big spending spree where clubs tend to progress, and City’s £130m signings of 2019 were important in 2020/21. The bigger the individual transfer fee the greater the odds of success, but it tends to move from around 40% for the cheapest to only 60% for the dearest.)

None of which is to say that you shouldn’t sign players, obviously. My point is that it doesn’t have to be every single summer, and in great quantities.

Let’s go back to Spurs’ signings in the two years prior to signing no one in 2018. In total, £180m spent on:

Victor Wanyama
Vincent Janssen
Juan Pablo Gonzalez Velasco
Georges-Kévin Nkoudou
Moussa Sissoko
Maximus Tainio
Davinson Sánchez
Paulo Gazzaniga
Juan Foyth
Serge Aurier
Fernando Llorente
Lucas Moura

Of those, only Moura has proved a consistent success, with Aurier horribly mixed (to the point where, bizarrely, he was released early from his contract), Sánchez not quite steady enough, and Sissoko only a belated success (around the time he turned 30). A couple of the signings were youngsters, but of the dozen, only Moura and Sánchez remain.

Spurs success in those seasons, which also included a 2nd-placed finish with a huge (for their budget) 86 points in 2017, was down to Harry Kane, Hugo Lloris, Kyle Walker, Danny Rose, Toby Alderweireld, Jan Vertonghen, Kieran Trippier, Mousa Dembélé, Dele Alli, Christian Eriksen and Son Heung-min. (Note: I forgot to include Erik Lamela, who signed in 2013.)

They were also mostly the core of the team that reached the Champions League final in 2019, where they found themselves Klopped.

Those eleven arrived (or made their debuts) respectively in 2012, 2009, 2015, 2009, 2012, 2015, 2012, 2015, 2013, 2011 and 2015. The average year of “arrival” was 2012 (some seven years before they could have become Champions of Europe), and although some of those featured as new players in the ill-fated title race against Leicester in 2015/16, that was a team that had been together for ages.

In truth, of the 12 players signed between 2016 and 2019, Spurs could have saved £155m and just focused on Moura, and bar some squad depth, the rest mostly added very little. When Sissoko finally came to life, it was after years of being a bit of a joke.

That team was not only managed by Mauricio Pochettino with his fitness work and attention to detail, but that was a proper team. It can be hard to add to such a united, connected unit, working under a manager who creates such bonds. They seemed like a bunch who protected one another.

Obviously the key eleven players were mostly signed as transfers; but over a long period of time. The difficulty was improving on those players, and especially, improving on the shared understanding gained through years training and playing together.

And one issue is the commitment of the players you do sign.

I personally thought it was pretty disgraceful when Spurs and Villa’s new players chose to go and play for Argentina and Colombia during the controversial international break where the Premier League had told its players not to travel to South America, due to Covid-19 restrictions meaning they could not return directly to England.

Giovani Lo Celso (fairly new), Cristian Romero (brand new) and Davinson Sánchez, at Spurs, and Villa’s Emiliano Martinez, signed in 2020, and Emiliano Buendia, signed in 2021, went off against the league’s advice. They all missed at least the next league game for their clubs, due to quarantining.

At the time – and let this sink in – Spurs were top of the table.

Yes, it was just three games, but it was also three wins, including against Manchester City. Villa, meanwhile, were a respectable 11th, having won and drawn their previous two games.

Villa lost that weekend with their missing players, and since then the run is now five losses from seven league games.

Spurs also lost that weekend, and their run is also five losses from the next seven league games. It cost Nuno his job.

While these sample sizes are small, as soon as I saw that these players had chosen their countries over their clubs – to the point where they would be away for vital league games – I noted on this site that it was a red flag.

Where’s the commitment to the cause that pays their wages?

I know players want to play for their countries, but the edict was clear. And more fool those two clubs for giving them permission.

As for what it would do to the group harmony at those clubs, I felt it created a two-tier system: while we train hard and slog it out on the weekend, you’ll be in sunny Croatia, doing a bit of jogging.

This is even more vital if you’ve just arrived. Your job is to settle in the team. Gabby Agbonlahor just noted that: “I want to single out’ Buendia as he’s an Aston Villa ‘impostor'” (in that he’s not the player he was at Norwich).

This is because at Norwich he had time to settle, and did not arrive with a record-breaking price tag or any kind of reputation. At Norwich he was not replacing a club icon (although if he fell down drunk in Croatia, he might have resembled Jack Grealish on a bender).

Here’s my issue, beyond the myopia of not respecting who (the fans of your club) pays your wages: if you do not put your club career first, your international career will atrophy anyway.

Beyond small nations with few players to choose from (like Wales), anyone who isn’t in their club side will not be in their international side. You’re just making life harder for yourself, and you will increase your odds of falling into the flop category.

Liverpool’s head of research, Ian Graham (PhD), noted at the recent StatsBomb conference that half of all transfers fail.

While he reached this conclusion in a different manner to me, this is something I first noted in 2011 (that Dan Kennett called “Tomkins’ Law”), having analysed what was then around 3,000 Premier League-era players/transfers to see how many games they played and how much money they lost (or generated).

Buy Now?

It does feel to me that Liverpool need to start buying players again, given the age of a lot of the squad (albeit no single individual is over the hill, as James Milner just keeps building a bigger bloody hill), but they have to be the right players, at the right age, with the right attitude.

New signings can make a team worse, which people seem to forget: the time it takes them to settle, get onto the right wavelength, learn how to press in unison, and so on. A new big-earner can upset the apple cart.

I personally think that, for all the goals he scores, Cristiano Ronaldo makes Manchester United a worse team (as I expected when he signed). Certainly they, like Spurs and Villa, were having a much better start to the season than the form since (in this case, it was a new superstar arriving). Maybe it’ll prove wise to bring back a player about to turn 37, but how has it affected other players, and the team dynamics? So far it’s working in the Champions League, but not the Premier League. Equally, spending £73m on Jadon Sancho is not working at all, at this juncture. Big names, mega-fees, huge wages, and … regression (short-term, at least).

As Premier League teams get more organised, analytical and cohesive, the big immediate-impact signing seems a bit rarer, albeit almost all of the iconic game-changing signings made in the late ’90s by Arsène Wenger famously took time to settle; particularly Thierry Henry (half a season) and Robert Pires (almost a whole season), while Dennis Bergkamp was another slow starter a couple of years earlier.

Liverpool, despite adding only Ibrahima Konaté who has played just three meaningful games (as the young centre-back adjusts and competes with world-class players), have made an unbeaten start to the league season and just set more club records: longest ever unbeaten run in all competitions (25, most of them this season); and the first four Champions League group games won. Scoring records have been broken, too, with a staggering streak of 3+ goals away from home, with back-to-back 5-0 wins, including the Reds’ biggest ever victory at Old Trafford.

Again, this is not to say that buying players is bad, as clearly it isn’t; and the more you can spend, the greater your odds of success.

But Klopp has always found ways to get more out of his players, turning £35m men into £150m stars. Equally, he’d turn academy graduates into £150m stars. (In time, how much will Kaide Gordon, Tyler Morton and Conor Bradley be worth, to name the three kids currently closest to the first team?)

In another Athletic article, Damien Comolli (the man who brought Michael Edwards, Ian Graham, Jordan Henderson and Luis Suarez to Liverpool – as well as Andy Carroll, but let’s not go there), said:

“The issue now for the top clubs in the world is they are looking to recruit Superman. And that guy doesn’t exist,” Comolli said, “because he needs to be a very good tactician, he needs to be good at creating training sessions, he needs to develop young players, he needs to be good with the press, he needs to be a great leader, he needs to be a great communicator, he needs to be knowledgeable in sports-science and in medicine, he needs to have an opinion on players on the recruitment side, he needs to manage a staff of anywhere from 25 to 50 people, he needs to know how to ‘manage up’ — billionaires who have got a lot of businesses.
“And this Superman needs to fit with the club’s culture, whatever it is — whether it’s winning at all cost at Real Madrid, Bayern Munich or Juventus, whether it’s developing players at Tottenham and trying to win a trophy and getting into the Champions League, whether it’s trying to break into the top six at Everton et cetera, et cetera.
“Real Madrid went back to a coach (Ancelotti, who returned to the Bernabeu from Everton this summer) they sacked six years ago, Bayern Munich paid €25 million for (RB Leipzig coach Julian) Nagelsmann, who I think is brilliant but has never won anything and is 34. Juventus went back to (their coach from 2014-2019, Massimiliano) Allegri. I could go on and on and on.
“It just shows the market is small. Those people who can manage the big clubs and tick all the boxes are unique individuals and there are only a handful in the world that can do it.”

I think this is why – allied to the stellar scouting, canny negotiating and world-class data analysis – Liverpool have over-performed on transfers and won the biggest prizes without spending the most money.

Jürgen Klopp, via that list of attributes, is therefore a superman, backed by the best in the business.

Paul Tomkins

Magical Thinking, and the Total Reality Divergence Between Liverpool and Manchester United by Paul Tomkins

2021-10-27T09:11:00.001+08:00

https://tomkinstimes.com/2021/10/magical-thinking-and-the-total-reality-divergence-between-liverpool-and-manchester-united/

By Paul Tomkins

October 26, 2021In By Paul Tomkins, Free

It’s the summer of 2015. Liverpool have finally got rid of Colin Pascoe and his shorts, but chaos will remain. (Turns out, it wasn’t Colin Pascoe’s shorts that were the issue. Who knew?)

James Milner arrives, but he already looks old and slow in the midfield. Great pro, but past his best. Jordan Henderson hasn’t been the same since 2013/14, but it doesn’t take long for me to feel that Milner and Henderson, together, is not the solution.

Daniel Sturridge, out injured, will never recover properly. Philippe Coutinho will start to fulfil his potential, but then leave when looking like the Reds’ best player.

Roberto Firmino arrives, but a journalist (now at Manchester United) will famously mock why the Reds spent £29m on such a hopeless misfit. Christian Benteke is the new great striking hope.

Liverpool will later sign the total Chelsea reject, Mo Salah, and hoover up more players from Southampton, including some young guy who at the time in an uncapped Dutchman moving from the Scottish league. The Reds will buy a low-key left-back who was relegated with a tiny club, who was almost considered too rubbish to play football a couple of years earlier.

Liverpool will eventually invest in a goalkeeper who, in 2015, aged 23, had played about a dozen league games of football.

The good news is that Liverpool will sign the phenomenal Thiago Alcantara; the bad news is that he’ll suffer terrible injuries. The one really big-name signing, from Bayern Munich (after Barcelona), is hobbled in only his second game for the club.

By contrast, at Manchester United, six years down the line in 2021, will have signed the world’s most expensive defender and broken the British transfer record (neither adjusted for inflation, mind).

The infuriatingly brilliant David de Gea – denier of many a Liverpool victory up to 2015 – will still be in goal, still at a good age. They’ll have added a returning superstar who has won half of the Ballon d’Ors awarded after 2015 (which to date, is two from four, with Covid cancelling those since 2019).

United will break the British transfer record for a midfielder who was voted into the Serie A Team of the Year in 2013–14, 2014–15 and 2015–16, and who will later inspire his country to World Cup glory. They’ll add the most exciting young English winger seen in years, who scored and assisted at a frightening rate in the Bundesliga.

They’ll add another World Cup winner, Raphael Varane, who will be at the heart of Real Madrid’s defence in three further Champions League successes, having already won one by 2015. They’ll have added a global superstar from Uruguay who has over 50 international goals, and who, in 2015, has just had a 30+ goal club season (and who, in a two year period soon after 2015, will score almost 100 goals). Juan Mata and the much hyped Anthony Martial will still be in the squad. (As will Phil Jones, but never mind.)

Liverpool will go to Old Trafford, in 2021, with James Milner, nearly 36, in their midfield. He’ll be alongside Henderson, now 31.

If you told me this in 2015 I’d have cried. Especially without any idea who the Liverpool manager would be. It seemed unlike it would be someone as elite as Jürgen Klopp.

When the score of 5-0 would be mentioned, via a crystal ball, I’d have said you don’t need to be clairvoyant to see that the Reds will get a right pasting.

Adjusted for inflation, the Reds’ £XI will be around £400m, ranking 4th in the Premier League, while United’s is over £700m, up there with Man City’s.

The Reds’ XI will contain players who, in the summer of 2015, were at Southampton, Hull City, Internacional (Brazil), Sochaux B, Paços de Ferreira (who still sound like a 1970s nightclub singer), Red Bull Salzburg, Fiorentina; and that nobody who arrived from Hoffenheim.

A free transfer from Schalke will be surprisingly left on the bench, along with yet another Southampton player, a reserve left-back from Olympiacos, another from Red Bull Salzburg, and some lad from Charlton. Plus, two kids from the Reds’ U18 side will feature.

Liverpool’s captain arrived via Sunderland a few years earlier, to much bafflement, including from Alex Ferguson (who chose Phil Jones instead), who will be watching from the stands when the historic 5-0 result occurs. How he must be laughing, I’d have thought, back in 2015.

United’s players to feature against the Reds on that historic day were, six years earlier, included those at Real Madrid (two), Juventus, PSG, Udinese and Napoli, and a Man City prospect who arrived via Borussia Dortmund. Plus the best keeper in the world as of 2015, de Gea, as one of the remaining title-winners from just two years earlier (2013) still on the books.

Clearly, Liverpool – with players bought only from mediocre clubs or as rejects from bigger clubs – will get trounced by the bigger-name, higher-paid superstars of Old Trafford. United have a winning mentality; indeed, proven winners. They’ve won it all. It’s in their DNA.

Indeed, United re-signing Ronaldo is seen by many as the greatest coup in the history of football; a player about to turn 37, to play with Edison Cavani, nearly 35.

But he’s a proven winner. A proven goalscorer. It’s like they’d still be saying that when he’s 89 and in a wheelchair; as if time does not move on.

At times, as of 2021, it feels like everyone lives in a world of magical thinking, where both sides of the political aisle deny clear scientific, political, logical and biological realities; and so the notion that Ronaldo, who can still finish, clearly, but cannot and will not run, will take a team, led by a mediocre manager and surrounded by talented slackers, to the title, seems the epitome of this collective dream-like unreality.

As I noted in the part-subscriber-piece yesterday:

“I also say this about managers; Gary Neville insisted yesterday that Jose Mourinho was the best manager in the world when United appointed him (!), whereas to me, Mourinho was well on the slide, and Klopp and Pep Guardiola were already well ahead in the way the game was changing.
“By 2019, Daniel Levy said Mourinho was one of the top two managers in the world when he appointed him. Liverpool had just won the Champions League against his club [and finished 2nd in the league with 97 points, I failed to add], and at the time of the appointment, were eight points clear of Man City on the way to winning the title, with 11 wins and a draw from 12 games. So Mourinho was better than Guardiola or Klopp?! These are people running football clubs, working on data that’s 5-10 years out of date.”

The past is seductive. But it’s not the route to the future. Sometimes it’s handy to go back there (to stem a horrific rot), but things change. Past achievements are valid, in terms of someone’s highest possible ceiling, but there’s a time context; as some people joked, Neville’s logic means he would have kept Ron Atkinson and not employed Alex Ferguson.

It means Atkinson, 82, would still be boss now, in this weird new posturing refusal to ever say a manager must be sacked (as if saying to sack someone means you’re A Bad Fan or a Bad Football Person.)

To never say that a manager’s time is up is as bizarre as to always scream that managers must be sacked. It’s another binary world without shades of grey. Brendan Rodgers did pretty well at Liverpool overall, but the best decision made by the club regarding Rodgers was to sack him.

You can learn from the past, but as I argued back in 2005, Liverpool would only move into the future by finding people who could mirror the cutting-edge thinking of Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley, but not by regurgitating the very ideas from the 1970s. Shankly and Paisley were innovators; innovators don’t copy what worked in the olden days. New bands who try and sound like the Beatles are not grasping the essence of the Beatles, which was that no one had ever sounded like the Beatles.

Klopp is an innovator, as well as having those more timeless managerial skills.

Alas, one thing that is now a little out of date – because books date – is “Perched: Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool FC – Champions Of Everything”.

But it does include a section in how Manchester United fell from the very perch from which they had earlier helped knock Liverpool; and how the club’s fortunes had reversed, with Liverpool becoming the smarter thinkers.

A year on, Liverpool may not be fully perched right now, but unlike United, the Reds are in contention.

Since 2009, The Tomkins Times has been a paywalled site that also publishes free articles. We need paying subscribers to keep doing what we do, as we don’t run advertising, take any sponsorship money, or do any commercial things beyond the occasional book. If you don’t like what we do, then no problem. If you do, then consider subscribing and becoming part of our community where we mostly (but not exclusively) discuss football with intelligence and maturity; or sign up to the email newsletter on Substack. Also, one-off donations are greatly accepted here.

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Paul Tomkins

More by Paul Tomkins

Egosystems and Main-Man Syndrome: How Liverpool’s Rivals Bought High-Paid Problems, Not Smart Solutions by Paul Tomkins

2021-09-28T09:50:00.001+08:00

https://tomkinstimes.com/2021/09/egosystems-and-main-man-syndrome-how-liverpools-rivals-bought-high-paid-problems-not-smart-solutions/

By Paul Tomkins

September 27, 2021In By Paul Tomkins, Free

This free article is also available on the TTT Substack, which is where certain free articles can be accessed via email newsletter, when signing up at no cost. However, as has been the case since 2009, to comment on TTT you need to be a paid subscriber.

Egosystems and Main-Man Syndrome: How Liverpool’s Rivals Bought High-Paid Problems, Not Smart Solutions

It wasn’t the best end to the weekend with Liverpool twice surrendering a lead in a frantic and at times incomprehensibly messy match, but also one of great excitement. But despite a fixture list that wasn’t the toughest on paper, to be unbeaten, winning 66% of games and scoring loads of goals – to lead the table by a clear point – is about as good as we could have hoped for at the start of the season, even if it was galling to not get the three points at a rocking Brentford (that may not be easy for other big clubs to visit).

For all the glitzy signings made by other clubs, this season is following the path of 2019/20, when the Reds unity, squad cohesion, team interplay and understanding, meant no new signings were required to break almost all of the records. So far, bar 90 minutes from the hugely promising Ibrahima Konaté, the same pattern is emerging, albeit with the record at 100% up to the 9th game that year. City sat second, as now, but five points behind, instead of one.

There’s also no doubt that the league feels stronger this season, but this squad is still, for me, the best the Reds have ever had. Andy Robertson is off form (maybe worn out from four seasons of constant football for Liverpool and Scotland), but there’s now Kostas Tsimikas, who has a wand of a left foot. There are four outstanding centre-backs, plus an amazing fifth choice in Nat Phillips – but three are working their way back to full match fitness, and the other is adapting to life in England.

The midfield pool is deep, but obviously already racking up injuries; the worst of which was from a red-card tackle, which was the problem last season for Virgil van Dijk and Thiago. (You can’t do much about such frequent bad tackles, other than to hope the officials crack down on them.)

And the terrific trident up front has become a fab four, with Divock Origi and Taki Minamino the types of backups who rarely get a run of games to get into any rhythm, but who are capable of shining when they do get enough game time; their issue is how rarely the others are injured. (And that’s a good thing.)

This squad is better than 2019/20 (the only key player lost is Gini Wijnaldum, now a barely-used sub at PSG but on £300,000 a week), but the squad, due to terrible luck, has already lost the energy-boosting Harvey Elliott, who was really adding a new dimension on the right with Mo Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold, and somehow already looking every inch Wijnaldum’s equal at just 18.

And Curtis Jones, at 20, is a potential future superstar, with real maturity being added to his game (he seems to be growing up fast as a man as well as a player), in addition to a touch more strength and pace as he leaves his teen years well behind. Kaide Gordon, just 16 and soon to turn 17, could also be at those levels by the spring of 2022, albeit after what happened to Elliott (against Burnley and Leeds), he’ll need protection from 15-stone thugs. He’s yet another elite age-group player.

In addition to Elliott, Jones, Minamino, Konaté and Tsimikas, the duo of Thiago and Diogo Jota are newer members of a squad that also includes the fast-improving Caoimhin Kelleher as backup keeper. The squad is deeper, and there are more options than in 2019/20. The XI remains strong, and the backups are now stronger.

The difference is that the lowering of FFP regulations has allowed the petrodollar-doped rivals to buy beyond “fair” means, and Liverpool cannot compete at that game, with the funding this year mostly going into a dozen pay-rises, with more to follow.

The rivals do feel stronger, but Liverpool cannot buy superstars they cannot afford, just as I can’t afford to buy a Ferrari just because my neighbour buys one (albeit a posh car around my way is a 10-year-old BMW, and I drive a 13-year-old Ford – when there’s petrol).

There have been some sensible signings by rivals, but also some moments of real vanity.

Egotists

The one thing I often talk about when buying a player is the potential of what can be lost, as well as gained.

When Manchester United signed Cristiano Ronaldo, I expected him to score goals, but what would they lose by introducing a player who was in the bottom 1% for work-rate by strikers in Europe? Would Ronaldo take so many shots from poor positions because that’s what he does? How do you quantify all the good chances you don’t create because someone else keeps shooting from 30 yards, or because he does no pressing?

How would the previous go-to men feel, when usurped? Has his arrival turned Bruno Fernandes, banging in the goals and the penalties (a hat-trick on the opening day, before Ronaldo returned), into a goal-shy penalty-misser? It may be that, in time, Fernandes is actually more inspired by the presence of his legendary compatriot, but initially it seems that he might be overawed, or reduced to playing second-fiddle. It’s not that it’s a problem that cannot be solved; but it does appear to be an additional problem in need of solving. If Ronaldo’s presence ends up diminishing Fernandes, couldn’t that prove to be a bad thing?

I wouldn’t write off Man United after three defeats in 10 days, and Ronaldo is still a goal machine; and Fernandes may regain his mojo. They have an enormous squad, that cost the most money to assemble when adjusted for inflation. (Just ahead of Man City, at an average £XI of over £700m, with Liverpool and Chelsea about £300m behind, and Arsenal and Spurs another £100m back, followed by Everton.)

But at some point soon that goal machine has to start developing rust, and then what? How is a player so famous he’s almost as big as the club (and clearly bigger than the manager) allowed to be phased out? The move is a gamble, in terms of the knock-on effects. Ronaldo is nearly 37, and who will bench him when he’s 38? What happens when the entire centre of attention starts to lose his mojo and finally melt?

Steven Gerrard had a great penultimate season at Liverpool – as he raged at the dying of the light – but his final season a year later was full of acrimony, fading power and 6-1 defeats to Stoke (okay, there was just one of those, but that was one too many for this lifetime).

Then there’s the priceless – or should that be costly? – farce of James Rodriguez at Everton.

Signed to win the 2020 transfer window, he arrived at a club he didn’t even want to play for – he admitted that he only wanted to play for the manager – to earn more per week than any of the Liverpool side who’d just been crowned champions (on the back of also winning the Champions League 12 months earlier).

Andros Townsend, as a free transfer, already looks like better business; as does Demarai Gray, for peanuts. Neither would win you the transfer window; but they do look good business in the early days of this season. (I’m trying to mix my abiding affection for Rafa Benítez with a desire to not see him do too well.) As soon as Everton stop the churn of expensive signings (by their standards) and stop trying to win the transfer window they look half-decent.

In a very interesting Athletic article on Rodriguez, Patrick Boyland explains all that went wrong with the Colombian, but the author makes at least two utterly bizarre, wistful mentions of the poor Everton fans who never got to see Rodriguez in the flesh, as if it was Diego Maradona being discussed (or even an Everton legend, like Kevin Sheedy; or a current-day dedicated servant like Seamus Coleman – why would you want to see some feckless wastrel who never really displayed his talents for more than a game or two? Do some Man United fans pine over never having seen Alexis Sanchez in their colours? Do we mourn the fact that we never got to see World Cup-winner Bernard Diomède, although I was there for his overhead kick that hit the bar in one of his four games).

“That those fans never got to see him in the flesh is the greatest shame of all — Rodriguez’s move to Qatar is a sorry next step for a player who once had the world at his feet.”

Weird.

I love the story of Rodriguez at Everton (especially as it didn’t happen at our club), as it sums up almost everything that’s wrong with modern football: the transfer as form of dick-swinging; the player, whose move is overseen by super-agents, who is only there for the money, and who gets much more of it than the honest pros who work for the team and the club; the player who initially wows his teammates in training, only to soon be considered invisible, as if they feel they are playing games with 10 men when he’s strolling about; the player who has a great first month and then goes missing when the temperature drops below 20º C; the player who just takes a game off, as he can’t be arsed; the player disappearing on a private jet before the end of the season; the player as status symbol, not squad member and team player. And then the player given away, to get his £250,000-a-week wages off the bill as the club panics to meet even relaxed FFP standards after years of vanity purchasing.

I’ve spoken at length about the importance of the ‘egosystem’ at Liverpool – the unquantifiable gains made when everyone is on the same wavelength, pulling in the same direction. And in fairness to Benítez, he is trying to do the same at Everton, with low-key buys who will give him honest endeavour. But he is doing so from a position of undoing an unholy mess of status-symbol transfers.

It’s why someone like Jürgen Klopp will say to anyone who wants to leave “there’s the door” (if your transfer value is met), because unity trumps individualism, and anyone who no longer sees themselves as part of the group is like an infectious wretch capable of passing on that viral disaffection. Obviously Klopp will speak to a player and try to resolve any simple problems, but he won’t indulge them or pander to fragile egos. If they badly want out, then keeping them can become toxic.

It’s why Klopp – unhappy with the increasingly moody Brazilian winger in late 2017 – cut the ties with Philippe Coutinho midseason; the club taking the £142m as fans went absolutely apeshit about how reckless FSG were (yawn), and how the club would never win the league or the Champions League with such a policy. Yet Klopp did not want to keep a sulking player who could start to drag down the mood of others.

Well, what’s happened since, for both Liverpool and Coutinho? Liverpool banked £142m, which paid for van Dijk and Alisson, then reached the Champions League final, won the next Champions League final, and won the title; Coutinho was mocked in Spain, sent to Germany, and has picked up a couple of league titles by dint of just being present rather than any meaningful contributions (and played just twice for Brazil since 2019).

Barcelona – obsessed with superstar signings, all of whom tanked – are now €1.2billion in debt. Meanwhile, clubs that tried to spend their way into the Premier League are going bankrupt. The Championship is like one giant Ponzi scheme, waiting for the cards to fall.

Hubris

But I’ve also seen hubris and vanity turn Spurs from incredible overachievers on a relative small budget who ran the Reds close to the Champions League in 2019 (and went close in league title races) to succumb to a succession of dumbass big-dick decisions.

First they ditched their elite manager, and – as I called it at the time – replaced him with a man who played the wrong style of football for the squad. He was appointed on the outdated basis that he was a “winner”.

I loathe the concept of the “winner” as a constant quality in a manager, because Brian Clough was an incredible winner in the 1970s and then not-much-of-a-winner in the 1980s, and a total loser by the 1990s.

Arsène Wenger won with the best football imaginable between 1997 and 2004, and then – like Clough – went from title-winner to trying to hoover up a domestic cup or two (which I don’t count as being a winner; otherwise Juande Ramos would have a statue at Spurs). George Graham won two titles with Arsenal around the turn of the 1990s, then slipped into obscurity, via some stuffed brown envelopes.

Howard Kendall was just one of several managers who returned at least three times to manage the same club, and almost all of them saw a big drop in their win percentage every successive time they took charge. (And Kenny Dalglish’s second stint at Liverpool was far worse than his first, albeit I still back the decision, as the need was for him to be better than Roy Hodgson to rescue 2010/11, and that was achieved. I don’t think we expected miracles.)

All of these men were absolute winners. Until they couldn’t win as often anymore.

Arrigo Sacchi returned to AC Milan having won everything, and second time won only 28% of his games. Fabio Capello went from being like Bob Paisley in his first spell at AC Milan to being more like Roy Hodgson in his second. (The classic 36% win rate.)

Radomir ‘Raddy’ Antić had three spells at Atlético Madrid in quick succession, and each time, like Sacchi, he halved his win percentage: from 51% to 28% to 13%. One more go and it would have been 6%. A rare exception is Jupp Heynckes, who always did well at Bayern, albeit Bayern have a monopoly on the Bundesliga. Any club who finishes 2nd can be certain that Bayern will simply nab their best players. How is that “fair”?

(It’s ‘funny’, shall we say, that Bayern and PSG were two of the only big clubs to oppose the European Super League, when they have won 17 of the last 20 combined titles in Germany and France, and are likely to make it 19 from 22 this season. They have no insecurity about qualifying for the Champions League as they don’t really even have much when it comes to winning their own league. Now PSG – backed by Qatari-based financial doping – have gained more control of the club scene in Europe, too. None of which is to say the ESL was an idea I would back, but equally, it remains an idea that was blown out of the water in the usual red-faced online outrage before its merits could even be discussed. Football is broken in so many ways, and as with anything that’s broken, you need to discuss all the potential fixes – not simply justify continuing on the same path when it’s leading to chaos. But I digress.…)

And while Mourinho won the title in his second stint at Chelsea, it was a far less successful spell overall, and soon he looked to be on the Clough and Wenger train from title-contender to League Cup aspirant. (Spurs sacked him days before he could have won one for them, which seems odd, if he was such a winner; and at least winning the League Cup was something he remained good at.)

Five years is a long time in football, given how the game changes. Managers don’t lose all their skills (or knowledge) overnight, but the game can evolve to make some of their cutting edge abilities seem a little old school. Every year that a manager ages also takes him a year further away from the players he must inspire. Mourinho – greying and grumpy – was a nightmare waiting to happen, and whenever he leaves a club it’s usually in a mess.

I’d already noted down that Spurs’ new stadium feels more like a vanity project, given the incredible debt involved (although long-term it may prove a wise move, if it doesn’t sink them first), when I read that Phil McNulty noted in a piece today that:

“Mourinho appeared very much a quick fix, Levy-led vanity project that was an expensive failure.”

Vanity stadium. Vanity appointment, followed by a sacking with no plan (days before a domestic cup final), and a recruitment botch-job where Nuno (who did well at Wolves, albeit with about a dozen compatriots who would buy into his ideas) was like the chubby kid with two left feet who gets picked last for a kickabout. Spurs ran out of alternatives.

I also saw it as offensive to the Spurs fans that their Argentine and Colombian players preferred to go off and abandon their club and accept 10 days quarantining in Croatia when the rest of the league (bar Aston Villa) had accepted, as one, that it wasn’t fair to take their wages and be unavailable for their clubs after the last international break. Without them, Spurs duly lost 3-0 at Crystal Palace. I can’t express how disrespectful that is to the fans whose costly season ticket and hefty television subscriptions pay their wages. International football is important to players, and that’s fair enough; but the clubs and those fans pay their wages. It stinks of mercenaries, not really wanting to be there. Where’s the unity?

Then there’s the star player who wants out. Without Harry Kane, Spurs beat Man City and won away at Wolves. They unified. With him returning to the team, they’ve won one league game and lost three, to a goal difference of 2-9 (and Kane scored neither of those two goals).

Yesterday, Arsenal twice scored soon after Kane took (or tried to take) an utterly stupid shot from a ludicrous distance instead of passing to his teammates. When, on the second occasion (as he miskicked), he at least chased back to redeem himself – and then slid the ball perfectly for an assist to Arsenal (and it’s nice to see the brilliant Bukayo Saka having such a good time after the Euros; kudos to Kane for setting him up).

Kane looked moody, selfish and like a man dragging a team down with him, as they rank 20th out of 20 for distance covered.

I keep hearing that he’s the “consummate professional”, but I’m not sure his behaviour this summer was anything other than a bit shitty, even if a lot of players do it. Going on strike is hardly the sign of an ultimate pro, even if it what a lot do to force through a move that breaks their contract.

Then there’s the vanity signing of Tanguy Ndombele, for a fee of up to £65m, for a talented player who appears to have the heart and desire of an ageing diabetic field mouse.

Cohesion

I guess this is just a way to say that cohesion is more important than anything else in football. That talent is involved is a given, because all players have talent. Hunger, unity, work-rate, commitment, wavelength-understanding (which increases with time spent training and playing together), respect for your colleagues – all of these make a team.

Liverpool, under Klopp, are all about being a team. They are not about individuals, and for all the lack of big-money buys this summer, the strengths are all still there.

Mo Salah is the biggest star, but he tracks back to defend in the full-back positions, and runs his chunky socks off. He is the main man, but not put on a pedestal and worshipped; he is part of the team, working hard for everyone else. If all these players stay fit, and give their all, the Reds stand a chance, even with FFP now favouring those who prop up clubs with oil-based wealth.

It’s a question of being a combined force, to exceed the sum of the parts.

As the famous poem states:

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson*

* NOTE: I DO NOT KNOW TENNYSON’S PERSONAL STORY, BUT HE WAS LIKELY A PRODUCT OF HIS TIME, AND AS SUCH, I DO NOT CONDONE ANY 19TH-CENTURY BELIEFS HE HAD IN THE, ER, 19TH CENTURY (HOW DARE HE!). AND AT LEAST HE DIDN’T REFER TO WOMEN AS “BODIES WITH VAGINAS”, WHICH WILL SURELY DATE ABOUT AS BADLY AS ANY PHRASE IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. I WRITE THIS AS A FLESH-SLAB WITH A PENIS, ALBEIT IT SEEMS THAT I ACTUALLY HAVE THREE PENISES, AND REALLY MUST SEE THE DOCTOR ABOUT THIS – JUST NOT ONE CONNECTED TO THE LANCET.

Paul Tomkins

FIFTEEN New Players For Liverpool – Write Reds Off At Your Peril @ By Paul Tomkins

2021-09-09T16:11:00.000+08:00

https://tomkinstimes.com/2021/08/fifteen-new-players-for-liverpool-write-reds-off-at-your-peril/

By Paul Tomkins

August 12, 2021In By Paul Tomkins, Free, Site News

After Monday’s big free piece, in a week of great subscriber-only content on TTT, I thought it was worth a further free article to just make a point about what a lot of observers seem to be missing about Liverpool’s team right now.

To me, it feels almost as if Liverpool have just signed FIFTEEN “new” players – from the point where the Reds were top of the league last season before Christmas. It may be a cliché, but returning players are often just like new signings.

Indeed, often better.

These are fifteen players who played only a limited role in the last campaign.

Virgil van Dijk, Joe Gomez and Joel Matip all had their seasons ended before halfway; two of them well before halfway. Jordan Henderson played just 21 league games, starting 20, and essentially it was therefore just 19 – half the season – when considering that he limped off early against Everton.

Diogo Jota, in terms of actual time on the pitch (as he started out as a sub, before getting injured and then returning as a sub), played just 1,113 minutes, or less than a third of the season. A full season is 3,420 minutes. Nat Phillips played more minutes.

Add that a few hundred of Jota’s minutes were when returning from a serious knee injury, and he had the issue that so many others had: nowhere near match-fit when playing after long lay-offs.

Even then, he scored the equivalent of 27 non-penalty league goals when extrapolated. He also added four more in the Champions League, and has scored a fairly incredible seven international goals in the last 11 months – all of which that suggests the extrapolation may have some validity. At the very least, he’s developed into a player capable of 25 goals in a season in a top team.

Trent Alexander-Arnold had a campaign beset with Covid, injuries and niggles, and like so many, looked unfit without a proper preseason. But only in the final 1-2 months did he look like he was back to his physical best, to arguably then play the best football of his career (aided, as explained in The Athletic, by some peripheral vision training; the lad already had supreme “vision”). At 22, he’s still going to improve. Soon he’ll be able to see out the back of his head.

Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, who relies on his pace and power, missed the first half of last season, and returned lacking both that pace and that power. Like Trent, he only looked sharp in the final weeks of the season. He played just 246 minutes, and while he’s not a definite starter, a fit ‘Ox’ is a totally different proposition. In preseason he looked better than ever, and while it was only preseason, it was against top-division German and Spanish teams. He’s in supreme shape, and gives the Reds something different.

Then there’s the maestro Thiago, who only played around half the games in 2020/21 (1,858 minutes), largely due to Richarlison’s assault.

He appeared to settle quickly in crazy a game-and-a-half, then missed months. He returned to a struggling side missing it’s giant defenders and midfield bodyguards, and he spent months after his return being a fraction late in almost every tackle – often using the ball well, but not quite adjusted to the Premier League on the whole. But again, like Alexander-Arnold and Oxlade-Chamberlain, it clicked in the final half-dozen games, playing a slightly more advanced role (where he gave away fewer free-kicks).

Naby Keïta saw another season pass him by, with just 500-or-so minutes played, but he is now fit again; and if it can stay that way this is an elite player, who can dribble, press like crazy and score goals. As with ‘Ox’, you wouldn’t bank on him being fit, but he’s top-quality when he is. Like his fellow midfielder, it’s harder for him to play fewer minutes than last season.

And while not listed as a new signing, Dr Andreas Schlumberger only arrived earlier this year. “If you would ask people in Germany, in this area – rehab, performance, recovery – he is No.1 in Germany,” Jürgen Klopp said in January. He’ll help players like Keïta and ‘Ox’.

It’s another behind-the-scenes improvement that people just notice, or laugh at – like Thomas Grønnemark – until suddenly results improve massively. There were no “Announce Schlumberger” trends or demands on Twitter.

Kostas Tsimikas should be another bonus – a fast, winger-like full-back who got Covid-19 soon after arriving, then was one of over half-a-dozen serious knee-injury victims at Liverpool, on the end of brutal challenges; then could not easily be used in the run-in due to the changes all over the defence. As with Thiago, he’s had a season to adjust to the Liverpool way, and the English style, as well as settling in with the team culture and Liverpool FC egosystem. Not all new signings settle, but you have to give everyone at least a year of leeway.

Ibrahima Konaté has of course joined, as the one proper signing. He’s arguably the most complete young centre-back in world football. It could take a while to adapt, but he had the full month in Evian in preseason, which is something Ozan Kabak never had last year (and it showed). More than anything, back four-work is about unity and understanding; and while attacking can be improved with the same kind of work, a front three doesn’t have to be perfectly in line at any point, in contrast to a back four. It’s about synchronicity, and that takes training-ground work.

Returning from loan is Harvey Elliott – who can spot passes some elite playmakers would struggle to see – ready for the Premier League. He’s not the quickest or tallest, but he is extremely ‘lively’. And incredibly clever. He can create and finish, and the sky is the limit. This is no ordinary 18-year-old, and indeed, he only turned 18 at the end of a superb season in the Championship. He went there a boy and returned man.

Taki Minamino – whose off-the-ball running opened up a ton of space in the 7-0 win at Crystal Palace – went away to gain some regular starting experience of the Premier League. He finally had a proper preseason, after a stop-start Liverpool career, where he experienced no fewer than four down-periods before his loan to Southampton.

It’s one thing buying new players, but you also have to wait for the ones you’ve bought to settle in, and as noted, many can take 6-12 months (and some, like İlkay Gündoğan at City, only went up a level or two aged 30, after years in England; in part after escaping an injury hell).

Taki looks brighter, sharper and more relaxed, and while he’s unlikely to make the first XI, it seems that he has that vital boost of confidence and feeling like he finally belongs at this level.

Ben Davies also joined in 2021, and at worst he’ll be a reasonable backup in emergencies.

Kaide Gordon only arrived in February, yet at 16 he looks ready for the Premier League, if not as a starter. Like Elliott, he was training with the first team at a Championship club at the age of 15 and playing for them at the age of 16.

He’s fast, supremely gifted, and fearless. Like Elliott, he looks a potential future superstar, if he can steer clear of injuries and remain as level-headed as he has been so far. Elliott, 18 months older, has developed a lot more physically in the past year, but both look like elite players for their age, and both have brilliant attitudes. They arrived without fanfare, and that’s often the best way.

And then there’s Ben Woodburn – a player I stated several years ago might only make a mark once he was 20-or-so (as he lacked pace, height and strength, but had a good football brain) – has grown, got stronger and even looks zippier.

In September 2017 I wrote:

“Ben Woodburn, by contrast to the emerging full-blanket talents, looks like an elite creative force who works hard too, but who doesn’t have blanket-stretching pace. (Of course, it’s no use having super-quick players who are useless either.) Woodburn is like Kenny Dalglish in how quickly he sees things without being able to run like a sprinter, although it’s fair to say that Woodburn is quicker than the King. (And he certainly is now, with Dalglish 66.) As I’ve said many times, Dalglish only properly broke through at Celtic aged 20, and Paul Scholes (whose shooting I likened Woodburn’s to in the summer) was also 20 when he got the nod at United. To be that good at 17 is remarkable, but this is his transition season.”

(This was in an article calling for patience for Klopp, in the face of accusations that he was no better than Brendan Rodgers at Liverpool.)

By this stage, Liverpool’s system started to rely on searing pace, especially in the wide attacking areas, and Woodburn fell away. I also made it clear on plenty of occasions that I didn’t think he would be as good as Dalglish (who could be?), just that the slower, thoughtful attacker takes longer to make an impact. Searing pace takes years off the time it takes to make a big impact. Pace can get you in the team as a regular at 18, but few slower players can do that.

To be honest, given that he turned 21 last year, I’d written him off when things didn’t work out at Blackpool, but he had a fantastic period of training with the senior team after his unsuccessful (but educational) loans, including a hat-trick in a game behind closed doors; and shone in the U23s with new nerve and vigour, and now looks like the player many of us thought he could become when aged just 16. He’s bigger, stronger and a bit faster, albeit not fast enough to be ideal in this front three. He was nothing short of sensational in preseason, and at the very least, it shows his talent and rediscovered desire. Now he has to take that forward.

I’d be delighted to see him continue to emerge, after a difficult few years of physical and emotional transition (all the hype, then the stagnation and rejection, before overcoming those setbacks). Both Klopp and Pep Lijnders singled him out this week as a special talent. Had he been blessed with the pace of a Michael Owen he’d have been in the team years ago, but sometimes non-sprinters only become good players as they have to rely on their thinking. To me, he was the biggest bonus in a preseason of many, many bonuses.

So, that’s fifteen players who either barely featured last season, or who played, at most, a maximum of about half the minutes (bar Alexander-Arnold, who played more, but often under par).

Indeed, Thiago missed many months, and had games as a sub at the start of the season and after his long layoff, and yet still ranked 9th for league minutes played, at just over half; while the Reds, with no comfort games to hand out debuts (such as after the league was won) were forced into using no fewer than 28 players in the 38 games.

That’s chaos. (And it felt like 27 of them were centre-backs.)

The 15 also doesn’t include Divock Origi, who played just 182 league minutes; although he’s not someone – in contrast to most of the others – who, if he stays, you’d expect to nail down a place in the side if he got a run of games. (It hasn’t helped him that he only gets a game every now and then, as the main strikers are – touch wood – so rarely injured. He’s better than people realise, but he rarely gets a run of games; the two times he has, in 2016 and 2019, he did very well, but then he had his leg broken in 2016, and the season ended in 2019).

Ditto Xherdan Shaqiri, who may be leaving – still a very good player, but he didn’t feature a lot last season. Bar two superb assists, I felt he was fairly quiet when he did play.

It also doesn’t include another young wildcard or two – the unexpected player who pushes his way into the first-team picture; maybe Owen Beck, albeit he’s got some filling out to do, or Leighton Clarkson, a majestic passer who is only 5’7″ (which is not a problem if he has tall bodyguards, but would be if in a small XI overall; Liverpool’s results last season were worst when the XI was small, and best when the XI was tall).

The Reds – already set-piece specialists when the big guns were in the team – have appointed new set-piece experts as well; another quiet piece of evolution. (#AnnounceSetPieceGurus never caught on.)

Indeed, whenever van Dijk and Matip start together, the Reds, as a team, score a goal every three games; last season, when both were out, the Reds went five months without a set-piece goal. The set-piece threat this season is likely to be supremely high again, having been non-existent due to injuries last season.

In contrast to the “returns”, Liverpool have lost Gini Wijnaldum (sadly; albeit, a player approaching 31), as well as Kabak – although the latter, while honest and not a disaster, was not yet settled into the defensive line, nor the pace of the Premier League (or the aerial challenges, where his stats were dreadful), and results improved only after he got injured – and taller, English-football-accustomed players introduced. Indeed, Rhys Williams, aged just 19 at the midway point, played more league minutes than both Virgil van Dijk and Joe Gomez.

Nat Phillips, seen as a Championship player, was one of the 11 who played the most league minutes last season.

Konaté appears a huge upgrade on Kabak, in part due to his extra size and strength, but also his dribbling skills and passing. All of the other departures so far have been players who were out on loan anyway, and if Origi and/or Shaqiri leave, it’s still players who barely featured last season.

In terms of age, only Henderson, now 31, is in the melt-zone, aside from the never-melter, James Milner.

Another “bonus” from all the injuries from last season – aside from squad players getting time in the team to develop – is that it gave them a chance to rest and reset, after several intense seasons. They can come back hungrier, and the whole team has gone from the pressure of defending their title to the anger of trying to win it back.

As I’ve noted all summer, Liverpool can’t let the current team stay together for the next few years, as it needs refreshing; but not immediately. And for all the talk of Sadio Mané fading last season, his underlying numbers were largely excellent. He was as fast as ever, brilliant at dribbling and taking the ball into the box, but he just had a dip with his finishing, as did Roberto Firmino, whose goals tally tends to rise and fall more than others, but who is always a creator of space and a drawer of attention. Both have finished superbly in preseason.

And even the dreaded African Cup of Nations (if it goes ahead) occurs mostly when it’s the early FA Cup rounds. (Plus, as the three who are going play for different nations, there’s no chance all three will be there all the way to the final, and as such, all three could be home early.)

Then there’s the energy, the buzz, the super-fitness, that was missing last season, with the 2020 preseason plans left in tatters by Covid protocols, when there already wasn’t enough time to get the stamina up to the levels required for insanely hard pressing that defined the team.

That insane pressing can now return, buoyed by the fans. That pressing could be worth 10-20 points. (Plus, van Dijk’s passing alone feels worth 10 points a season, without getting onto the set-piece threat he, Matip and Konaté could pose. Set-piece goals also take pressure off the strikers. And of course, Liverpool can now send Alisson up for every corner Career stats: headers: one. Goals: one.)

The home form – imperious under Klopp for about four years until the crowds were kept out – will surely not be as bad again. Last season was terrible for home form for all teams, overall, but it clearly affected Liverpool, as the contrast to the previous seasons was so stark. As Mark Cohen showed in his bumper season preview, it was a total outlier. That weird run of losses would surely never have occurred with a full Anfield.

And so, imagine if Liverpool had actually just signed van Dijk, Gomez, Matip, Thiago, Tsmikas, Konaté, Elliott, Keita, Davies, Jota, Minamino, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Henderson, Woodburn and Gordon, for £350m. Everyone would be going insane with joy.

Yet the Reds have essentially done that, compared to what was seen for a lot of last season – and unlike new signings, they are bedded in, and committed. They know the club, the pressure, the tactics, the pressing, the movement, the ethos. They can hit the ground running. (Although van Dijk and Gomez are a couple of weeks behind the others in terms of fitness work.)

Of course, another dozen injuries could occur – but if so, that would be hard for any club to deal with. Take away all the best players from any team and it will obviously get weaker.

One of the issues last year was how many players were on the end of bad tackles or unfortunate falls, rather than an excess of muscle injuries through bad preparation (albeit the lack of a proper preseason didn’t help). If the same players, or the few key players who escaped them last season, succumb again, then apart from those recovering from surgeries that carry some risk of recurrence, that could also be bad luck.

Teams can often carry on without two or three major players, but for shorter periods; half the squad, for longer periods, is near impossible for any club to deal with.

(People outside of this site still talk to me as if van Dijk was the only player missing last season. The Reds were top of the league months after he got injured. The much bigger problem was all the other players getting injured too. Again, Liverpool were top without van Dijk, Thiago and others, but once Matip joined Gomez, Jota and others in falling, it was a bridge too far.)

So far, missing Andy Robertson for a few games is nothing too great to fear, especially as Tsimikas looked so sharp in preseason, and arguably attacks even better, with the ability to dribble infield and deliver a wider range of crosses; but Robertson is still the more dogged defender and gutsy competitor.

For so many pundits to write Liverpool off is absurd; the only senior player to arrive when winning the league was a reserve keeper. (Plus, Minamino halfway through.) With no new outfield players to integrate, Liverpool racked up 26 wins and a draw from their first 27 games – taking 79 points out of 81 on offer, and reached 30 league wins faster than any team in English top-flight history.

A fit squad, that is settled and fully on the same wavelength, and has what I call a Kloppian preseason under their belts, can trump major signings (which isn’t to therefore saying signings are “bad”).

That Liverpool finished 3rd with their 7th and 8th choice centre-backs, and, under pressure, won eight and drew two of the final ten games, despite so many absentees, should remind people what Klopp is capable of, with the tools provided by the people above him at the club, and those he has appointed to work alongside him, including the best coach in football, Pep Lijnders.

Let people write Liverpool off, but don’t ignore that this is largely the title and Champions League-winning squad, and that even since 2019, only Wijnaldum, of the players of note, has left; while only Henderson is older than 30 (he’s 31), so it’s not like we’re talking about Mo Salah, Mané, Matip, Firmino or van Dijk being 34 or 35 and on their last legs.

At 29/30, they are still at their peak, but younger players will be gradually phased in over the next two seasons.

And so, in Wijnaldum, only one first XI player has left since 2019, and he is about to turn 31.

Otherwise it’s been: Dejan Lovren, 4th-choice centre-back, now aged 32; Alberto Moreno, as a largely unused reserve left-back; plus Daniel Sturridge and Adam Lallana, two players now well into their decline (32/33) who barely started games later on at Liverpool, are the other main departures from those two crazily successful seasons.

Players added in that time? Thiago, Jota, Konaté, Elliott, Tsimikas, Gordon, Minamino, as well as the emergence of the brilliant Curtis Jones (for a lad who’s just 20) and Caoimhín Kelleher (aged just 22, the best no.2 the club have had in years), as well as other kids who gained vital first team experience. So the idea that Liverpool have not already been refreshing and revamping is clearly wrong.

Thiago, Jota and Konaté are all better and younger than the players they replaced, while the others are longer-term investments, with a couple of potential future superstars – and in the case of Elliott, someone who looks ready now.

Yes, rivals have also strengthened, but they have to integrate all the new players, and they don’t have the kind of returning brilliance that the Reds do. I wouldn’t make Liverpool favourites, but to write off the Reds seems weird to me.

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Paul Tomkins

Total Madness At Barça and Inter Show Why FSG Are Running Liverpool Properly @ By Paul Tomkins

2021-09-09T16:08:00.003+08:00

https://tomkinstimes.com/2021/08/total-madness-at-barca-and-inter-show-why-fsg-are-running-liverpool-properly/

By Paul Tomkins

August 9, 2021In By Paul Tomkins, Deep Dive, Free, In-Depth Analysis

This in-depth free article – warning: contains ideas – appears on here (TTT), and on the TTT Substack newsletter (click link to sign up).

One of the reasons I’ve generally defended FSG – if not all their judgement calls – since they baled Liverpool out of near-bankruptcy in 2010 is my preference for sensible, calculated ownership over emotional, often irrational decision makers, who play egotistical, high risk games with a club’s future.

Now, I can be an emotional guy. But I’m also more of an arsehole when I’m emotional. I’m much nicer, much smarter, when I’m less emotional. With age, wisdom, meditation and a little medication, I try to limit my arseholery, but obviously I have lapses, especially when running a stressful business (upon which several other people also with chronic illnesses rely for their income) and trying to maintain a forum engaging in discussion about a high-passion issue.

(One of the many reasons I despise Twitter is how much of an arsehole it makes me; and if I can see it doing that to me – as someone who never even spent 15 hours a day on there like some, and who has had varying IRL experiences amongst diverse communities, and have mostly only minor mental health issues – I can see it doing that to everyone on there, and then some. I see public performance arseholery taken to the level of an art form, and people with personality disorders scaring others into silence. Maybe that this stage, Tristan Harris is our only hope.)

Anyway, at that time in 2010, FFP was being introduced, and so gazillionaire owners weren’t going to be as powerful; it was more about strategy than just financial power. FSG (then called NESV) had ended a near-90-year wait for a title with the Boston Red Sox, using smarts. And people were wary?

I’d spent the previous few years – in books and writing a weekly column for the official Liverpool website from 2005-2010, and then on here from 2009 – noting how much of a financial advantage Chelsea (financially doped) and Manchester United (off-field Goliaths) had over the Reds, and that gap only grew as Tom Hicks and George Gillett, a couple of chumps who had an acrimonious fallout, looked intent on driving Liverpool into the ground, complete with some little cock-strutter in Cuban heels.

Whether or not Liverpool won the league or the Champions League after 2010, the aim, to me, was always to avoid seeing the Reds become a Leeds United; to be competitive, without being reckless.

That was the one message I took from the 2000s, above all others. I never studied Greek mythology but I knew enough to see how Icarus perished. Sure, I’d like the Reds to win the league, but not at the risk of existential oblivion. That Leeds implosion scared me, as about 12 months earlier they were on a par with Liverpool, with a superb young team that was going places. That was the cautionary tale some younger fans may not be aware of.

The places that team went, instead, were to Liverpool (Harry Kewell), Spurs (Robbie Keane and Paul Robinson), Roma (Olivier Dacourt), Newcastle (Jonathan Woodgate and James Milner), West Ham (Lee Bowyer), Man City (Robbie Fowler), Everton (Nigel Martyn), Middlesbrough (Danny Mills and Mark Viduka), Levante (Ian Harte), Man United (Alan Smith), Hull City (Nicky Barmby) and Blackburn Rovers (Dominic Matteo). All in the space of twelve months (and these were just the senior players).

That would be the same as Liverpool selling Alisson, Caoimhin Kelleher, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Joe Gomez, Joel Matip, Virgil van Dijk, Andy Robertson, Thiago, Jordan Henderson, Fabinho, Diogo Jota, Roberto Firmino, Mo Salah and Sadio Mané between now and next summer, in the process of getting relegated.

Some Liverpool fans still crave oligarchs or sovereign state owners, and care not if their wealth was built on the deaths and impoverishment and human rights violations of many, many people, so long as they “announce Mbappé”; by comparison to which, a few bespectacled American capitalists with slightly awkward social skills are surely not so distasteful.

While FSG have made plenty of mistakes, they oversaw the delivery of two landmark trophies (the league after 30 years of waiting, to add to quickly ending the 84 year wait in Boston), and even in the midst of a global pandemic, did not leave the club at risk.

Maybe that last fact is the most important. Even in the midst of a global pandemic, did not leave the club at risk

Again, maybe that last fact is the most important.

It now means less money to spend on transfers, but it also means sensibly securing the future of the club with new deals – spending via wages – for the best players aged 28 and under, and investing in teenagers with talent, hunger and humility, like the ridiculously prodigious Harvey Elliott and Kaide Gordon, amongst others.

(I’ve done a lot of work in the last 11 years in analysing several thousands transfers in the entire Premier League era, doing so in books, an academic paper, and also at the request of a European Union study – and establishing the role transfer spending has in success. But the correlation has never really been about one transfer window, or an arbitrary period of net spend. It’s about the total cost of the assembled team and squad, adjusted for inflation – it tracks fairly well with success. But it was also never to undermine the wage bill model, which does similar. There are pros and cons to both, depending on how clubs spend their money; and Liverpool have spent more, relatively speaking, on wages than transfers. You could call FSG misers over their low net spend, but they’ve ramped up the wage bill in a big, big way.)

Deals for those closer to, or already over 30, are surely being negotiated, but without tying the club to excessively long-term or wage-bill distorting deals that would be costly when those 8-10 players – all soon to be in their 30s – then melt; which inevitable decline could be within a year, or within five years – no one knows the timing, other than, on average, players are better at 29 than they are at 34. (And no one wants a team of Trent Alexander-Arnold and ten 34-year-olds.)

Other fans want fan ownership, but my fear – having spent over 20 years discussing Liverpool online – is that a lot of fans are bonkers. Even the smarter ones.

They are emotional and irrational, and social media has only sped up the irrationality and hyped up the emotion.

(One of the worst things about social media is that, because nuance is difficult on places like Twitter, people then began to argue that nuance itself is problematic; which is like saying, where breathing is difficult, that we really need to do away with oxygen.)

The very thing that makes Liverpool fans great inside Anfield – passion, noisiness and sometimes irrational belief – are not what I want to see in a boardroom. (Although that doesn’t mean I oppose some fan representation; and I wouldn’t be opposed to someone at the table suddenly singing the full song for each player every time their name gets mentioned.)

Barcelona are an even bigger club than Liverpool – there are not many – and they also haven’t had gazillionaire owners who are sportswashing their way to a kind of unpalatable success; but have had some kind of fan ownership.

(“Barcelona is a members-owned club, with over 144,000 members, and fans are encouraged to become members. This means that Barcelona is not owned outright by a single individual and decisions regarding the future direction of the club are made by the members.”)

From what I can tell, it is all driven by some kind of election system, and we all know how honest, reputable people who never lie or make ludicrous promises to curry favour don’t like to try and prosper from election systems in order to feather their own nests and elevate their own egos. Election systems are clearly logical, and always produce balanced outcomes, with zero false promises. No cockwombles are ever elected, right?

Maybe there is a way to marry different forms of ownership, but looking at the absolute catastrafucks at Barça and now Inter Milan (amongst many other clubs across Europe), I can’t help but feel grateful that for all their mistakes, Liverpool have been run by people who have kept the club stable. Indeed, the team has been more competitive than I ever dare imagine (the Reds rose the 4th-best team in European history in 2020 based on the Elo Rankings, breaking many all-time English records in the process), and have navigated a situation where several other clubs who spent like there was no tomorrow are close to finding that … well, there is no tomorrow.

Two years ago, Barça had a wage bill four times that of a fairly large English club; now they are closer to having the wage bill of a Burnley. Until late last week, they were trying to give a third of that wage bill to just one player, and to pay him until he was 39. They couldn’t even register the four big-name free transfers they had signed (and it would have been a fifth but for PSG gazumping them over Gini Wijnaldum), because in recent years they’d splashed over £100m a pop on several players who failed to make them any better, and La Liga enforces strict FFP laws that it would be nice to see in the Premier League.

Barça’s view seemed to be that La Liga will simply change its rules for them and Messi, like a man caught doing 195mph in a 70mph zone asking that, if it’s okay, they could just increase the speed limit by 125mph, and then everything would be okay.

While Liverpool – in recent times – are famous for negotiating startlingly low transfer fees for players whose value doubles and trebles almost overnight (and selling players for far more than they were worth), Barcelona were going into deals like dumbed down versions of Bill and Ted.

From Simon Kuper, in an article about his new book on Barça:

When a club sells a player for €220 million, it doesn’t actually have €220 million to spend. There are taxes, agents’ fees and payments by instalment. Still, every other football club in 2017 knew Bartomeu had a wad of money in his back pocket and a need for a human trophy to wave in front of Barça’s 150,000 Neymar-deprived club members.

Instead [of getting Mbappé], Barça targeted another young Frenchman, Borussia Dortmund’s Ousmane Dembélé. Three weeks after Neymar left, Bartomeu and another Barcelona official flew to negotiate Dembélé’s transfer with their German counterparts in Monte Carlo, a favourite hub of the football business.

The Barça duo landed with a firm resolution, reported the New York Times: they would pay a transfer fee of at most €80 million. Anything more and they would walk away. Before walking into the assigned room, the two men hugged.

But in the room, they got a surprise. The Germans said they had no time to chat, had a plane to catch, wouldn’t negotiate and wanted about double Barcelona’s budgeted sum for Dembélé. Bartomeu gave in. After all, he was president of the world’s richest club, and still something of a football virgin. He committed to pay €105 million up front, plus €42 million in easily obtained performance bonuses – more than Mbappé would have cost.

Not six months later, Barça paid Liverpool €160 million for the Brazilian creator Philippe Coutinho. Neymar’s transfer fee had been blown, and more. A transfer fee of more than €100 million should be a guarantee against failure, but neither Dembélé nor Coutinho succeeded at Barça.

It’s not just Barça.

Inter Milan, immediately after winning the title, are without their elite manager, and the entire squad is up for sale. It smells very much of Leeds United, circa 2003. In France, clubs are in trouble – albeit there’s one that is so rich and aims to add Lionel Messi to its sportswashing empire, as it turns a farmer’s league into a farmer’s cakewalk.

Football all over Europe is in turmoil, and while it’s partly due to Covid, it’s more a case of the chickens coming home to roost for clubs run irresponsibly, with greed, poor planning, vanity and irrationality.

We live in an increasingly “pay for it later” society, as if the bills will never come in. I find fewer and fewer people living in “reality” (in all realms of life), but see the world as they want it to be, rather than how it is.

But then Covid hit. Even before Covid, I felt sickened seeing insanely big businesses built only on borrowing, that are run at losses to drive the honest competition out of business, and then, if they have played their cards right, they sweep up. Or, they go bust, having manufactured nothing but some incredible share value and a lot of hype. (I’m not an expert on businesses, in case that isn’t clear, beyond running this modest one for 12 years. This was built on zero borrowing, but the idea of doing the work, and getting paid for it.)

At a time when I expect many fans are going crazy at the lack of c.£100m signings at Liverpool (while rivals rack them up), the Reds have to do the more sensible thing, and sign up the players they want to keep on longer term contracts. They have to safeguard the future of the club whilst keeping the team as competitive as possible.

It’s not as exciting when Alisson signs a 6-year deal – sans fanfare – as it must be when £100m Jack Grealish can be shown in his socks lounging on some leather throne like he’s just won the World Cup, but for Liverpool, supreme management of the wage bill has been a vital factor in over-performance on the overall budget (transfer spending + wages), allied to the talent scouting (Michael Edwards and co.) and player-improving (Jürgen Klopp and co.)

Rather than spend excessively on transfer fees, bar a couple of big-game (rather than big-name) players, the Reds worked on an incentivised wage structure, that meant the players could earn a lot of money – but only if they were successful; and if successful, the money to fund it would arrive via the rewards of increased television, merchandising, sponsorship and performance-related income streams. (And even the most expensive players did not come in on the highest wages.)

If they weren’t successful, the wage bill would drop, meaning less risk.

Of course, even that sensible strategy took a hit with the unprecedented alterations of Covid-19, that took away TV money and all crowd-related income, but Liverpool were close to going broke 11 years ago, under the previous American owners (a pair of morons who borrowed money just to buy the club, which it then leveraged against the club), and there was no pandemic then. There was a financial crash, but we’ve just had a financial crash and the removal of almost all fans from matches for the last 18 months due to a deadly virus, and the payback of some TV money for games the broadcasters still got to show.

A decade or so before the cowboys were riding roughshod over the Reds, Leeds United faced no pandemic other than expecting to always be in the Champions League without budgeting for not being in the Champions League. They spent more on goldfish tanks for their offices than some clubs spent on players. Within a couple of years their finances collapsed faster than a dot-com startup specialising in chocolate teapots, perforated condoms and high-explosive butt-plugs.

When Barcelona bought Philippe Coutinho for £142m, I expect their fans were delirious. (Because the aim of football is always to win the transfer window.)

What a player he looked! (albeit under Klopp’s training regimen and within the team-first framework of carefully selected personalities, and delicately modelled and rehearsed interplay – what I call the egosystem).

By contrast, many Liverpool fans were up in arms, accusing the club of getting rid of its prize asset, which showed a lack of ambition.

Reckless and irresponsible were the kinds of words bandied about, just as they were when the club decided against signing someone else instead of Virgil van Dijk, by instead choosing to wait for the giant Dutchman. I’ve lost count of the times that the Reds owners and decisions makers have been called “reckless and irresponsible”, but it seems to be every week. And yet the club has had one of the best periods in its insanely successful history.

In essence, for the price of van Dijk and Alisson, Liverpool, at the start of 2018, sold the Catalan giants a pair of wax wings.

The looks in those overpaid Barça eyes (think rabbit, headlights, oncoming HGV) when the injury-depleted Reds tore them apart in the Champions League semi-final 18 months later was priceless.

Corner taken quickly….

Toxic Ambition

A certain level of ambition is required to succeed in sport. But if it’s allied to avarice or irrationality, it becomes self-destructive. To win at all costs is to end up cheating, and to undermine the very nature of sport.

One of my other fixations is true crime, and in hundreds of documentaries and hundreds of books I’ve consumed on wrongful convictions, a driving factor was almost always “we need to get a result”.

The police are often culpable, but so are the public and even the victims’ families who, unable to see the hundreds of officers and detective chasing down leads, accuse them of incompetence, of doing nothing, of being indifferent to the death of poor innocent people.

The result: locking up other innocent people (or prior to that, hanging them) whilst other innocent people are subsequently killed by the murderers spared by someone else’s wrongful conviction; all because of a type of PR (“we must be seen to have caught the perp”).

A desire to get a result – to have to win – is to lose your moral compass. Often, the police feel righteous – they know that the young man they just beat the confession out of is guilty (because he looked guilty, smelt guilty, had slightly shifty eyes) – and that kind of righteousness is frightening. Even if that kid was deaf and mute, as in one case from Australia in the early 1960s in a fascinating new series on Sky Crime.

In need of results, athletes start to dope, clubs start to overspend. Again, in business you see those startup sociopaths, who raise billions in phantom dollars for blood-testing kits that are essentially Casio calculators from 1979, or who organise gold-plated music festivals with elite accommodation and cuisine where, in the end, there isn’t even plastic cutlery to go with the Saran-wrapped soggy, cheap cheese sandwiches to eat in the £5 tents pitched near a toxic waste dump. We know of multi-million-dollar startups by beautiful young women with five different types of deadly cancer “apparently” kept at bay by eating prune juice, cheered on by million chorusing “you’re so brave, Belle!” In this shallow era, the slick PR person is even more in their element.

Beware the shiny smiles and the coteries of social media influencers who oversell the dream and nip out the back door when the nightmare comes home to roost. Beware the slick, even if slickness is not itself a crime. Beware the users of all the right buzzwords, because they often disguise empty rhetoric and iffy promises; most normal people don’t talk via a series of buzzwords, and tiptoeing around language makes communicating truth all the harder.

Pay more attention to the boring people who do the boring things.

The grey people.

Live in the real world; don’t trust anyone faking it until they make it, as we are often only shown the few who made it (survivorship bias) and no one sees the bankrupt hellscapes left behind by the majority who just screwed everything up as they didn’t have a clue.

(Note: this is not the same as starting out as a novice, and feeling like you have imposter syndrome; this is about lying your way to the top, on some kind of moral Ponzi scheme, or blowing the budget on fish tanks.)

Liverpool FC, in an understated, often grey way, has been run with real intelligence, in a baffling landscape. People can’t see it. The PR for FSG is often terrible – in that it’s just nonexistent – and people like Michael Edwards and Ian Graham are rarely seen in the media.

As such, people just don’t understand what they do, or they simply refuse to acknowledge that it has worked.

Take this tweet from a BBC sports contributor, which has thousands of likes:

“Raj Chohan @rajsinghchohan Jürgen Klopp is going into a gun fight with a toy pistol. But I still expect him to keep Liverpool in contention. But that credit should go to him, nobody else and certainly not Liverpool’s owners.”

I find this logic fascinating, in how certain people cannot credit the owners with anything.

The owners believed in Michael Edwards a decade ago, after he arrived with Damien Comolli, whom they sacked for various reasons (mainly a lack of communication as to his strategy, based on my discussions with John Henry at the time).

Edwards arrived with Comolli, and later got promoted at Liverpool. They were able to procure Klopp, when other owners or head honchos had turned Klopp’s stomach. Mike Gordon – one of those shadowy grey FSG figures, who does the most work on Merseyside – ‘sold’ the club to Klopp; and even if you think that’s an easy sell, you’d expect Man United to have been a fairly easy sell as well. But no. They fucked up when trying to seduce Klopp, to the point where it sounded like he vomited in his own mouth a little.

So, zero credit to Edwards and his team of analysts, and definitely no credit to the owners who appointed them all?

Just credit to Klopp, and no one else? What kind of warped thinking is that?

I wrote in “Perched”, my book from 2020, that, to me, Klopp is the most important factor at the club, in that he has a unique way to hold together the intelligent analysis behind the scenes, the advanced tactical ideas of his brilliant coaches (that he appointed), and provide the passion for effort – and has the gravitas to demand that ceaseless effort – on the training pitch. He is fiery, but also uniquely practical and level-headed away from the emotion of the game. He is a unifier, a uniter. He’s a winner, but not an egotist. He has charisma, but also self-awareness and humility.

He not only humanises the data, he appreciates the data; he’s an incredibly smart man, but smart enough to know that if he knows 90% about a lot of subjects, he’s stronger with people around him, each of whom know 99% on the specifics.

He is also a realist and a stoic, who knows the realities of working at clubs that don’t have sugar daddy owners, and who actually wants it that way where he works. Richer clubs have wanted him. Why go there? Why not try and do it the hard way, not the easy way?

As JKF said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

This notion of Liverpool taking a toy pistol to a gun fight is so ludicrous, not least as it ignores the entire arsenal absent last season when the Reds still ended the season with eight wins and two draws, with 7th- and 8th-choice centre-backs and half the midfield absent. (And no, the injury crisis was not the fault of FSG!)

Liverpool spent most of last season with an average of £300m of talent (transfer fees adjusted to inflation) absent due to injury. That’s a fact. Spending £200m this summer, that the club doesn’t have, is not as good as having those £300m-worth of players back.

At times, ten or more players were out injured. Just to add those – yes, those players whose wages still had to be paid – whose understanding of team play, when to press, where to be, what to do at set-pieces, how to get along with each other and to respect the team egosystem, is all already inbuilt. You don’t get any of that from a new player, no matter how shiny or expensive.

(Again, Liverpool went five months without a league set-piece goal last season with all their set-piece giants absent. When Virgil van Dijk and Joel Matip play, the average for the team is a staggering goal every three games – often scored by van Dijk, sometimes scored or assisted by Matip, but just as frequently scored by Roberto Firmino, who finds space he cannot when he’s one of the tallest players. As I discussed during the slump, Liverpool’s results last season closely tracked the average height of the team: the smaller, the fewer set-piece goals scored and the more conceded, and for the shortest 10 lineups the Reds fielded, a relegation-threatened points per game; taller in the run-in, even with rookies, and the pattern reversed, to suddenly become elite, with Champions League football secured thanks to six set-piece goals in the final four games, connected to the proximity of various players who were 6’3” or taller – including Alisson Becker!)

Toy pistols? It sounds like the notion of a five-year-old.

What about the adding of the 16-inch main battery warship guns of Virgil van Dijk, Joel Matip, Joe Gomez, Ibrahima Konaté and Jordan Henderson to the team? That’s just five players; five totems, one of them new. You wanna fuck with those guys? Put Fabinho back in the midfield because you have giant but elegant centre-backs, and you wanna make it physical with him and Hendo? Good luck!

To me, many fans are like naive simpletons who scream to a driver: “Go faster!” So the driver goes faster. “Go faster!” So the driver says “this is as fast as the car will go!”

“No, go faster!” Followed by … “Oh shit, we’ve crashed into a fucking tree at 200mph because the engine exploded and wheels flew off, and we’re dead.” (Dead people still get a few minutes to compose a couple of tweets that, alas, they never get to send.)

Social media has reduced people to dumb, limbic-driven click monsters who have no conception of the bigger picture beyond the nanosecond in which they, triggered as hell, unleash a load of self-obsessed nonsense. One of the joys of writing books on this stuff is that you can properly analyse things with all the context you want (and idiots can’t keep interrupting you with dumb replies.).

In some ways I don’t really care if people don’t like the owners, but the lack of objectivity is frightening; as is the desire to fit in on social media and signal your righteousness, ahead of logic, facts, reason and some spirit of finding a mutual understanding. There’s a kind of “proper Liverpool fan” ethos that is a waste of time; you don’t need to signal how much of a fan you are, just use your brain.

History will prove that Liverpool 2018-2020 was one of the best periods for any club in the history of football.

And yet it’s apparently just by accident – given that the transfer budget was based purely on balancing the books – that the Reds rose to those heady heights? It was entirely Klopp’s doing, and everything else was irrelevant?

To suggest it was just Klopp is to ignore a deeply complex system, like saying that it’s the pilot that flies the plane, and that the getting into the air has nothing to do with the fuselage, the wings, the control systems and the engines, which were previously designed and assembled and tested over a decade of development?

The head of Boeing presumably had something to do with the success of the 747, even if he wasn’t the one flying it. The pilot could fly other less-good planes, as other planes were in 1969, and the plane could be flown by other less-good pilots. But perfection (as we saw from 2018-2020) requires a synchronicity between many different factors. Even the best Formula One drivers don’t win in a beat-up Ford Mondeo, no matter how good they are. They don’t design or build their cars, nor fund that development; they don’t do their own tyre changes.

The fantasist fan is of no interest to me. I’ve spent over 20 years dealing with these people; being called a sunshiner by them when I point out the realistic positives, but also find them to be the kind of people who say “we’re gonna beat this shit team 7-0 today” and then meltdown when it’s just 2-0. They’re the kind of people who meltdown about the transfer window (“shit, Everton won the transfer window again, we’re doomed”), and don’t understand the science of team growth and shared understanding.

New players, new players, new players! Feed me, feed me, feed me!

(Er, the best league season – way back in, erm, 2019/20 – in the club’s history saw zero first-team players arrive: just a reserve goalkeeper.)

People’s desires to be either 100% for or 100% against things is also driving the world insane. It’s black-and-white thinking.

I like Donald Trump about as much as I like root canal work done without anaesthetic, and without even a dentist – the procedure performed with rusty pliers by a blind heroin addict who hasn’t shot up in three days, and who has both’s faces.

I also like Boris Johnson about as much as I like Trump.

I could complain about all the things they’ve done wrong, and how they turn my stomach. The list is long. But equally, if they do something right, like getting a vaccine programme up and running on time (or setting the wheels in motion for the next guy to do so), then the truth is that they got a vaccine programme up and running in time; my personal opinion about them as über-arseholes who are an insult to the privilege of still having hair (the bastards), should not alter that fact.

(For the record, I also like and trust Big Pharma about as much as I trust the deranged faux-dentists of this world. They do a ton of stuff that worries me, but also, they have their uses; and the consensus is that vaccinations is a way out of this mess, which, despite possibly ignoring other alternatives that may or may not work, seems a fair enough belief. If vaccines was the goal, then the crazy-haired numpties at least got that part right.)

President Obama once bemoaned the fact that the only time the Republicans didn’t say he was entirely wrong about something was the killing of Osama Bin Laden. But we cannot go around establishing our beliefs in contrast the beliefs or opinions of people we despise, because as tempting as it is (and I know it’s tempting), on the occasions they are right it means we are automatically wrong.

It is not “thinking”. It is tribalism, us vs them, good vs bad, right vs wrong, heroes vs villains. It’s insane.

Anyway, I’m sure Obama did lots wrong, just like anyone else making judgements calls that could prove helpful or hurtful. I could name a few things, a couple of which were amongst the very few things I agreed with the scrotal-faced pubic-haired Trump on when his administration reversed them. (Just as Obama initially opposed gay marriage, which was a position that did not age well; albeit a reversal seen in the public western consciousness based on sound and sympathetic reasoning relating to gay rights prior to everything being done via Twitter, not public shaming or science-rewriting by some rabid activists.)

But equally, the Republicans pretty much only agreed with one single thing Obama did in eight years? And then the Democrats agreed with pretty much nothing Trump did? And now the Republicans agree with pretty much nothing Joe Biden does? This is a kind of mass insanity. It’s how we end up with masks becoming a political football during a pandemic. You may like this version of society, but I do not (hence why I steer clear of social media 99% of the time, and the cost to my business and my profile, but to the benefit of my sanity).

This is not about politics per se, as your politics are your business. It’s a metaphor. (And a metaphor is a glorious thing.) That said, this entire framework – politics as tribalism, rather than weighing up ideas and issues and solutions and principles – has put me off politics (along with the far-right nutters and the far-left cancellers), beyond spending some time pointing out how toxic politics now is. Yet it’s now how we see all issues, in part as all issues are becoming politicised. It’s seeped into football in recent years, and is increasing.

As such, me making a case for the pros and cons of FSG will likely convert no one. Everyone has likely already made up their mind, and this diatribe will likely achieve nothing.

(As such, it hopefully being an interesting read may be the only purpose of the 8,000 words; another reason why we need to be careful of over-policing language, lest it rob us of the last of our joys. I love this inspiring piece by the bipolar writer Freddie deBoer on the actual point of writing and being a writer.)

In fact, this might even annoy some FSG supporters, for whom it is not positive enough (as I list their gaffes) and it will almost certainly annoy those whose binary thinking, with no nuance possible, means they can only see things through the lens of “Them = Good People” and “Them = Bad People”. You don’t have to like nuance, but it fucking well helps if you do.

In other words, you can hate FSG as much as you want, and you can criticise the decisions that they have made: the £77 tickets; the sacking of Kenny Dalglish, or at least the manner of it; the allowing of Colin Pascoe to wear those shorts; the furlough furore; the Project Big Picture and the European Super League clusterfucks (even if those last three were not debated or discussed properly as Twitter went from zero-to-hysteria in 0.0001 seconds, before the benefits they might provide could even be raised as counterarguments – albeit they were also partially self-inflicted PR gaffes due to the shoddy way they were unveiled. I am also not claiming there wasn’t rampant self-interest involved, too; but most compromises mesh rampant self-interest with other people’s rampant self-interest, where each gives up some of their desires, and it requires a dialogue to establish the terms).

But you cannot list all those cockups and then also give them zero credit for taking a financially fucked club, and putting structures in place to find a new way of thinking about football; sacking Roy Hodgson and overhauling the mess of a squad that had fallen to mid-table and below, and was years away from ever hoping to finish top four again; appointing Michael Edwards via Comolli, who in turn, with Ian Graham – another from that same initial bout of data-driven appointments – worked out via what were then cutting-edge analytics that Jürgen Klopp was the man to get at all costs, when his stock was lower after a difficult final season at Dortmund; nearly winning the title with Brendan Rodgers, a left-field appointment that had some ups with all the downs (much like Pascoe’s shorts); rebuilding the Main Stand at Anfield after inheriting a costs-sucking mess of a plan for a new stadium; building a state-of-the-art training complex; getting rid of the dude in the Cuban heels and his lackeys pronto; posting two of the four all-time best league points tallies in English football history; reaching two Champions League finals in incredible fashion, and winning one; commencing the rebuilding of the Anfield Road end, and a general regeneration of the Anfield area; and finally, finishing 3rd in a season with the worst injury crisis in living memory and more VAR overturns than pretty much the rest of the league combined, that extended the run of consecutive top four finishes to five.

Even (not-Scouser) Tommy, the deaf, dumb and blind kid (damn, the Who were ableist), could get a good sense of what’s been achieved, if he wasn’t a fictional pinball player from 1969.

For all their fuckups, on balance, FSG have, to me, done incredibly well.

But at worst, you could call it a mixed bag. After all, no one judges Mo Salah only on the chances he misses. You note the misses, but count the average of 32 goals per season.

However, clearly FSG could be like Wayne Rooney, aged 29: excellent previous 11 years (littered with mistakes), who then ends up finished in surprisingly little time. Or they could be like Zlatan Ibrahimovic, aged 29: excellent previous 11 years (littered with mistakes), but somehow about to score another 322 club goals (362 in total if you add 40 more for Sweden), and win countless trophies, and continuing to swing his dick in changing rooms as he’s about to turn 40. I also like Ibrahimovic about as much as I like my fake dentist, but that’s one of the most amazing 30-something careers in history (and therefore still an outlier).

So, FSG are not done yet, the book on them is not closed. They may Rooney it up, or they may do a Zlatan. (My sense is that they could be more like James Milner, and quietly continue their good work, possibly whilst drinking Ribena; always trust the grey people, but never deal in absolutes.)

You want something to contrast this against?

A trip back to Spain and Kuper’s take:

“Between 2017 and 2021, Messi earned a total of more than €555 million, according to extracts from his 30-page contract published in El Mundo newspaper. Neither Messi nor senior Barcelona officials denied the figure. One senior Barça official told me Messi’s salary had tripled between 2014 and 2020. But he added, ‘Messi is not the problem. The problem is the contagion of the rest of the team.’ Whenever Messi got a raise, his teammates wanted one too.”

Hmm, sounds like a recipe for disaster.

It’s hard to have sympathy for Messi when his craven wage demands drove the club to near financial oblivion, no matter how good he was (and boy was he good).

But wait, weren’t FSG criticised for not giving bigger wages to key men, and for not signing new superstars on mega-bucks because they were too mean to pay the wages that would have destroyed the club’s very smartly managed wage structure?

How many times have I pointed out on this site that the Reds will not bring in someone new on higher wages than those who have historically earned the right to be the best paid? – but will bump their wages if they then earn it? How many times have I spoken of the dangers of raising the bar for one player meaning that others will ask for rises too? The dangers of bringing in an Alexis Sanchez on so much money that, when he’s suddenly not even good enough to be described as ‘utter dogshit’, 23 other players suddenly feel underpaid and demand raises?

Something else?

“Barça’s process for buying players is unusually messy. Rival currents inside the club each push for different signings, often without bothering to inform the head coach. Candidates for the Barça presidency campaign on promises of the stars they will buy if elected.”

While FSG got into a similar bizarre situation with Rodgers and Edwards, that was resolved in 2015, with Klopp and Edwards working in harmony; and who – beyond bonkers fans – wants someone promising who they will bring to Liverpool if elected?

If someone promises me Kylian Mbappé, I worry: how will it be paid for? What would he do to the wage structure, in terms of everyone else asking for a raise? How will a superstar affect the team’s vital egosystem? Will he do the hard yards closing down the opposition? Will he be an Alexis Sanchez, who is both useless on the pitch and unhelpful to the club as a whole? And what if the manager doesn’t want that particular player, but the President is promising that player to the fans?

FSG haven’t taken money out of Liverpool, or saddled it with debt, unlike their predecessors and unlike the Glazers at Man United. They also haven’t pumped much in (in contrast to the petrodollar sportswashers whose wealth is obviously massively greater), but they’ve used their money where possible, including with loans. However, mainly, they made the club self-sustainable, and indeed, very profitable (up to Covid), to enable a higher wage bill, not personal dividends.

Even though it was largely so high due to winning the league, the Reds’ had a high wage bill in 2019/20, as seen by this graph from The Athletic, which was shown to chart Barcelona’s insane wage-bill implosion. The graph should show doubters how FSG, with a low net spent on transfers, have invested money into the wage bill. Look at the dark-green line, that rose to the 4th-highest in Europe that season, before Covid struck.

And even with Covid having taken £100m+ from the club, Liverpool are still financially viable, still moving forward. The Covid storm is still settling for most clubs. It’s set Liverpool back, but it’s not a fatal wound.

Here is Andrew Beasley’s table comparing the Reds’ transfer spending with Barcelona, updated from an article he wrote for TTT:

Walk On?

FSG may still walk on – walk away – with billions in profit at the end, if/when they sell up and move on.

But to me, the same applies to any normal person who buys a house, in terms of the fairness of investments and how they work: the more work you do to it, the better the odds of profiting, especially if the market rises. (If you take the time to pay for planning permission, for architects, for renovators, or you do a ton of DIY, you are essentially earning any later profit.)

If you just ignore the investment, let the house fall into rack and ruin, you may be lucky if the market rises and you make a small profit – but equally, you’re risking nothing, investing nothing and may end up with a pile of rubble.

The same applies to all businesses, and football clubs have to be run like businesses, as a reality. It’s always been the case. No matter how much of football is not, to us, about the business side of things, the business side of things is always underpinning everything else. You can choose to ignore that, but you can also choose to ignore that gravity exists. It makes no difference what you believe.

Anyone who thinks football clubs don’t have to be run like businesses and should be based on emotion can drink Lionel Messi’s tears, for all the good it will do Messi remaining at Barcelona. Bad business decisions meant that the greatest player of all time does not end up a one-club player. His own famously bad business acumen, aided by his agent father, is also to blame. Even offering to halve his wages from £2m per week to £1m per week was not enough, as The Athletic explained:

“Laporta said clearly on Friday that even with Messi’s salary cut, Barcelona’s wages would be at 110 per cent of the club revenues. Best practice — and La Liga rules — demand a ratio of 70 per cent. Even with Messi off the books, wages remain at 95 per cent of revenue and Laporta admitted there was ‘more work to be done’ on persuading some players to accept pay cuts and selling others before Depay, Aguero, Garcia and Emerson can be registered.”

An older graph from the website showed how well Liverpool’s ratio was managed, and the English clubs who are at dangerous levels (albeit the rules over here are different).

So, even FSG selling for a profit wouldn’t be “morally” wrong, especially as they delivered the league title and a Champions League, and some of the best years to be a Liverpool fan, including the madness of 2013/14. (Albeit I’d hope that they could find a way to sell that would continue to benefit the club.)

I don’t mind any owner profiting from selling a club that it has helped improve; I do resent anyone who had come in, done nothing, then doubled their money simply because the TV deals doubled. I resent what the cowboys did, but’s a false equivalence to treat FSG the same. (My favourite false equivalence was an email I received in 2007 saying that Liverpool were dumb in trying to sign Fernando Torres, as Fernando Morientes had been a bust. By this logic, Liverpool should only sign players called Kenny, Bruce, Steven and Xabi.)

Anyway, we shall see. I have some personal experience with FSG, but for years I’ve tried to keep away from club politics, and never contact anyone at the club. (Sometimes someone will contact me, but I try to be objective and not allow myself to be influenced. These days I mostly live as a recluse anyway, which meant lockdowns were not quite as weird for me.)

But what I’ll say, above all else, is that Liverpool have far more than a toy pistol for the new season. (My apologies for singling out that guy and his tweet – he may be a great football thinker otherwise – but if you say stuff like that, with total black-and-white thinking, you are inviting replies that mock your ideas.)

And any success will be due to the interplay between a team of teams: the owners, the data guys, the transfer gurus, the manager, the coaches, the physios and medics and the dieticians, the first-team players, and even the fringe players who help maintain the standards by pushing the others in training, day after day after day, as part of the process of general social-multiplier improvement effects.

To suggest it would “all” be down to the admittedly brilliant and wonderful – and vital – Klopp is an insult to well over 100 other people. (Plus the 55,000 a week at Anfield who may also have some influence.)

Anyway, let’s try and enjoy the new season (radical idea, I know), and not spend the entire time bickering and moaning and wishing the time away, or indulging in excessive schadenfreude. Let’s live in the moment, enjoy what we have, and buckle up for an exciting ride.

Paul Tomkins

Liverpool’s Successful Summer – Squad Harmony and a More Important Type of Signing by Paul Tomkins

2021-09-02T09:20:00.006+08:00

By Paul Tomkins

September 1, 2021In By Paul Tomkins, Free

https://tomkinstimes.com/2021/09/liverpools-successful-summer-squad-harmony-and-a-more-important-type-of-signing/

As I’ve been saying all summer, vital players – often leaders, not just regular footballers – valued at hundreds of millions of pounds have returned from injuries, and the new and often improved contracts to the key personnel was more vital than adding shiny new signings.

Jürgen Klopp has made it clear that he wants unity, stability, and to work with the squad he has assembled. Does he want to waste time having to train new players to do all the things the existing players took years to learn, and from which they will continue to improve and benefit?

Add the one new big buy, Ibrahima Konaté, and the Reds have now tied a staggering 12 first-team squad players down to long-term new deals, and of course, the negotiations don’t have to end with the transfer window; new deals for the Terrific Trident will be negotiated. As it stands, no fewer than 14 of the Reds’ first-team squad are contracted until 2025, and six to 2026 and beyond.

New deals signed so far, with potential first-XI players in bold:

Adrián – 14 June 2021
Caoimhín Kelleher – 24 June 2021
Ibrahima Konaté – 1 July 2021
Harvey Elliott – 9 July 2021
Trent Alexander-Arnold – 30 July 2021
Fabinho – 3 August 2021
Alisson – 4 August 2021
Virgil van Dijk – 13 August 2021
Andy Robertson – 24 August 2021
Jordan Henderson – 31 August 2021
Nathaniel Phillips – 31 August 2021
Rhys Williams – 31 August 2021

Seven of the 12 (thus far) getting new deals this summer started against Chelsea, while Konaté and Kelleher were on the bench. After the £100m+ losses through Covid, there was also the loss of certainty; deals were harder to renegotiate for a club that balances its books until it was clear that fans would be back in the stadia.

The below graphic, by Andrew Beasley, is a stark contrast from just a few months ago, as players get moved from the 2023 line to the right-hand side of the graph. (The aim now is to update as many of those left on the 2023 expiry date, too.)

Stronger Than Ever

I genuinely believe that this is the strongest squad Liverpool have ever had.

Kelleher is a superb young keeper; better than any backup in years. Liverpool have added the prodigious (and giant) Konaté, to provide the best four centre-backs I can recall the club ever possessing.

Nat Phillips has emerged to be the best 5th-choice centre-back at any club that plays a back four (clubs that play three central defenders may have more options, as they need six centre-backs, at least). Phillips was effectively a nobody 12 months ago; now he’s a cult hero. In all the setbacks of last season, he benefited, becoming a proper Premier League player.

Against Chelsea, Liverpool fielded what could be close to a strongest XI, but on the bench were Diogo Jota, Ibrahima Konaté, Thiago Alcántara, Naby Keïta, Joe Gomez, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Takumi Minamino, Kostas Tsimikas and Caoimhín Kelleher. Wow! Has the bench ever been stronger, unless the first-XI players were being rested?

For various reasons, not even in the expanded 20-man squad were Curtis Jones, James Milner, Divock Origi, Nathaniel Phillips, Neco Williams, Rhys Williams and Kaide Gordon (plus Adrián). Many of these are at the level of player who, a couple of years ago, would make the seven-man bench. Now they can’t even make the nine-man bench; and if they did, excellent players would have to drop out.

Ignoring the often mindless obsession with new signings, can you honestly say that Liverpool have ever had a stronger squad? And as I will show, there is more depth and variety than when racking up 97 and 99 league points.

I won’t go into the benefits of how the club is currently run, but you can read more about that in my piece that covered the madness going on at other clubs in 2021, and how it seems that, mostly, it’s the oil-backed clubs that are thriving.

Didn’t replace Gini Wijnaldum?

To me, this is a fallacy, as at the start of last season, Liverpool had Wijnaldum, but no Thiago.

Then Thiago arrived, which could almost be seen as like Liverpool buying John Aldridge six months before Ian Rush left to Juventus. For a while, Liverpool had both players, and then there was only Aldridge for the remarkable 1987/88.

There was no Harvey Elliott either, as a kid sent out on loan. There was Curtis Jones, but he wasn’t really part of fans’ thinking. So, Thiago, Elliott and Jones are now strong parts of the equation that has seen Wijnaldum go. As great as Gini was, that seems like an upgrade overall.

Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain was also missing – out until the second half of the season. Like Naby Keïta, he needed a good fitness guru to sort out his issues; midway through 2020/21 Klopp said Liverpool had hired the “number one in Germany” in new Head of Recovery and Performance Andreas Schlumberger.

The emergence of Jones means a strong 20-year-old midfield option; the signing of Thiago occurred a year before Wijnaldum departed (if Thiago had arrived now, everyone would think Wijnaldum had been replaced!); and the prodigious talents of Elliott suggest that Liverpool have far better midfield options than in the recent past. Jones and Elliott are surely only going to improve.

I think Man United have obviously got a top talent on their hands with Jadon Sancho, and I’m not making the comparison in the longer term, but so far this season, Elliott, aged just 18 and at £3m and a bag of tracksuits, has outshone Sancho, 21, at £73m. Sancho has to learn to fit into United’s system, and to play with the brand new pressure of a £73m price tag, as well as overcoming some disciplinary issues in his career so far (a habit for being late to training or returning from international duty). He’s even played less professional football in England than Elliott.

Again, Sancho may end up as the next Ryan Giggs at United – the lad has ability and pace to burn – but if Elliott keeps playing like he has, and indeed, improves with age and experience (as you’d expect), Liverpool won’t need to have paid £73m for anyone.

Elliott at 18 is good enough to be contesting Man of the Match awards against big bruising Burnley bullies and the European champions; Elliott at 21 could be mind-blowing; especially in a team that he has grown up in, where everyone knows each other’s game. Elliott in just three months’ time could be a step up from what we’ve seen so far.

Again, had Liverpool just paid £47m for Elliott from a Bundesliga team – after he was rated as one of the best five teenagers in Europe last season – then everyone would be overjoyed. It’s all a question of framing and anchoring: frame things the wrong way, because of anchoring to a certain idea, and you can miss the glorious reality.

Take it further. If, this summer, Liverpool had paid £350m for van Dijk, Matip, Gomez, Thiago, Jota, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Jordan Henderson and Keïta – who missed huge chunks of last season, if not virtually all of it – then people would view things very differently. Even better than new players, they are integrated players. (A reminder: Jota played only a third of the available league minutes.)

There’s this idea that new is always better; but the most comfortable shoes are the ones you’ve been wearing for a while; ones that, day after day, increasingly suit the shape of your feet. If they’re not falling apart at the seams, they are perfect. New ones that look better but give you blisters are not exactly ideal.

Not enough strikers?

Again, Liverpool’s strikers in the first half of the record-breaking, title-winning season were Mo Salah, Roberto Firmino, Sadio Mané and Divock Origi, with the much-melted Daniel Sturridge having left after playing a very small part on the road to winning the Champions League the season before.

Taki Minamino arrived, and has yet to really fire, but is now probably finally used to English football. He is what most good squad players are: talented, eager and professional, but humble enough to bide his time. (He scored the same number goals for Liverpool in the first half of last season than Sturridge, a superb finisher, managed in a full final season of 27 appearances.)

However, the key addition has been Diogo Jota, who scores non-penalty goals faster than any other Liverpool attacker; even more regularly than Salah. The main three have insane fitness records, which makes it hard for understudies to settle into the team, but Jota is so good that it’s any three from four.

Divock Origi remains, and I want to point out how easy he is to overlook. He didn’t feature in 2018/19 until December (and that goal), and only really got a run of games in the run-in, where he was vital. Then the season ended. Ditto 2015/16 when he ended the season on fire, until he had his leg broken. Each time the next season started with Salah, Firmino and Mané, and why wouldn’t it? Indeed, he scored against Norwich in the opening game of 2019/20, and was still dropped. It’s tough, but that’s life.

Origi almost never gets a run of games to get fitter, sharper and stronger, and to relax into the role (anyone who has played sport knows that it’s easier if you get a run of games and just relax, rather than trying too hard with every rusty rare start or six minutes as a sub). He never gets to find playing rhythm, as a consequence of the Terrific Trident having played over 500 games for the Reds between them. Few players would look good playing only once a month. When Origi has had a run of games he hasn’t let the team down; far from it. Again, he was absolutely irrelevant at the start of December 2019, yet came to define that season. That’s how it can work with Klopp: players come in from the cold and, if they get a run of games after some shaky moments, do the business. See Nat Phillips and Rhys Williams last season.

Liverpool have better striking options than in 2018/19 and 2019/20, the two best seasons in the club’s recent history (and possibly its entire history, given the points tallies involved and the European Cup). Now, rival clubs are spending £100m at a pop on their strikers, or bringing superstars in on £500,000-a-week – but Liverpool can’t do that.

If you live life with a compare and despair attitude, it will wear you down. Liverpool cannot stop what their rivals do. Going into debt to keep up with the Joneses is a dumb way to live.

When the Reds spend nothing in 2020, Man City spent £120m on two players; and had a bad season. Those two players did much better in 2020/21, once settled. Buying for the sake of it helps no one; see Man United’s panicky usurping of Alexis Sanchez from Man City, who did far more harm to United than good.

People never get it, but you can subtract when you add: you can lose cohesion, shared understanding, and you can see the wage bill distorted by a new arrival. Sanchez not only failed, but he pissed off all the other players, who wanted pay rises, to match his mega-deal.

I learnt this lesson in 1997, when I felt Paul Ince’s grit would help the Reds’ midfield; but the loss of John Barnes’ 99%-possession meant Ince was often winning tackles just to retrieve balls he lost. Ince had qualities, but Liverpool were no better overall, because in adding Ince’s steel they lost control of the games.

Egos-A-Go-Go

Anything you add into an ecosystem can change that ecosystem in unexpected ways, and anything you add into football’s egosystem can change that egosystem. It’s much easier to disrupt an utterly united group of players than to improve it.

New players can upset the applecart, disrupt the wage structure, and cause all kinds of issues, if they are not right; and finding the right players is not easy. Liverpool’s transfer success this past decade or so has been due to limiting their own options, to avoid toxic talent; Brendan Rodgers took a gamble on Mario Balotelli, and rather than help, he helped ruin a season. He ruined training. He ruined the atmosphere. He was a good laugh at times, but a pain in the arse more often.

A lot of players fail the Reds’ current “no dickheads” test, but it’s not just the players: parents or siblings who are overbearing in inserting themselves into the picture; agents who are disruptors, eager to constantly cause unrest to move their players on; entourages who get in the way of the actual football. Liverpool avoid dickhead players, but also dickhead families, dickhead agents, dickhead entourages. Dickheads are distractions, after all.

Instead, the Reds make fewer signings, but develop the players via a system of intense training, world-class coaching, clear-eyed tactical visions and shared values and understandings.

For example, at the end of last season people told me Kostas Tsimikas was garbage; but a proper preseason, after a year of adjustment, and he’s a different proposition. Just wait, I told people four months ago. He could yet adjust. The more time with this group of players, playing in this league, training intensely every day, under Klopp and Pep Lijnders’ tutelage (having overcome Covid and a bad knee injury), and see what happens.

Now, Man United are getting all the headlines for re-signing Cristiano Ronaldo, who was clearly one of the great of the English game first time around. (I can’t stand the guy, but he was brilliant for them, after a slowish start.)

But he’s nearly 37 now, and instantly the top-earner at a club where others will work harder.

When you buy an ageing superstar who does no running on the pitch, you have to factor in what you lose, as well as what you may gain.

As noted above, every player you add has the ability to not just improve things but also to subtract from the team, when the sport is maxed out at 11 players; each new signing has to replace someone whose qualities may be missed, but the key is if the new addition may add more.

Individually the big new name may thrive, and their presence may give others a lift. They’ll sell more shirts, for certain.

But if you buy a player who is on too much money, and is too high-profile to drop despite being in the melt-zone, what then? In fairness, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and others have defied Father Time exceptionally well, but older players come with more risks. Any player can get a serious injury, but only players in their 30s tend to “melt”. Phasing out iconic players is almost always a messy affair.

Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi still score a lot of goals (albeit from taking a lot of shots and penalties that other players could be taking), but they do the least work of any strikers.

In a team sport, you lose the pressing and the running into spaces, and football is not like basketball where an individual can carry a team.

Big names can inspire, but they can also hog the ball, hog the limelight, and unbalance the egosystem. Too many big egos and a squad becomes a powder keg.

Plus, how do you phase out a superstar whose legs are going, and who won’t take kindly to some kind of managed decline? (It went badly with Steven Gerrard at Liverpool, while Kenny Dalglish had the luxury of managing his own reduction in playing time, as the boss.)

Ronaldo is in great shape, but can it really last that much longer? Maybe, but the odds are that it won’t.

In that sense, are some clubs signing impending problems, rather than solutions?

Attack!

A low-key signing made back in February (ancient history, which means it doesn’t count) could prove another gem within the next 12 months. And while he may not feature much in the league in 2021, Kaide Gordon is the best 16-year-old Liverpool have had in donkey’s years; with the exception of Harvey Elliott.

I also see zero decline in Sadio Mané, with his pace and ability to go past players clear, and his goalscoring form at the end of last season, in preseason, plus a goal already in the Premier League, suggest there’s no decline. He looks as good as ever – and that’s a one-in-three scorer who does so much more than that. He’s sharp, inventive, hard-working, and stretches teams. His pace hasn’t dropped one bit.

Strikers’ seasonal tallies often vary, and he doesn’t take penalties (or even free-kicks) to bolster his numbers and get him out of dry spells. If he’d taken (and scored) Liverpool’s penalties last season, no one would mention that he doesn’t score enough goals; ditto Roberto Firmino, who also ended last season on fire, had a great preseason, and had scored in the league already before what seems a minor hamstring injury.

Both had a confidence dip in front of goal last season but their attacking play often remained excellent. If you only judge players by their goals you miss all the ways they help others to score and to win games. And last season they were playing in much-weakened XIs, lacking leaders, and all the set-piece giants.

(Again, the correlation between Firmino scoring from set-pieces and Liverpool fielding giant centre-backs is clear, as I showed several times last season, prior to him scoring from set-pieces once Liverpool switched to the giant Rhys Williams and the bonkers, ball-nutting Phillips. Only van Dijk has scored more set-piece goals for the Reds than Firmino since the summer of 2018, and both are in double figures. But without the big guys, Firmino, at 5’11”, becomes easier to mark and nullify. And people don’t tend to notice that quite a few of his goals come when Virgil van Dijk and Joel Matip are being crowded and fouled, or when someone like Rhys Williams, just via his presence, was dragging several men away.)

I know I’ve gone over this ground before this summer, but the story never changes: Liverpool have to buy new players is the constant mantra.

No. Liverpool are a team built on small numbers of signings, gradual integration, extreme professionalism and motivation, and improved interplay; within a tightly-managed and heavily incentivised wage structure that seriously rewards success, and not mediocrity.

Indeed, after the hell of last winter – endless lockdown, soulless stadia, never-ending injury list and for Klopp, the death of his mother and a funeral he could not attend due to Covid restrictions (ditto Alisson and his father) – and we should be counting our blessings that Klopp is still at the club, as I feared he looked close to burnout. (As we all did, often without those added stresses.)

In time there will need to be new signings, and maybe some shakeups behind the scenes, but for now the squad remains at a great age. And it can be a gradual evolution over the next couple of years.

It’s easy to want new things, but in the case of Klopp, and players like Alisson and various others, a proper break to recharge and decompress may be the most valuable benefit of the summer. As ever – such as the total fanbase meltdown when Coutinho was sold, and when the club preferred to wait five months for van Dijk instead of signing someone else, and when people thought Andy Robertson was a waste of £8m, and the lack of a ‘proper’ signing before 2019/20, etc. – it’s often best to wait and see.

Paul Tomkins

How the Autopsy of LFC’s Black Swans Became a Celebration of Overcoming the Odds by Paul Tomkins

2021-05-28T09:43:00.000+08:00

By Paul Tomkins

May 26, 2021In Black Swan, By Paul Tomkins, Free, In-Depth Analysis

The “Black Swan”: that event so freakishly rare you rarely see them.

As I’ve noted throughout the season, pretty much the only swans seen at Liverpool Football Club in 2020/21 were of the jet-black variety (with all the sheep mysteriously that variety too). In this bizarro world, perhaps there has been a proliferation of white widow spiders, white crows and white jaguars; and of course, throw in some pink giraffes and green elephants, just to make it all the more trippy.

I had been preparing to point out how these Black Swans killed Liverpool’s Champions League qualification hopes, and yet despite more setbacks than you’d probably expect in 20 seasons, the Reds clawed their way back from the brink of mid-table, to finish 3rd. They did so minus all their senior centre-backs – fielding their 7th and 8th choices – and their leader and captain, amongst other absentees in the run-in; having had long-term injuries to various other players.

It will never be Jürgen Klopp’s most celebrated achievement, but it could be his most impressive.

Indeed, as the corpses of Black Swans littered the Anfield area in this era of plague and pestilence, we got to see something even rarer: a flying Golden Griffin, complete with gloved talons, as Alisson Becker channeled his inner mythic beast to head home the goal that potentially earned the Reds in excess of £50m and, more importantly, the cachet of elite football – and most vital of all, the chance to win next year’s Champions League (or, to at least enjoy some big Anfield nights that transcend the “ropey” league).

The Golden Griffin swooped, and for the first time in nearly 6,000 games of football in Liverpool’s history, and perhaps getting close to 100,000 top-flight games in England since the inception of league football in Victorian times, a goalkeeper scored the winning goal in a game (as well as, I believe, becoming the first to score at that level with a header – most of them have been long clearances that caught the wind).

In that moment the last living Black Swans fell from the sky, dropping dead to the ground.

Diagnosing Disaster

Working out what was going wrong – in a football sense – in a season when so many factors were having an influence was almost impossible. I compared it to trying to diagnose one specific illness from an inexhaustible list of symptoms.

People would pick one simplistic (and often incorrect) thing and focus on it: “Thiago slows Liverpool down”.

Yet this didn’t explain why, during the midseason slump, the Reds were still creating good chances from open play – just a) missing them (was that Thiago’s fault?); but b) no longer creating them from set-pieces (and he neither took the corners, nor was expected to be on the end of them).

This is an image from a few months ago, at the peak of the “Thiago slows Liverpool down” nonsense. You can barely see his name, as he’s almost literally off the top of the chart.

They saw the addition of Thiago coinciding with the slump, but didn’t note the loss of the third and final major centre-back as a far more decisive moment; especially at a time when Nat Phillips and Rhys Williams had one Premier League start between them. At that point, Liverpool were top of the league.

Both came into the side and had harrowing games that perhaps suggested they were not ready for the deep end; but while they appeared to be drowning, they were simply learning to swim in public. Fabinho (and even Jordan Henderson) at centre-half made sense in that the others did not appear ready; Ozan Kabak, who arrived in an emergency deal, was himself only 20, and he had to get up to pace with the Premier League with zero time to adjust. (He did very well considering, even if he didn’t quite convince the higher-ups at Liverpool that he was ready for a permanent deal.)

Thiago had his ups and downs this season, after returning from open-knee surgery performed by a snarling Brazilian, but slowing Liverpool down was never true. He made too many fouls, and at times his lack of pace (and fitness after injury) caused optical alarm (he appeared to be too sluggish), but he always made the ball do more forward-thinking work than any other midfielder in the country. And as the season progressed, he increasingly bossed games. Vitally, he was able to have a bodyguard in Fabinho – although he continued to battle for the ball and win a surprising number of headers.

Such an explanation – Thiago was the problem – ignored that lack of stability at the other end, with a different goalkeeper and centre-back pairing almost every game. Liverpool used twenty different centre-back pairings, and thirty different rearguard trios (GK-CB-CB).

Such narratives ignored ten or twenty other important factors.

They ignored that injuries to the two main goalscoring midfielders from open play: Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Naby Keïta; the two who would run ahead of the strikers.

That pair also happen to be elite pressers, too (Keïta remains the best at the club, but he needs to get an injury specialist to sort him out. He remains a fantastic player, but at this stage cannot be relied upon. I wouldn’t write him off, but I wouldn’t bank on him either. My view is that you try to limit the churn in the transfer market, and work on getting talented fringe players to challenge for starting berths; as seen at Manchester City this season, with İlkay Gündoğan, John Stones and João Cancelo, amongst others whose form completely switched this season).

Another elite presser was Diogo Jota, the league’s best marksman in terms of shots on target per game, who missed three months. Indeed, Liverpool had just two games where a total of four serious long-term knee injuries were sustained. These two games alone cost Liverpool c.100 appearances (from Virgil van Dijk, Thiago, Jota and Tsimikas: three major players, and one much-needed backup).

The narrative ignored how Liverpool were not being given penalties (an ongoing trend), but were conceding them at an unusually high rate (a new trend). Despite doing two thirds of the attacking, the Reds conceded more penalties than they won.

The four teams vying with Liverpool for the top four each won between 9-12 league penalties, ranking #1-4. Liverpool ranked joint 7th, level with several other clubs, to mean that every single season has seen Klopp rank lower on penalties won than league position (as did Rafa Benítez), while every single season in the top flight has seen Brendan Rodgers rank higher in penalties won than league finish.

While that may be merely coincidental in Rodgers’ case, there is this very weird pattern where not only do British players get favoured in both boxes by referees (based on in-depth studies we’ve undertaken), but the teams of British managers seem to fare much better too – it certainly applies to Liverpool: Benítez, lower every year; Rodgers, higher every year (ditto Dalglish and Hodgson); Klopp, lower every year.

(The absolutely scandalous diving by Jamie Vardy explains some of this recent trend: the most egregious one I’ve ever seen was how he grabbed Davison Sanchez’s arm and then threw himself to the ground. What next? Vardy to get hold of a centre-back’s hand and thrust it into his face, to pretend he’s just been punched? All teams have players who go down easily, but this is some new-level conniving, that the VAR inexplicably failed to recognise, when all neutrals could see it a mile off.)

For the second season running a relegated team won more penalties than Liverpool, who had the best attacking xG figures in the top division.

Again, this makes no logical sense. (And no opposition player has been sent off at Anfield for several years now; Jordan Ayew continued the trend of players staying on despite at least two bookable offences.)

One thing we studied on this site was how officials from the north-west show a clear bias against Liverpool, and that the closer to Liverpool their hometown, the more biased they are; as if it’s a bend-over-backwards bias that is so prevalent in modern society (trying too hard to look unbiased, as the optics are all the counts).

With subscriber “CVT” and old friend Rob Radburn, we created this interactive chart (click this link for the longer and fully interactive version):

As you will see from the full version, the three least generous refs are all examples of officiating Liverpool matches, and most referees – when it comes to their treatment of Liverpool – rank towards the foot of the table. The only active referee who is even remotely generous to Liverpool is Michael Oliver, whilst the older the refs are (and the more north-west their place of origin), the worse things get on average.

(Note: data was correct up to March, and as such, no further penalties or red cards were awarded in Liverpool’s favour. In fairness, Anthony Taylor did award one, but Paul Tierney overruled it.)

This overly harsh treatment by north-west refs would explain why, in a season when north-west refs did most of their games due to Covid-19, the officiating got even more punishing. While we must all be aware of our own biases (mine are pretty clear!), we must also be aware of bias overcorrections, which are about appeasing the masses, and not being honest. We have to correct for our biasses, but not overcorrect to look virtuous and just.

Outrage on social media leads to a lot of accusations of bias in all areas of life (and sport), and so people veer towards anti-bias virtue signalling. People will accuse Mike Dean of favouring Liverpool, yet he remains a nightmare for the Reds in terms of big decision balance (excluding VAR interventions). Dean gives tons of penalties, but he’s given none for Liverpool, and two against (one was outside the box, but he gave the foul).

My aim has always been to mine the data, not work on raw emotion (although I also tweet some absolute horseshit in times of high stress, which, along with the toxic nature of social media in general, is part of the reason why I try to avoid those places these days. It thrives on our worst instincts).

Anthony Taylor, from Manchester, has bottled some big decisions for Liverpool (most famously at Man City in 2019), but has awarded the Reds a healthy six penalties, albeit with one overturned by the VAR from Wigan. While we may recall the Vincent Kompany assault on Salah that only resulted in a yellow card (and helped tip the title in City’s favour) and think he’s biased against Liverpool, he’s actually a fair ref, according to the data. Again, the optics are what we remember – the high-profile events. The data is what reveals the bigger picture.

I would put Taylor with Oliver and Andre Marriner as the only three refs who are even vaguely fair to Liverpool. (The Premier League and the PGMOL may be aware of which referees favour which teams when appointing them. It certainly felt like they were trying to handicap Liverpool this season, to the point where favourable refs were replaced at the last moment by unfavourable refs in the run-in. That’s not to say it’s a conspiracy, just that I wouldn’t necessarily trust either the Premier League or the PGMOL, with their rampant self-interests.)

Liverpool had to dig themselves out of a hole without a single penalty after early February, which was itself the only penalty since December 13th, as refs and VARs otherwise dished them out left, right and centre. As ever, Michael Oliver was the only referee who gave Liverpool a vaguely logical number of penalties, based on the data. He gave the Reds three this season, and all were correct decisions; no other ref gave more than one.

The simplistic narratives ignored the lack of a home crowd, which turned Liverpool’s best-ever home record (four years without defeat, which still applies if you exclude three-quarters of a season in an empty stadium) into the club’s worst-ever run, in a season which – for the first ever time across the whole top flight – saw more away wins than home wins. Burnley also suffered their worst ever home run, and Everton and Manchester United had their worst home runs for many, many decades. Manchester City won the league, and lost a fairly hefty four of 19 games at home; yet adding together the previous three title winners (Liverpool, City and City) saw just two home defeats in 57 league games in those three seasons. So, the lack of crowd was clearly a big factor too.

Simple one-fact narratives don’t even cover the way the Reds’ preseason – already truncated – was thrown into chaos by last-minute changes to the training camp location due to Covid issues. They do not cover the lack of fitness in the squad as a result, and how, with up to a dozen injuries at a time, rotation was harder; and therefore fatigue in the middle of the campaign became an issue for some players in a more heavily-packed schedule.

Andy Robertson desperately needed cover, but his cover got Covid and then a serious knee injury; and when his cover was fit again, Klopp essentially admitted he couldn’t really change much of the core of the team, due to the ever-changing centre-back pairings. The manager could have given more minutes to Kostas Tsimikas had it not been two rookie centre-halves, who needed Robertson’s know-how alongside them, and a settled midfield ahead of them.

Robertson was clearly knackered, but normal rotation was out, as Klopp strove for stability. And he was proven correct to do so, albeit in a gamble that could have gone either way (as is the case with all judgement calls).

The simple narratives do not include the insane balance of VAR calls that went against the Reds, mainly in the periods when the team was struggling. Seven decisions went in their favour, but a whopping thirteen went against. Of these 13, some were as clear as day – but about half were scarcely believable.

I’m not being wise after the event. I have been tracking these things all season on TTT, with the help of Andrew Beasley, Daniel Rhodes and others. This has been a shocking outlier of a season, and the notion that these were Mentality Midgets and not Mentality Monsters has been disproved beyond all doubt.

The Biggest Factor

But if I had to pick one single factor – or rather, the biggest contributing factor – then aside from often lacking so many world-class players (whose value often exceeded £300m, which meant the Reds had more financial investment in the treatment room than on the pitch), I’d say that a lack of height (itself due to those injuries) was killing the Reds.

Possession stats had not changed much, open-play xG stats had not changed much, referees were still not giving Liverpool many penalties, but set-pieces at both ends (and an inability to win headers in the middle of the park) were – to my mind – behind the slump against big-bastard teams.

They just happened to be the “smaller” clubs, which incorrectly implied that the Reds just weren’t up for it; but these little clubs had the tall, bodybuilder players that overpowered Liverpool’s technicians in the absence of the Reds’ enforcers (and fair refereeing).

They played aerial percentage football that was Liverpool’s Achilles heel (if only there was an Achilles head). These alehouse units played the kind of football that Joel Matip, Virgil van Dijk and Fabinho (as a midfielder) were brought in to combat.

The most simple are startling statistic I can find is the disparity between when Liverpool – overall the shortest team in the league this season (and by an even greater margin when you look only at outfield players) – were at their smallest, and when they were at their tallest (which wasn’t even within an inch of the average of the tallest side, Manchester United).

“Shortest Liverpool” had relegation form, over a run of 13 games. PPG: 0.8, or 29.2 for the season. Or, the same as Fulham.

“Taller Liverpool” had league-winning form, over a run of 25 games. PPG: 2.3, or 89.7 for the season. Or, better than Manchester City.

It’s that simple. (Even if it’s not really that simple, as nothing ever is.)

But the stats really are that startling.

(Another thing: Man City added height to their team this season, and fielded taller centre-backs than last season, and Rodri won an absolute ton of headers, to rank 4th in the entire division, while John Stones has improved in the air with age and experience, and ranked in the top 10.)

However, which Premier League player ended the season winning the most aerial duels as a percentage? Rhys Williams.

Which player’s inclusion in the team suddenly increased the set-ball threat at the other end? Rhys Williams.

Nat Phillips, four years his senior, is clearly more aggressive, and goes for less-winnable duels, and helps in this regard too, as he’s in the top 75 percentile for centre-backs; but Williams is just bloody tall.

Williams won over 82% of his duels, and he contested almost 40. That is an elite figure, and the only player I’ve seen better it in recent years is Joel Matip, with 90% last season (from 46 duels).

Who ranked 2nd last season? Virgil van Dijk, at 80%. Who ranked 1st the season before? Virgil van Dijk.

As good – and honest – as Ozan Kabak has been, he’s just 6’1″. He won just 55% of his aerial duels this season, and whilst Fabinho is good in the air for a midfield (in that he’s tall for a midfielder), he’s substandard in the air as a centre-back. (Indeed, he doesn’t even go up for corners anymore.)

Most young players improve in aerial duels as they get more experienced and beef up a bit. Their timing improves, their ability to use their body improves, and they gain power from the gym. But height seems key. (Note: as ever, set-piece goals exclude penalties.)

Williams was also standing right next to Roberto Firmino in December when the Brazilian headed that remarkable winner against Spurs. That was the last set-piece goal the Reds would score until Williams returned to the side for the final five league games.

The Reds won all five, and scored their first set-piece goal for five months. Coincidence?

They also scored their 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th set-piece goals since the game after that Spurs fixture back in 2020.

Coincidence?

This was after an admittedly Black Swan run of no set-piece goals for five months. There was one more set-piece goal after Firmino’s against Spurs in December: the next game, when Mo Salah headed home. This was also Matip’s last full game, and Matip – 6’5″ – headed the assist, before he got injured again in the next game at West Brom (when Liverpool threw away a 1-0 lead after his exit, and the slump started).

According to Andrew Beasley, between Salah’s goal against Crystal Palace and Diogo Jota’s at Old Trafford, there was a gap of 2,383 minutes and 91 set-piece shots without a goal, across a shit-ton (my technical term) of free-kicks and 183 corners. The quality of the balls into the box wasn’t necessarily different, as both full-backs played all these games – albeit after Covid and injuries, Trent Alexander-Arnold was looking sluggish. The balls were whipped into the danger areas, and Liverpool had no height to contest them. Smaller players can score from set-pieces, but rarely if the opposition’s tallest players have no tall players to mark, so mark them instead.

That five-month drought saw Liverpool field mostly shorter centre-back pairings, and that meant an increase in set-piece goals conceded, too. The dip in height correlates directly with the slump in results, albeit height won’t have been the only factor; it just feels like the main factor to me.

While I haven’t done so, if you overlaid the league table, it might look quite similar! The Reds started the season as the best team (and were top until all the senior centre-backs fell to injury), and ended the season as the best team.

As I said, surely other factors applied, including that the stand-in centre-backs were not always specialist centre-backs (and when the average was lower earlier in the season it was with the elite-paced Joe Gomez, 6’2″), but from the ten league games where the Reds fielded centre-backs who averaged below 188cms in height, they took just 0.6 points per game, with just one win: against West Ham away. Centre-back pairings 188cm or taller resulted in title-winning form.

Now, I admit that this is an area of fascination for me, but I’m not cherry-picking the data.

For many years I’ve been talking about the importance of aerial duels in English football. I started focussing on it in 2015, when the Reds were the smallest team, and the worst in the air by some distance.

It’s even more important if your strikers and midfielders are superb but small. You wouldn’t swap Mo Salah for Ashley Barnes because one is a giant bodybuilder and the other is 5’9″, but if over 30% of goals are from set-pieces, then you end up essentially gifting results to the opposition if you cannot compete on them. Brendan Rodgers tried to add height in Christian Benteke, but it was at the expense of quality. (Benteke was excellent at Aston Villa until he suffered a serious injury that robbed him of pace.)

Remember, Liverpool’s 13 shortest starting XIs in 2020/21 scored zero set-piece goals, and conceded five, and had relegation-form results.

You don’t need a tall team per se, but you need four or five tall players to handle the aerial onslaughts. This is why Man City bought Rodri, and Stones scored four goals as well as improving defensively. In the last two seasons they have bought several players who are 6ft or taller.

Rhys Williams – as tall as Joel Matip, and aged just 19 until fairly recently – started seven Premier League games, and the Reds won six of them. The Reds scored a staggering c.60% of their set-piece goals in these seven games (and the other 40% came via goals or assists by van Dijk and Matip). The age of 19/20 is an absolute baby for centre-backs, where almost all players (especially what I call Slow Giants) start to look the part at 24/25.

Williams and Phillips both clearly lack pace, and both lack experience. Both are Slow Giants, and the last thing you want is to pair a Slow Giant with a Slow Giant. So how did they succeed? It seems that Liverpool had enough quality, just not enough height. Ozan Kabak and Fabinho are quicker than both, yet it seemed that height was the missing factor.

While Phillips seems to be the chaos-monster, Williams is the unmarkable object. Phillips’ aggression helps, without doubt. He’s the one that goes looking for the duels, and will head a 50-50 even if the ball is on the ground. But Williams is just a giant, and one who will surely only improve in the air with time spent on the pitch (and in the weights room). I was lucky enough to be at Anfield on Sunday, and I really appreciated his composure and touch, as well as how he caused chaos in the Crystal Palace area (and Palace are one of the league’s tallest teams, as well as being its oldest. You can count on Roy Hodgson bequeathing a team aged 30 to his successor, time after time).

Incredibly, Roberto Firmino has now outscored Virgil van Dijk from set-pieces since the summer of 2018, albeit van Dijk has played only two full seasons in that time.

But Firmino cannot score from set-pieces without a giant or two to act as distractions. It doesn’t even need an elite aerial threat like van Dijk; it just needs some bloody tall kid, to get in the mix. Being 6’4″ or 6’5″ makes a huge difference to aerial win percentages, and it makes flick-ons at corners all the more likely. Years ago I worked out that the best aerial win percentages belong, on average, to the very tallest players (if you group them by height), and they fall in line with every inch lost in height.

Peter Crouch was not a wonderful technical header of the ball, nor could he jump that high. But he was (and presumably still is) 6’7″, and thus scored the most headed goals in the modern era.

When Firmino headed home the diagonal free-kick against Man United a few weeks ago, Williams was initially standing right next to him, taking up the attention of three tall United players, despite the fact that Williams has no clear aerial ability in terms of heading at goal (as we saw when unmarked this weekend). Three men on (or near) Williams left one player (Paul Pogba) half-marking Firmino at the far post as he stole a march.

Below is Firmino heading home against Spurs, with Williams (ducking) helping him to create a two-on-one.

When Liverpool broke through against Palace at the weekend, it was Williams heading the ball on to Firmino after getting above the tall Cheikhou Kouyaté; perhaps by accident, but there they were again, the same pair linking up. Kouyaté failed to jump, and tried to foul Williams, to no avail. He did stop Williams from heading at goal, but the ball fell to Firmino.

Williams was involved in the set-piece goal against United – before Firmino’s – that broke the five-month drought. He was the one who was challenged by David de Gea and not one but two United defenders, which meant space for other players. Three United players against Williams, and the ball fell to Mo Salah in space in the box.

Williams also helped win the penalty from a corner that was bizarrely overruled (yes, Eric Bailly won the ball, but it was not won cleanly, and the follow-through was extreme – far more of a penalty than Fabinho’s challenge outside the box against Sheffield United!).

At 0-0 at Burnley, Williams headed down from a corner and Phillips somehow volleyed over. It was a golden chance. Williams didn’t even need to jump.

When Mané set up the vital second goal in that game, from a 2nd-phase corner, he lofted the cross directly over Williams’ head at the near post, as the Reds’ no.46 stood surrounded by Burnley players; in snuck an unmarked Phillips to finally show that he can be a threat in the opposition box too, after various wild attempts.

All this is under the radar, with Phillips and Mané getting the plaudits; yet Williams is taking up the attentions of half the home team. You could argue, via the image below, that five players are stationed to deal with Williams, and just one (Ben Mee) has to mark both Phillips and Firmino, as well as being one of the five in a position to challenge Williams (whilst Salah lurks at the back post too).

And when Williams went off late-on against West Brom, it was the Reds’ 6’4″ keeper, challenging for the ball along with the aggressive Reds’ 6’3″ heading-machine, that won the game and essentially banished the Black Swans. There was a height overload at the back post, and it turned Liverpool’s fortunes around, and gave us the best moment of the season by far.

While delivery is obviously important, height is absolutely vital at attacking set-pieces – and sometimes it can be the goalkeeper, too. It’s similar to how a quick striker often just needs a half-decent through-ball and he can turn it into a killer pass: a tall player doesn’t necessarily need the perfect cross.

It’s hard to quantify how much better Thiago did with “bodyguards”, but he started the season looking sublime in a team containing van Dijk, Fabinho and Henderson, and then had a slump in a short-arsed midfield, with issues at centre-back.

One other issue during the slump was just how bad the Reds’ finishing was, but this was also partly linked to height and set-pieces. Remember, Firmino gets a lot of his goals as the free man when taller Liverpool players are being marked. He’s the one that finds the space. A lack of set-piece goals put more pressure on the strikers, and for a while they were weighed down. At the other end, the Reds conceded from set-pieces, and conceded penalties that cost a lot of points.

The law of averages suggested Liverpool’s fortunes in front of goal would change, and they did. Sometimes you just have to ride out the storm. Next season, Liverpool should have elite tall players back in the team, as well as (hopefully) other players being fit again. But now, the Reds also have Williams and Phillips, two rookies who helped transform the season. The worst season in a decade turned into one of the best run-ins, and in the absence of up to a dozen players at a time, new heroes were born.

Part Two

Some crazy Black Swan stats, many compiled by Andrew Beasley, often at my request.

Injuries

Defensive Chaos

Penalties Won

Officiating and VAR

Quick Officiating Lowlights Reel via Twitter

(Complete with terrible music)

https://twitter.com/lverpull/status/1396792221559558147?s=21

Summary

The Golden Griffin killed all the Black Swans.

The end.

This is a free article, but The Tomkins Times has existed since 2009 due to paid subscribers who take part in the troll-free paywalled debate (and get access to subscriber-only material), so see details below on how to sign up. Also, we have a free Substack newsletter that sends highlights from TTT to your inbox, which you can register for here.

Paul Tomkins

A Damning Indictment of English Referees Regarding Foreign Players by Paul Tomkins

2021-03-31T14:18:00.001+08:00

https://tomkinstimes.com/2021/03/a-damning-indictment-of-english-referees-regarding-foreign-players/

By Paul Tomkins

March 30, 2021In By Paul Tomkins, Deep Dive, Free, In-Depth Analysis

I have spent the past month working continually on a project to assess the fairness of referees, including various potential biases they may have, and which players and teams they seem to favour and which they seem to punish.

I am still unsure of when to publish the whole study, for which, with the help of various people, I’ve mined tons of data.

As well as with TTT’s regular writers (including Andrew Beasley), I have been working with a high-level graduate of Harvard and Oxford who works as a project leader at one of the world’s biggest businesses (TTT subscriber CVT123), as well as another academic currently at Oxford University, on the findings. (With erstwhile Tableau Zen Master Robert Radburn doing some data visuals, in addition to my more simple spreadsheet outputs.) Basically, it could now easily make for an academic study, and having been asked about considering that route, I’m currently pondering whether to take it to that level.

Having been driven to distraction by the officiating these past few seasons, and the apparently botched introduction of VAR (albeit some teething problems are to be expected), I wanted to actually find out if my frustrations were based on reality. I’m sure the same applies to the others who helped with this study. I’m sure we all have our own biases too, but the data has to be allowed to speak for itself. No subjective data was used. The only subjectivity was by the officials.

In the past month I’ve written several 5,000-word pieces that are still gathering metaphorical dust on my hard-drive because, as soon as I reach a conclusion, I think of other variables to check, and find more data to mine, or new ways to filter the data at my disposal. Sometimes it strengthens my hypothesis, and sometimes it weakens it. Either way, it’s like a rabbit hole of never-ending possibilities to check. (And I don’t want to spend the rest of my life sifting through it, lest the last of my sanity be drained away, along with my will to live.)

I want to get this right. I want to be fair to the referees, who have a very difficult job, but also point out the bad ones or their overall biases.

A lot of the preliminary findings are damning of Premier League officials, and show what appear to be strong biases, and in some cases, anti-biases, as they try and bend over backwards in certain situations to try to not look biased (which everyone has to do in modern society).

For instance, if Liverpool are officiated by a referee from the North-west then the Reds’ positive decisions diminish massively – but with one Mancunian referee (Anthony Taylor) more likely to give Liverpool positive decisions than the North-west refs who hail from closer to Merseyside.

Indeed, across a sample of 68 games since Klopp took charge, referees from the North-west absolutely hammer Liverpool on the whole, compared against all the other referees. (And by ‘hammer’, that is also compared to how those same referees officiate other big clubs.)

Similarly, age seems to play a big role in Liverpool’s case: older referees are also incredibly harsh on the Reds overall, with those born after the old myths about the Kop winning penalties and influencing refs less likely to show a desire to avoid all big decisions at Anfield. There’s a provable home/away difference in officiating across all clubs in the study, and other anomalies. But that’s all for another time.

(One thing that was clear from the data is that Liverpool have a ton of “absent penalties” compared to all their rivals since Jürgen Klopp arrived in 2015, even if Liverpool, in the first 12 years of the Premier League, won an excess of penalties – but that doesn’t help this manager, these owners, these players and the current fans who are paying emotionally and financially to follow their team. Referees clearly officiate Liverpool very differently from the other five major contenders I studied regarding the number of decisions they make, based on tons of data from every single game, and they almost go “on strike” at Anfield. But I’ll save that stuff for another time too.)

Going back a couple of years, I had already studied the 600+ penalties given in the Premier League between 2011 and 2019, and found disparities between the awards given at both ends to British players and overseas players, with the British less harshly treated based on the percentage of minutes played. For that old study, with help from volunteers, we simply listed the team, the player fouled, that player’s nationality, and then the name and nationality of the fouling player. Then, as with everything in this much more expanded study, I am not factoring in whether penalties and sendings off were “correct”.

This is purely based on big data, and the belief that biases will show up in the numbers.

(That said, we have prepared videos of some of the decisions affecting Liverpool in the last two seasons, although this is not a study skewed towards Liverpool in any way, albeit we will focusing on the results that affect the club we write about. We want to highlight some of these “absent penalties”.)

One thing I wanted to do this time was to expand on that 2019 work, and to split it down further, to see if English players benefited more than Scottish, Welsh and Irish players; to see if English referees benefited their “own” more readily, and also, to see if England internationals appeared to get extra preferential treatment. So, this was all underway – albeit I was drowning in data and in the challenge of turning it into comprehensible articles.

But today has seen a development. Ex-referee boss Keith Hackett has been talking about how Jürgen Klopp has to inform Mo Salah to stop diving – so I thought it was worth looking again at how foreign players are treated at both ends of the pitch, and leaving the rest of the officiating study (which teams win a greater or lesser number of big decisions than expected; which refs are kinder/harsher to certain teams, and the role age and birth location plays; and things like home vs away biases, etc.) to another time.

Indeed, Liverpool played for seasons with their front three of Roberto Firmino, Sadio Mané and Salah, and had Virgil van Dijk, Alisson and Joel Matip at the heart of the defence, they were primed to be hit hard by any potential anti-English bias from English refs. And with Jordan Henderson and James Milner as midfielders, the team’s “Britishness” was often confined to wider and more central midfield areas – although both Andy Robertson and Trent Alexander-Arnold got into the opposition box more than some attacking midfielders at other clubs.

Whilst I will – in one form or another – publish all the data for all the issues in the full study in due course, for now this is a very Liverpool specific piece on the issue that affects the club to an outsized degree. That said, it also affects the players of other clubs, too – and hopefully the study, as a whole, will prove informative to fans of all clubs and neutrals alike (and if any non-Liverpool fans want to do a similar study or to try and replicate our results, I’d encourage it).

Expected Penalties

First of all, TTT subscriber “CVT” created an expected penalties model based on the number of Penalty Box Touches (PBT) of the ten English players who win the most penalties*, to set that as a baseline against which similarly (if not additionally) talented foreign players could be judged, as well as everyone else. The r2 correlation was 0.92 (or 92%), with anything above 0.75 considered “substantial” (according to a quick google of interpreting the results).

*Four or more since the start of 2017/18, with all data on PBT collated from the superb https://fbref.com/en/

In other words, for these ten English players – henceforth known as The English Ten – the relationship between the number of touches in the opposition penalty area and the number of penalties won is very strong. Indeed, remove the outlier Jesse Lingard (not to be confused with The Outlaw Jesse James) and the r2 goes up to 0.982, or almost 100%. Give these players between 30-80 touches in opposition areas and they’ll get a penalty.

The English Ten are: Raheem Sterling, Wilfried Zaha*, Jamie Vardy, Callum Wilson, Marcus Rashford, Dominic Calvert-Lewin, Jesse Lingard, Danny Ings, Glenn Murray and James Maddison. (Harry Kane won a penalty the evening after we collated the data!) On average, they get a penalty every 73 PBT, with Lingard averaging one every 38 PBT.

*As with my 2019 study, I’ve counted Zaha as English, as he played 17 times for England age-group sides and twice for the full team, and has been in England since a young child. As such, I would expect referees to treat him as English, just as they would Raheem Sterling, who moved to England at a similar age, but who stayed with the English national team. (Which is not to diminish Zaha’s allegiance to Ivory Coast, but he was an England international first.)

So, based on this analysis, we can say that The English Ten win penalties at a fair rate (based on the correlation between touches and awards), albeit some are a bit below the line and some are above. The problem is, almost no one else wins penalties at that fair rate.

A lucky few overseas players do, but on the whole, they are much less likely to be given penalties, even though The English Ten are not exclusively brilliant attacking players. Several are (Sterling and Zaha, for instance); some are not. Glenn Murray was slow and big; Jesse Lingard is small and fast; Danny Ings is dedicated and more than decent, but not world-class by any measure. Whilst no one can live up to the high bar of “fairness”, it’s interesting to see the margins by which everyone else falls short.

The clear problem is that once you overlay all the foreign players to win four or more penalties since 2017 onto the same fairness line, they fall short. Timo Werner, the Teutonic attacker who is struggling for goals – but not in terms of winning penalties – is a clear exception. Paul Pogba also wins more than expected, whilst Anthony Martial is the only foreign player to win a lot of penalties (more than four) at the same rate as The English Ten, which we have decreed as the fair amount.

However. Add Mohamed Salah, Riyad Mahrez, Roberto Pereyra, Sadio Mané, Alexandre Lacazette and Richarlison, as the other overseas players to win more than four, and they slide to the “harshly treated” side of the graph like the capsizing Titanic. Indeed, I asked to have Roberto Firmino added to the graphic too, as the Premier League player to have won the fewest penalties based on his expected totals: one from 785 PBTs, which would lead to 10 penalties for certain English players, some of whom are far less skilful. (For someone who drops deep a lot, Firmino is also in the box a lot, too. He’s everywhere.)

Which means, Liverpool have three outliers, all harshly punished. Of course, some players haven’t even won a penalty, and Firmino aside, the qualifying limit was four.

You could add the Portuguese Diogo Jota, yet to win a penalty despite 401 touches in opposition penalty areas since his debut in the top-flight with Wolves (over 50 of them with the Reds), and Liverpool have a quartet who, since 2017, win a penalty once every 213 PBT, compared with 38 PBTs for Lingard, 52 for Glenn Murray, and 73 for The English Ten. And I would argue that Salah, Jota, Firmino and Mané are, on average, better than The English Ten, if not not necessarily better than every member of The English Ten (that is debatable). Indeed, I think we can “prove” that with data, as I will come on to.

Or maybe that quartet of Liverpool’s just aren’t very good, or quick, or skilful, right? Murray and Mané both have four Premier League penalties since 2017, but Mané needed four times as many touches to win them. Obviously that’s because Murray was the Lionel Messi of English football.

Brazilian Attackers Are Rubbish, Right?

Everyone knows that Brazilians can’t play football. And African attackers aren’t that good, either. Everyone knows that Jesse Lingard, Glenn Murray and James Maddison would all start for the Brazilian national side, even when at its best.

This is where it all gets worrying in the data. While I won’t step too far into the minefield issue of race (other than to say that English players of all races seem fairly evenly treated), there seems a strong xenophobic stench in the data from how refs treat players who did not grow up in England.

“Foreign-ness” seems more of an issue, given that plenty of non-white English players win a lot of penalties – although being foreign and darker-skinned may be even more of a punishment – but that’s for other people to decide. However, for the purposes of this study we have stuck to nationalities, which are more easily defined, rather than race, which, in contrast to place of birth and country represented, is not listed in major databases. For the record, due to their varied smaller sample sizes as individual countries, African players have been grouped together – which is not to say, in any way, that all Africans are the same, but they may be viewed as such by certain referees in terms of their “otherness”.

As an aside, I’ve previous shown when studying just Liverpool, that the Reds have won far more penalties since 2002 when the team has been full of British players, and that a British manager helps, too (albeit perhaps because they prefer British players). The only exception was Gérard Houllier’s side of 2002-2004, which had fallen dramatically from its exciting 2000-2002 heights, but still ranked 2nd and 3rd in the Premier League for penalties won in those two seasons, thanks to a heavily English team. Liverpool’s penalties last spiked in 2013/14, when seven of the 12 were won by fouls on British players (plus three on Luis Suarez, and two handballs where nationality was not taken into account), with British boss Brendan Rodgers in charge. In 12 seasons at the helm since 2002, no foreign Liverpool manager has seen his side finish as high in the penalty rankings as they have in the league table; whereas no British manager has finished lower. So this suspicion has been with me for years. The more I parse the data across the whole Premier League, the clearer it seems to become. (Indeed, the only noticeable change was in 2019/20, following my 2019 articles on the subject, before things returned to “normal” this season.)

The fact that Brazilians are three times less likely to win a penalty per 1,000 PBTs than a German, and 2.5 less likely than an Irishman, is worrying. African players are the next most harshly treated. (Good job Liverpool don’t have any Brazilian or African attackers, eh?)

English players need half the penalty box touches of Brazilians to win a penalty, while Africans need 50% more PBT than English players to get a spot-kick.

(Despite English and British players being booked far more frequently for diving than Brazilian or African players. I found this date: 2015-2019 yellow cards for simulation: 4 – Wilfried Zaha; 3 – Dele Alli, James McArthur; 2 Sadio Mané, Raheem Sterling, Pedro, Adam Smith, Leroy Sané, Joshua King, Martin Olsson, Roberto Pereyra, Pierre-Emile Højbjerg, Shkodran Mustafi, Daniel James. In his time with Liverpool, Salah has been booked just once for diving.)

(For the record, these are the most harshly treated players in the opposition box from some of the main European nations, listed in order of the most-harshly treated per country. Germany: Leroy Sané, Ilkay Gundogan, Mesut Ozil, Shkodran Mustafi, Antonio Rudiger. Holland: Georginio Wijnaldum, Patrick van Aanholt, Virgil van Dijk, Anwar El Ghazi. Belgium: Eden Hazard, Christian Benteke, Romelu Lukaku. France: Alexandre Lacazette, Abdoulaye Doucoure, Olivier Giroud, N’Golo Kante, Lys Mousset.)

Dangerousness!

So, are English players just generally more dangerous than Brazilians or Africans? It seems unlikely, given that only the exceptional foreign players (full internationals, especially those from outside the EU prior to 2021, who get special exceptional-talent-based visas) could join our league, but any number of mediocre English players can – and do – ply their trade here.

With this in mind, I worked with Andrew Beasley, again using the data from https://fbref.com/en/, to go beyond what I will call “standard” PBT (the gross number of touches), to delve into “dangerousness”. As detailed in more length for TTT subscribers last week, we selected six metrics to try and hone the PBT data into something that distinguished penalty-box loiterers with genuinely dangerous players. The six metrics we chose were as follows:

– Carries Into The Penalty Area (Per 90)

– Successful Dribbles (Per 90)

– Penalty Box Touches (Per 90)

– Progressive Passes Received (Per 90)

– Average Shot Distance

– Non-Penalty xG Per Shot (average)

We then applied them to a group of 53 players, who comprised the 20 who won the most penalties, the 25 who had the greatest shortfall in number of penalties (absent penalties) and the 25 who had the most “unexpected” penalties (i.e. more than their expected totals). As you can see, this meant a number of players appeared in two of the three datasets (for example, Mo Salah wins a high number of penalties, but also, has a high number of absent penalties), which took it from 70 down to 53.

We ranked all the players on these six metrics, and anyone who had the top score was assigned 1.0, and anyone who had only half the number in that metric would be 0.50, and so on; and these were averaged out over four seasons. A maximum score across all six metrics would be 6.0, but no one average above 5.0, which would surely be Messi-esque.

Do the six metrics capture everything? No. But they cover dribbling success rate and carrying the ball into the box; touching the ball in the box (can you not win penalties just by controlling the ball with your back to goal, or receiving a pass?) and in dangerous positions; and the closeness to goal for their shots and the clear-cut chances are covered by that and also xG.

The top player for dangerousness? Raheem Sterling, who is also the top penalty winner. (That said, as explained last week, the top individual score in any season was Sadio Mané’s for 2020/21 so far, at 4.85.) Sterling averages 4.55.

Overall, Sadio Mané ranked 3rd (his last three seasons have seen a big incremental jump in dangerousness), Mo Salah 5th, Diogo Jota 11th and Roberto Firmino 12th. Only two of the top 14 were English.

Logically, all of these players should have vaguely similar penalty awards based on their minutes played and their involvement in the box. But it varies greatly. Sterling has 13, Gabriel Jesus none; Zaha has 10, Firmino one.

We found that, on average, the group of 20 players who had won the most penalties were very dangerous indeed; but not quite as dangerous as the 25 players who seemed strangely harshly treated when looking purely at the number (and not the specifics) of their penalty-box touches – including the Brazilians and the Africans.

Add the specifics of their PBTs – the dangerousness – and they become even more harshly treated. They are almost exclusively foreign players, too. Only 12% are English, compared to the 55% for those who win the most penalties, and 30% of the group that win the greatest number beyond what is expected.

By contrast, that most strangely favoured group – 30% English – were by far the least dangerous when looking at their general stats, too. On average, non-dangerous English players win far more penalties than dangerous foreign players.

Only three of the most-dangerous 19 players were English (and four of the top-ranked 22), although this was a group of 53 selected for the aforementioned criteria (most penalties won, and a big positive or negative swing in the number of expected penalties based on standard penalty-box touches), and does not include players like Jack Grealish, Phil Foden and Michail Antonio, whose 2020/21 averages would put them into the top 20 (but equally, so would those of some overseas players not included; and the pre-2020/21 averages of Grealish, Foden, et al, would take them out of the top 20).

Of course, Grealish and Antonio have won penalties (plural) in the four seasons covered. Harry Kane rates very low on dangerousness, which was a bit of a surprise – but he does seem to play deeper these days, and he was in the box a lot more prior to the start of 2019/20 according to his dangerousness score.

Some of the 53 players are midfielders, and it’s hard to know why, given that they make far fewer entries into the penalty box, they can lead to winning a greater number of penalties than more talented strikers who spend more time in the box, and also make more entries into the box.

Overall, the main difference seemed to be whether or not they were English, and not their “dangerousness”.

As “CVT” put it based on standard penalty box touches: “Another simple way to say it is ‘if the Premier League players were given penalties at the same rate as the English Ten (Sterling, Zaha, Murray, Lingard, et al), then foreign players would get 177% more penalties’.”

Some of the English players play for more counterattacking sides, but a penalty should be a penalty whether it’s in a crowded area or on the break, if it’s a foul.

The latter may be easier to spot, with less going on, but it’s not like Sterling and Marcus Rashford haven’t won penalties on the break, or that players like Firmino, Jesus, Mané, Salah and Eden Hazard never counterattacked. So I’m not sure that argument stacks up.

If, visually, it looks more like a penalty on a counterattack than in a crowded area (where the ref’s view may be more likely to be obscured), then it’s up to VAR to correct for that. Equally, a counterattack will more often mean a referee is far further away from the action, and so is guessing a lot more – and hence, the bias comes into play. Again, VAR should correct for that.

Indeed, I’m not convinced referees can tell even 30% of the time if something was a foul, given the speed and the angles, and hence why I was in favour of VAR; but VAR has been used to back up bad decisions, and the same biases apply as they are the same group of referees operating the technology at Stockley Park. (Even Michael Oliver – generally the best ref – said that none of the Liverpool players appealed for the red card after Jordan Pickford’s foul on Virgil van Dijk, and now whenever I watch games I try to see which team appeals first and hardest for decisions, and how it seems to lead to them getting a lot of incorrect decisions. Much of a fast-flowing game of football is an optical illusion, depending on the angle viewed from.)

Equally, Manchester United seem to be favoured at both ends, but having an English centre-back (just one penalty conceded in four seasons, despite several good shouts against him), and several attacking English players, it could be more to do with that pro-English bias than anything more pro-United from referees (although the North-west refs do give United a lot more than they give Liverpool, and as reasonably generous as Mancunian Anthony Taylor is to Liverpool, he’s far more generous to United; while Mike Dean, by contrast, is also more generous to United than to Liverpool – who are the team he punishes the most, albeit from a smaller sample size).

So, do English players “dive” or fall differently? My sense is that players like Harry Kane have mastered the plank-like flop (see the image to last week’s piece), where there’s such an attempt to not arch the back it leads to falling like a tree, in an equally unnatural way. In fairness, Luis Suarez was terrible for arching the back (and for pretend rolling around in agony, which was embarrassing), which was highlighted in England 10-20 years ago as a sign of cheating; but a lot of foreign players don’t get penalties for fouls, no matter how they crumble or how they try to stay on their feet. The data backs that up.

This has been on my mind for decades. One of my first games as a semi-pro as a striker in the 1990s was an FA Cup qualifying round, and as a 5’10” forward with pace (but 11 stone) I found myself constantly having my shirt and shorts pulled by a 6’3” 15-stone 1980s-era Steve Foster lookalike, whenever I got in behind him. I’ve described it before as like trying to drag a tractor. He would slow me down, then, when my legs ran out of power from trying to shake loose of this great lummox, take the ball from me. I got nothing from the ref, and it happened all game. These days, in the same situations, strikers correctly stop, or “fall”, to draw attention to the foul; Adam Lallana did this against Everton in the cup a couple of years back, to win a penalty.

This is legitimate, and a world away from there being no contact and a pre-planned intent to dive. Even a hand on the shoulder can take away your split-second advantage, if you are a fast player; and a hand on the shoulder, just like two hands in the back or having hold of the shirt or the shorts, has never been legal in football. Shoulder to shoulder contact is allowed, but you cannot pull at an opponent.

In three recent games, Sadio Mané has been praised – but also called naive – for not going down when fouled in the box. But if he ever does go down, he usually gets nothing, and is accused of going down too easily. Indeed, the worst thing that most TV commentators say about their fellow Englishmen is that they went down a bit easily, even if it was a blatant dive. They are called “clever” or “cute”, while the foreigners are frequently labelled as “cheats”. Mané and Salah are frequently accused of diving, even when fouled.

Defending

It also works against foreign players at the other end. Fifteen non-English outfield players have conceded three or more Premier League penalties since the start of 2017/18, but just five England players have; and just two England internationals (Eric Dier and Kyle Walker).

While there have been more foreign players than English players in the league in that time, English players, if playing c.33% of the minutes, are likely to win 45% of the penalties, while foreign players, playing c.55% of the minutes (the rest being Scots, Welsh, etc.) are likely to win just 45% of the penalties, yet concede up to 70%. (Note: I calculated this data at a different time to the other data quoted, and this was using penalty data from www.transfermarkt.com and WhoScored for Opta data on minutes played and nationalities, with all English-raised players counted as English if they played for England youth teams, even if they later switched allegiances.)

England internationals seem greatly favoured by referees, too. While they are clearly better players than English non-internationals, they concede far fewer penalties than expected and win even more penalties than expected, when compared against often better foreign players (as well as the inferior uncapped English ones, which admittedly makes sense). Again, this needs to be investigated. No one has a right to an identical number of penalties, but big disparities in how referees treat players is a serious problem for the integrity of the league, even if these refs are not consciously penalising “foreigners”. (Their perception of who “dives” is also likely to be influenced by the narrative, awash in football during my formative years, that ‘only foreigners dive’.)

All foreign players – elite internationals in many cases – win and concede penalties at a similar rate to mere journeyman English players; indeed, overseas players concede 11.9 penalties per 1,000 games (so over a very long career, each could expect to concede almost 12), whereas for England internationals it’s 8.9 and for English non-capped players it’s 11.1. The likes of Virgil van Dijk (three penalties conceded in the past four years) are more punished than the likes of Craig Dawson (one conceded, in 6,000+ minutes, or roughly two-thirds of the playing time of the Dutchman).

England internationals also would win 19.8 penalties in a career of 1,000 games, but foreign ones in the Premier League would win 8.9 per 1,000 games, and uncapped English players 6.5.

The End is Nigh

There’s lot more to explore and reveal from the data, but I’ll go away and think about how best to share it. For now, I’ll share this article, and then go and do more work refining the data – but after a sufficient break to clear my head and breathe some fresh air.

But I’ll leave you with this quick snippet:

Combined Premier League penalties won by the following, 2017 onwards: Andrew Robertson, Georginio Wijnaldum, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Virgil van Dijk, James Milner, Xherdan Shaqiri, Jordan Henderson, Naby Keita, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Joel Matip, Diogo Jota, Philippe Coutinho, Daniel Sturridge, Curtis Jones, Joe Gomez and Thiago Alcantara.

ZERO.

(Jota includes two seasons for Wolves)

From a total of 1,692 touches in the opposition penalty area.

… Glenn Murray. 210 touches in opposition area, four penalties!

… Jesse Lingard. 229 touches in opposition area, six penalties!

Paul Tomkins

A Quick Guide To Liverpool’s “Crisis” – Wake Up To The Facts by Paul Tomkins

2021-03-07T14:02:00.002+08:00

https://tomkinstimes.com/2021/03/a-quick-guide-to-liverpools-crisis-wake-up-to-the-facts/

By Paul Tomkins

March 6, 2021In By Paul Tomkins, Free, In-Depth Analysis

Even allowing for the dumbing down of the western world, I’m staggered at some of the rubbish I’ve read and listened to about Liverpool Football Club in recent weeks.

To judge things like tactics, substitutions or the balance of the team when, at times, 8-12 players have been injured, is like looking at a car with only two wheels and wondering why it’s suddenly not going as fast. The team may need some tactical tweaks in the long term, as part of an evolution, but how do you judge a team that’s missing so many of its best players? It’s not the “first team”. No one can have elite talent in reserve to cover for elite talent on a long-term basis.

If you have a great manager, who has achieved exceptional things in the past decade, and achieved exceptional things in the previous two seasons, then you cut him all the slack in the world.

Liverpool appointed Jürgen Klopp because they knew his final season at Dortmund was a mess of bad luck, bad finishing, and absent players (injured, or pilfered by Bayern Munich). This season is no different. Indeed, you can add Covid (and even more injuries), and a lack of a winter break: at Dortmund, there was the full stadium and the bellowing yellow wall; and a chance to regroup and reset with warm-weather break halfway through.

I’ve written in depth at late about Black Swans, but if you can’t see the crazy coincidences of bad fortune that turned the two years of a virtuous circle into a spiralling vicious cycle then either you’re not paying attention, you’re not very smart, or it’s your job to shit-stir for clicks and dopey eyeballs.

But of course, people make judgements based on the league table, or the scoreline, with all the analysis offered by a dead slug that’s been run over by an HGV.

English Football has changed massively since 2016. Geggenpressing wasn’t part of our game when a lot of these ex-players still played. Keepers were still encouraged to hoof it under pressure, in stark contrast to now, where the aim is to play out at all costs (because of the risk/reward balance). Yet still ex-players on commentary say the keeper should just hoof it.

No ex-players had to play through a season like this; few of the regular pundits even went abroad, let alone went abroad and were caught up in a global pandemic. (Gary Neville managed abroad, terribly, for a brief time.)

As I see it, here are some of the big issues. I’ve made most of them before, but I’m trying to distil the points into one reasonable-length article.

Right now, Liverpool:

– Lack pace;

– Lack height;

– Lack experience;

– Lack team connectivity;

– Lack confidence in front of goal;

– Lack set-piece goals;

– Lack £300m-worth of their own players;

– Lack a crowd at Anfield to help lift the team in a difficult period;

– Lack any kind of good luck, especially the nature of the injuries;

– Lack “deep” stamina, due to the foreshortened preseason that was also wrecked by Covid;

– Lack rotation options due to injuries;

– Lack not just Virgil van Dijk, a key playmaker as well as defender, but were top of the table until they lost Joe Gomez and Joel Matip;

– Lack consistency of selection in the vital defensive triangle of goalkeeper/centre-back/centre-back;

– Lack leaders/enforcers;

– Lack the chance to properly grieve the recent death of parents (Klopp and Alisson);

– Lack having even celebrated the title win with the fans;

– Lack a balance of big decisions going their way this season;

– Lack fairness from the referees – that I feel is totally provable in the objective data, which is something I’ll be sharing in more detail soon.

Okay, so that’s a list of (some of) the things I could think of.

I’ll expand each point a bit further, but many have been addressed recently in both our free and paywalled articles on the site.

A Bit More Depth

– Lack pace. Liverpool have two of the quickest defenders in the league. Both are out injured. But to change the way the team plays is not necessarily a solution, as defending deeper causes its own problems (second-order problems, as a chain of bad reactions), particularly if teams only want to play against you on the break. You defend deep, they defend deep, and no one scores any goals. Stalemate. Equally, Diogo Jota – one of the Reds’ quickest attackers (and still the most prolific, based on minutes played) – has been out for three months. The more quick defenders you have, the better you can deal with their quick attackers; and the more quick attackers you have, the harder is for their quick defenders to deal with them all.

– Lack height. This is vital in the Premier League, which often aerial warfare (and it’s no coincidence how many teams of giants have beaten Liverpool in 2021, just as was the case before Klopp arrived and in his first season, until he had a summer to start rectifying the problems in the transfer market). Liverpool have two of the tallest centre-backs in England in Virgil van Dijk and Joel Matip, who, last season, were both in the top 10 for aerial duels won (Matip won 90% of his aerial duels, which is insane, and van Dijk is almost always in the top ten, and often the top five). Fabinho is a tall midfielder at 6’3″ – Man City have got much better in the air by adding one of those – and Jordan Henderson is 6’0″. All of these are elite technical players, and not mere donkeys. Height alone is no solution. But height+talent=success.

– Lack set-piece goals. This is the most obvious problem right now. Liverpool have JUST ONE set-piece goal in 21 games when playing without both van Dijk and Matip, and 20 of those games have been this season. (Fabinho has also missed a lot of football lately, and he at least had a header from a corner the other day). With that pair at the back, the Reds score a set-piece goal every three games – a staggering rate. But no one else can score from the full-backs’ continued excellent delivery as Liverpool can be easily marked. Virgil van Dijk is probably the best player in world football at attacking set-pieces, and when three men drag him over, that frees space for other, smaller players to nip in. Matip is not as good at directing headers, but is 6’5″, and this season has scored headers and made headed assists from set-pieces. Fabinho is 6’3″ and can be a handful. Take all these out, and it’s a small team that cannot do anything from the countless corners it wins, in stark contrast to the previous two seasons. Again, this is by far and away the biggest quantifiable change in the Reds’ data. Possession, xG, shots, corners, etc – they will have changed to a degree. But set-piece threat has gone from elite to totally absent.

– Lack experience. Liverpool have now fielded “rookies” for over 2,000 minutes in the Premier League in 2020/21. These are players who are new to top-league football in any country; and when I checked a few weeks ago, all the top four clubs were barely playing any rookie minutes this season; they might have injuries, but it never took them down to their rookies, and their younger players were already established before this season began. I mentioned recently that Chelsea’s Reece James and Mason Mount went from a year on loan in the Championship (two seasons ago) to their “adjustment season” in the Premier League last season, where they each played thousands of minutes, but Chelsea were inconsistent (and the fans accepted it, as it was an outlier season). Phil Foden has been playing in the Premier League for years now. This is Curtis Jones’ adjustment season. He’s doing great, but he can easily be even better next season. He’s learning on the job.

– Lack team connectivity. When Ben Davies finally makes his debut this season, he will become the TENTH player to play for the Reds in the league in 2020/21 who had never started a league game for the club nine months ago. (See my recent books for examples of the importance of team understanding and the increased effectiveness of a teams – in all walks of life – that are kept together, and the second nature that years playing or working together brings, until they get too old or jaded.)

– Lack confidence in front of goal. Earlier in the winter, Liverpool went through a goal drought, home and away, until Mo Salah scored an early open-play goal at Old Trafford in the FA Cup, since which point the Reds have mostly scored two or three goals per game on the road. But the home drought goes on. It’s purely psychological, and the mind is the most powerful factor in football. Once these things get into your head, you overthink things, and take longer to perform things you can otherwise do in your sleep. It needs the hoodoo to break, and for things to become second-nature again. Even Roberto Firmino, so valuable in various other ways, can score 15-25 goals in a season; three world-class strikers are not taking their chances. The lack of set-piece goals heaps more pressure on them, too, as does the absence of the best goalscoring midfielders (Alex Oxlade-Chamberlian down to injuries and then form; Naby Keita down to injuries). The chances of just one goal (a rare penalty) since December being scored from the chances created must be 10,000-1. Last winter, Liverpool had a similar run, but instead it was the opposition missing their big chances and it was the Reds’ keeper making the massive saves. That’s the randomness of football. Pressure plays a part, but you need the pressure to ease, and sometimes it takes no more than a lucky goal.

– Lack £300m-worth of their own players. If you include Fabinho (back now, but rushed back in emergency “a game too soon” against Chelsea, as Klopp admitted before the game), Naby Keita (back, but not yet match-fit) and Diogo Jota (ditto), then Liverpool have had £300m of their own transfer investment (adjusted for inflation) unavailable, turning them from a competitively-funded team (the third-highest £XI – the 38 lineups adjusted for inflation – last season won the title) to more like a mid-table £XI lately, with the additional pressure of a slump. While new players may still be needed in the summer (obviously elite additions can often help any team, if they adapt), it’s absolutely crazy to talk about spending big money when £300m of your own elite talent is out injured, and thus making life harder for those who are fit. Those players returning will be even better than spending £300m, as we know they all suit the team, can handle the pressure and offer team unity and team wavelength. They bring all the attributes the team currently miss. And players like Curtis Jones will be better in a year’s time, from the experience of being thrown in at the deep end when, ideally, he would have been introduced gently with armbands.

– Lack a crowd at Anfield to help lift the team in a difficult period. No one seems to connect the first-ever run of five straight home defeats with the contrast to what went before, with the lack of a crowd. To go 68 home games unbeaten, winning most of them, with a crowd, to the soulless patch of grass that is an empty Anfield, is a huge change. Klopp worked wonders to get the Kop back on form when he arrived, to turn around a jaded fanbase, and now the stands are empty. It’s not proper football. It might be great when you’re winning, but it’s harder work when you’re not.

– Lack any kind of good luck: the super-serious injuries to many of the key players were the result of impacts (seven serious such injuries), and not bad preparation or anything to do with the medical staff. Add these to the increased risk of muscle injuries in a cramped season, and you have a clusterfuck. Even someone like Kostas Tsimikas missing about three months so far means he hasn’t been able to deputise for Andy Robertson, who seems totally robust in terms of avoiding injuries – which is great – but looks absolutely knackered, mentally and physically, having played almost every minute of meaningly football (in a high-energy role) for three seasons.

– Lack “deep” stamina, due to the foreshortened preseason that was also wrecked by Covid and altered plans. Liverpool’s game has morphed to be heavily possession-based – not just “heavy metal football” but the mix of a string quartet too – but it still relies on elite stamina, to press hard, but also to make ceaseless runs off the ball. This is not a “Jürgen Klopp” team, through no fault of his own. It’s not the team he and Michael Edwards designed, nor the way he planned to prepare them. He had got preseasons down to a science; then it became guesswork.

– Lack rotation options due to injuries. Players like Robertson, Gini Wijnaldum and the front three are having to play too much due to injuries to others. Other clubs are gently rotating their front sixes, one or two per game; more if they have a ton of options. Liverpool cannot do that in 2020/21. A big squad has become a small squad. [Edit: I just wanted to add that “we have injuries too” seems to be a common refrain, as if having two or three injuries to unimportant players is the same as having 10 injuries, or five key players absent; a bit like when people said Liverpool were a very expensive team after buying van Dijk, as if one very expensive player is the same as having ten very expensive players. There must be a psychological term for this kind of slack thinking.]

– Lack not just Virgil van Dijk, a key playmaker as well as defender, who had some kind of role in 50% of the Reds’ goals last season at some point in the moves, but were top of the table until they lost Joe Gomez and Joel Matip. The issue is not van Dijk per se (although he adds so many elite qualities), but being down to what at times is getting close to the 9th and 10th choice players, at the heart of the team. Again, I’ve covered this before, but it should be basic logic.

– Lack consistency of selection in the vital defensive triangle of goalkeeper/centre-back/centre-back, with 18 combinations of the two defenders, and 29 combinations of GK-CB-CB, including three different goalkeepers used in recent weeks alone. This is unsustainable. No defender knows what the other is going to do, and neither of them knows what the keeper is going to do; and vice versa. It’s all new; they are all new to each other. It takes time for a defensive unit to gel, and these guys aren’t even getting a run of more than two games together.

– Lack leaders/enforcers. While I think he’s generally performed very well and hasn’t slowed the team’s play down, Thiago has been left with shorter players (or inexperienced players) alongside him in a midfield that is having to protect a makeshift defence, and so, at times, has been a bit overwhelmed. The midfield brutes had to play in defence, as the reserve centre-backs were lesser footballers: rookies who lack pace. Then Fabinho and Jordan Henderson got injured. It meant: the aforementioned reduced set-piece threat, less midfield heft, less enforcement. James Milner, a leader and a warrior, has been injured, and Henderson and van Dijk are two of the Reds’ most aggressive, no-nonsense players. The remaining players are all “too nice”, and while that’s great in many ways, they need the added edge to stop any bullying that you get from those senior, experienced, well-built bastards who take no nonsense, and take no prisoners. Andy Robertson is probably the only confrontational player left fit, and he’s knackered. He doesn’t even seem capable of being narky right now.

– Lack the chance to properly grieve the recent death of parents (Klopp and Alisson). I don’t know how anyone is focusing on football right now when so much is going on with their families thousands of miles away, but maybe football is easier when things are going well. But you can’t just carry on as normal in times of personal tragedy. Alisson was already having an unusual dip in form, but again, the team has been unsettled, and it’s a global pandemic with so many players likely to be missing their families. It would be normal for some of them to want the season to be over, to go and visit their loved ones.

– Lack having even celebrated the title win with the fans. Some of the drive to win the title was surely the thought of the amazing celebrations with the fans. There have still been no amazing celebrations with the fans. The players are human. Look at what the winning header by Roberto Firmino – the one set-piece goal without Matip and van Dijk in the team – against Spurs meant, even with just 2,000 fans in the ground.

– Lack a balance of big decisions going their way this season. It’s been less bad in 2021 (although still not great), but by that point the damage was largely done. And Liverpool have conceded as many penalties at home since lockdown – with no crowds – as in the previous five years combined. By contrast, the Reds are not getting half the clear penalties they should be, and nor have players been sent off against them when they should have been, all of which adds a type of “scoreboard pressure” which is “league table pressure”. The farce began at Everton. It’s no use to a side 15 points adrift at the bottom of the league to start getting fair decisions with three weeks of the season left, and someone smugly says “it all evens out”. Against Chelsea on Thursday, Liverpool benefitted from an offside decision that I felt was too tight to call, but by the halfway point of the season there had been five such goals chalked off all season in the entire Premier League, and three were to deny Liverpool goals (and two victories). By that point the damage was done.

– Lack fairness from the referees – that I feel is totally provable in the objective data. I’ve spent the past week micro-analysing all the Premier League referees and the decisions they give in games for six different clubs (including Liverpool) across the past six seasons; some of the results have surprised me, in that some refs I didn’t like seem objectively much fairer than I thought, but the overall trend for Liverpool is staggering, if unexpected. I am delaying the release of this until we can get a full series of articles ready to cover the various issues with the officiating, and I will continue to look into the various factors that might be playing a part. I’m trying to be utterly fair to referees over this by working on big, objective data, but there is a gaping black hole in the data where Liverpool’s “big decisions” should be.

The aforementioned points in the list won’t even be close to all the factors affecting the Reds. I’m struggling to document and keep up with how many freakish things have happened this season.

My desire for this site, as ever, is to having no moaning and griping, unless the manager is out of his depth or past his sell-by date. Constructive debate is welcome, but it has to be based in facts – it’s no good saying “X should have played” if X was injured.

You’ve just had two of the best years imaginable, and so much of what has gone wrong is beyond anyone’s control; and even with the on-pitch stuff, a manager cannot be blamed if 20/30-goals-a-season strikers miss a load of chances at key points in games. That’s the randomness of football. There will always be judgement calls that backfire, but again, it happens all the time for all the best managers. Anyone expecting perfection is insane. Bad seasons used to happen to elite managers all the time, and they were allowed to dust it off. Two bad seasons in a row is often something managers don’t get to experience now, as they’re gone by the end of the first one, but Klopp has built up a mega-bank of credit.

If Klopp had all his best players – and not this crazy injury crisis – and results were this bad, that would be different. If Anfield was full and results were this bad, that would be different. If there was no Covid, with normal scheduling of matches, and results were this bad, that would be different. If Liverpool hadn’t created a load of clear-cut chances in recent games, and results were this bad, that would be different. And if Liverpool hadn’t just had two all-time great seasons, and results were this bad, that would be different.

But even then, defending the title is a tough new challenge, and no one has ever had to defend theirs without even celebrating it to start with. Add all the other nightmarish scenarios of illness, death and disease, and as I’ve been saying for weeks now, even a good result is no guarantee of a change of fortune, as there is no longer any leeway. Things can always get worse before they get better.

Right now, Liverpool need to add pace at the back, goals to the team, set-piece threats, height and heft and leadership – and all of those attributes are at the club, just (mostly) long-term injured. You can’t magic those qualities up, or miraculously heal those out for 6-12 months.

They’ll be back in the summer, and this team can regroup and go again. I don’t need to hear the blind positivity that Liverpool “will definitely win the league next season”, as you can’t say that, and to me it’s just a type of hot air; but you can say that this team is capable of great things, even with a few players missing – it’s just not capable of great things when carrying a long-term injury crisis, amongst many other setbacks, in a super-strange season, the like of which we will surely never see again.

Give it a few months, and then yes, normal service can be resumed.

Paul Tomkins

The Biggest Issue Facing Liverpool FC by Paul Tomkins

2021-02-27T19:03:00.000+08:00

https://tomkinstimes.com/2021/02/the-biggest-issue-facing-liverpool-fc-an-alternative-free-friday/

By Paul Tomkins

February 26, 2021In Black Swan, By Paul Tomkins, Free, Free Friday

Due to several injuries to the centre-backs at TTT Towers (including our reserve centre-backs, who were de facto central midfielders with the attributes to be top centre-backs), there is no normal Free Friday this week.

(This article will also be available via our Substack-based email newsletter.)

We were also planning to use this week to focus on the officiating issues in a big one-off piece, having looked at the other Black Swan issues last week. But as hinted at, this week hasn’t gone to plan. Most of that piece is written, and the video collated, but there are so many issues to focus on, so we’d rather take our time and get it right.

(We’ll be slowing down on the free articles too, once we’ve released that. They don’t pay the bills.)

While Liverpool are having the opposite kind of results in 2020/21, and especially in this calendar year, I think the reasons behind the success that I outlined in both “Mentality Monsters” (2019) and “Perched” (2020) are actually enlightening examples of what the club has lacked this season, via the unprecedented injury crisis and the absence of an ultra-fitness regime due to no proper preseason because of the pandemic (and which has been compounded by terrible officiating; the Reds have been cost more points than any other clubs by tight calls – including wrong calls – and while you can say that’s just bad luck, it is bad luck that’s also heavily affected many results, as so many of the decisions were super-tight calls in super-tight games, that if given the other way would likely reverse the result, too. But that’ll be looked at in the aforementioned big officiating study).

The decisions any manager makes will backfire at times: no one makes the correct judgement call every time unless they are working only with hindsight; and whatever decisions a manager makes will succeed and fail on things like whether or not the strikers take their chances. But when the squad is so stretched, it’s difficult to produce the very things that made Liverpool such an outstanding team from 2018 to 2020. If you take almost all of the outstanding qualities out of a team, you have a team that is no longer outstanding. It should be logical. No one can have outstanding qualities in reserve, and even if you have four outstanding centre-back options, as Liverpool did, it’s not much help if they are all injured.

In “Mentality Monsters” I analysed in depth, and praised, the transfers that were undertaken up to 2018 to solve specific weaknesses from when Jürgen Klopp took charge: things I’d been talking about being in need of addressing way back in 2015, before he arrived: lack of pace, lack of goals, ineffectiveness at set-pieces (at both ends) due to a lack of height and power, lack of defensive authority, and goalkeeping weaknesses.

While signing players like Sadio Mané and Mo Salah addressed the issues of pace and goals – and did so with a value for money that remains staggering – the signings of Virgil van Dijk, Joel Matip, Fabinho and Alisson gave Liverpool a platform of 6’3″-6’5″ players in the defensive diamond (GK-CB-CB-DM), that could dip slightly to the range of 6’2″-6’5″ if Joe Gomez, maturing as a young defender, played instead (and a lot more pace was added in compensation for the small reduction in height). People focus on different members of this quartet of signings, but all were vital in their own way. Each added a new dimension, and some, like van Dijk, added several dimensions. Alisson, though off form in 2021 and now facing up to personal tragedy, had been a rock since he arrived.

At left-back, and not part of this defensive diamond, Andy Robertson – as well as his other qualities – was still a three-inch upgrade on Alberto Moreno (who had the worst aerial duel success rate for the defender in the league), but a 5’10” defender cannot do much if suddenly he’s one of the tallest players in the team.

A team that averages 5’10” is actually as small as any I have in my database of Premier League teams since 2015, and Liverpool averaged 5’10” in 2015.

After increasing that height with the four big (in every sense) signings, the Reds average 5’10” again right now.

This is not La Liga; the Premier League involves brutal aerial warfare, as Everton showed last week, with a succession of up-and-unders in gale-force winds. (The team Everton fielded was much taller the Reds’. The players they used had an aerial duel success rate in excess of 50% so far this season; the Reds had one that was way down around 35%. That’s a huge difference, and being weak in the air can unsettle a team, as we saw. It’s not rocket science.)

One major thing lacking in the analysis I read elsewhere that is driving me mad – and which was easy enough to find (courtesy of some help from Andrew Beasley) – is how Liverpool have gone from scoring a set-piece goal every three games with the pairing of van Dijk and Matip (and one every four games with just Matip and anyone bar van Dijk) to 1-in-19 in the 19 games the Reds have played without both since August 2018 (most of which have been this season, as van Dijk was a virtual ever-present up to then).

Everyone thinks of those players with their defending, and obviously they are vital; but if anything, their attacking contribution is even greater (compared to the players who have replaced them, and who were largely helping to keep clean sheets until, finally, pretty much everyone ended up injured). Some wise folk have also noted the huge loss of van Dijk’s sumptuous, game-changing passing, and last season he was involved in some way (i.e. at some point in the move) in a staggering half of the Reds’ goals.

Irrespective of the defensive instability with 27 different GK-CB-CB combinations so far this season, these injuries have effectively taken a prolific goalscorer out of the team (a 12th man that represents the sum of excess goals the Reds scored) and replaced “him” with no one. Liverpool’s set-pieces were the actual 12th man. (And of course, what I will now have to renumber as the “13th man” – the Kop – is absent too, where, after three years without a home league defeat, Liverpool, in an empty Anfield, suffered four in a row. This factor is also surely huge, and another reason to look forward to next season.)

If van Dijk and Matip play, and Fabinho also plays in midfield, that not only helps the Reds in their own box, but that’s three big players to mark at the other end, two of whom are very difficult to stop. Jordan Henderson, big and strong, becomes a fourth 6-footer.

If they all play, they score headed goals or make headed assists; or they act as decoys to make room for the smaller guys, who can at that point only be marked by smaller opposition players, to nip in. When none of the big guns play, the set-piece goals absolutely dry up. Roberto Firmino will find less space, at 5’11”, if he’s one of the Reds’ tallest players, than if he’s 5th or 6th tallest.

(Interestingly, the only set-piece goal Liverpool have scored when without both van Dijk and Matip was against Spurs, when Henderson blocked off the runner – which could have been labelled a foul, albeit it would have been in stark contrast to how teams could wrestle van Dijk and Matip each week with impunity when they did play – was from a perfect delivery met perfectly by Firmino, who was standing right next to 6’5″ Rhys Williams.)

Irrespective of tactics, pressing numbers, passing speed, strikers missing a freakish and uncharacteristic percentage of big chances (as shown in this excellent piece), or anything else you may try to weigh up (all of which play a part to varying degrees in this ultra-complex situation), Liverpool have lost the number of set-piece goals that could have earned perhaps 6-9 extra points since Christmas.

Not least as set-piece goals, whilst still relying on “finishing” skills to some degree, are often quick, instinctive, first-time situations close to goal – and not something anyone has any time to overthink (in the way that a striker in on goal from the halfway line, if low on confidence, probably wants a hole to open up and swallow him). Think of how many goals are scored with players’ shoulders, like Henderson’s “header” at Wolves last season, or headers that were never meant to end up quite where intended.

It’s often about a bloody big player who is good at the meeting a well-hit ball, from where it ends in the back of the net; there is often no complicated buildup (although that can win the corner to start with), but just a good delivery and someone meeting it, with the power already “on” the ball. It doesn’t even need to be that clever. This is how Liverpool beat Brighton and Manchester United at home last season, and Chelsea and Aston Villa away.

(The latter was a Mané header, but he found space at the near post as the big guys were being marked in the middle of the area, which allowed the near-post run to pay off.)

These types of situations also opened the scoring at home to Arsenal in a 3-1 win, and away at Leicester in a 4-0 win and Wolves in a 2-1 victory; and helped to beat Leeds at the start of this season.

If the keeper saves, or it hits the woodwork or a defender somehow blocks, someone else might stab it home. This – as part of the chaos and nervousness players like van Dijk and Matip can cause the opposition – is how Liverpool beat Crystal Palace away last season.

All huge goals, and that’s not counting the set-piece goals that put games to bed (to go ahead by three goals or more), or earned points in the Champions League in the previous two seasons (think of them all!); all lacking in 2021, when the Reds have yet to score a single set-piece goal, and it’s nearly March.

There are so many things other than set-piece threat that Liverpool are struggling with, but to me it’s the most quantifiable. It’s why I won’t let it lie.

And since I started analysing the links between height and set-pieces in 2015 (which should be obvious – I found that, on average, aerial success rates increase with every additional inch of height – but which people still ignore because occasionally a smaller player will score a header), Premier League teams seem to have got bigger.

Back then it was West Brom and Watford whose outfield players averaged 6’0″-6’1″. Liverpool were terrible in the air in 2015 as they averaged 5’10”.

Now, as well as Burnley being 6’0″-6’1″, Liverpool have recently faced lineups from Manchester United, Everton and “footballing” Brighton that are as tall as those long-ball teams from six years ago. Brighton had four players who were 6’4″ or over; and one who was 6’7″, whose height created the winning goal. Burnley and Everton caused chaos with launched up-and-unders, winning penalties on the back of that unsettling percentage play.

In the past, Man City had a small defensive diamond; this season it’s two 6’2″ centre-backs and keeper, and a 6’3″ defensive midfielder who has won a ton of headers.

Liverpool were not a “tall” team overall in the previous two seasons (who’d want to sacrifice Salah and Mané for a couple of giants?), but they had an extremely tall defensive diamond, and it also became its set-piece attacking threat.

This is vitally important, as Liverpool have no attacking players who are aerial threats in general (they may score a header from open play if they are in space and the ball is perfect: Mané is great in the air, but not really a set-piece threat if he’s being closely marked by someone who is 6’3″).

As I noted recently, around 25% of Liverpool’s league goals last season came from set-pieces. They scored twenty in total. Right now, pro rata (in games without the big guns), they are on par for two. They’re not even having big chances from corners and wide free-kicks. The delivery has often been good, but a bunch of 5’9″ players stand little chance in a crowded area if everyone on the opposition is over 6’0″ tall, and they have no one to act as decoys.

All of the “bodyguard”/set-piece players, who allowed the team to do its skilful thing (as well as dealing with opposition hoofs), are out injured. These are also the heavy cudgels who turned 20 promising attacking situations – corners and free-kicks, often won with fast moves – into the hammer blows of goals.

I also talked a lot about team stability in those aforementioned books – about the benefits of the shared understanding of a team that has been together for a number of years – and if Ben Davies makes his debut in the coming weeks, this season will have seen the Reds use TEN “new” players in the Premier League this season – players who had never started a league game for the club as recently as eight months ago; as well as the aforementioned 27 combinations of goalkeeper-centre-back-centre-back, that will become 28 combinations this weekend, and likely hit 30 soon (if Alisson is given compassionate leave this weekend for the horror of his father dying in an accident).

In contrast to the teams doing well in the league, Liverpool have given about 2,000 league minutes to players who were rookies going into this campaign; over TEN TIMES the average of teams – City, Leicester, Chelsea and Man United – likeliest to finish in the top four (some of whom, like Chelsea, had high rookie minutes last season: two seasons ago, Mason Mount and Reece James were on loan in the Championship; last season they each played thousands of Premier League and Champions League minutes; this season they are no longer rookies. Before this season, by stark contrast, Curtis Jones had almost no Premier League and Champions League minutes under his belt. Essentially, Jones is having the “senior adaptation” season that Mount and James were allowed last season).

I didn’t check Arsenal’s rookie minutes for 2020/21, but I imagine it’s also very high. They’re mid-table for a reason. Part of that was a choice on their part, but also driven by the fact that the manager didn’t like many of the senior players he inherited last season, and Arsenal have been more strapped for cash in recent times. (I’d expect the various Arsenal youngsters to be better still next season.)

As brilliantly as Curtis Jones and others have often done for Liverpool, they were not supposed to be playing this many minutes. Long term it will do them good, and do the club good. But short term, the team is less experienced, individually and as a collective. (And at times they’ve cost the team points, as happens.)

That’s in addition to the lack of pace (Gomez, van Dijk, Jota), height (van Dijk, Matip, Fabinho and now Henderson), goals (Jota, Keita and Oxlade-Chamberlain from midfield, and van Dijk and Matip from set-pieces) that the injuries have denied this team.

In other words, a ton of extra dimensions, all of which were lacking back in 2015, and all of which were added as the team improved (and which remain at the club, just currently unavailable).

And that’s before the unquantifiable damage done when Thiago missed three months, and the fact that two months out harmed Kostas Tsimikas’ chances of giving Robertson a rest.

So you can’t really blame the manager or the club for fixing all those problems so superbly well, only to then lose those players to injuries, many of which were freakish collision- or foul-based incidents.

That’s why I keep hammering home the point that this is a Black Swan season, and that – even though the club may look to improve the squad in the summer – the return to fitness of a ton of elite players (and the return from loan of others) will itself be like a £350m spending spree. It’s also why I find making any judgements about this season so unhelpful.

You can’t luckily or accidentally reach two Champions League finals in a row, winning one; and you can’t luckily or accidentally rack up 97 and 99 points in a row – the latter landing the league title quicker than any team in history. But you can have enough accidents and bad luck to take away all your best attributes. The worst luck would be for none of these players to be fit even for next season, but I dare not even contemplate such insane misfortune.

Paul Tomkins

Liverpool’s £300m Summer Arrivals Revealed! By Paul Tomkins

2021-02-25T07:58:00.003+08:00

https://tomkinstimes.com/2021/02/liverpools-300m-summer-arrivals-revealed/

By Paul Tomkins

February 24, 2021In By Paul Tomkins, Free, Subscribers Only, Transfer Debate

In a secret deal, late last summer, Liverpool chose to sell Virgil van Dijk to Real Madrid, for a fee to be paid in the future. In October, the Reds allowed Joe Gomez leave on a free transfer. Soon after, Liverpool chose to sell Diogo Jota to a club in Outer Sibera for three months, with a £70m buyback clause that actives soon. Halfway through the season, Joel Matip was offloaded to save on the wage bill, his contract cancelled.

Thiago, Naby Keita, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and various others were deemed surplus to requirements in the first half of the season. Rather than be allowed to get fit, the club forced them to wear knee braces and leg restraints, to test their character.

Fabinho, excelling as the 4th-choice centre-back, was allowed to miss a dozen games because the club’s hierarchy wanted to see what it would be like to eventually use the 9th- and 10-choice centre-backs. Meanwhile, Jordan Henderson was told he need not bother continuing as an emergency centre-back – he was hauled off after 20 minutes against Everton – in part because of the desire to try out as many rookies as possible, and partly because his middle name is Brian.

Liverpool chose to use three different keepers this season in the league, just to show off the various change kits, and have thus far opted for a total – I kid you not – of TWENTY-SEVEN different goalkeeper-left-centre-back-right-centre-back permutations simply because Jürgen Klopp loves the word ‘permutations’. And it’ll be 28 at the weekend.

(The stat about the GK-CB-CB trios is courtesy of Andrew Beasley, whose superb analysis of the Reds’ freakishly bad/unlucky run of finishing in 2021 in like gold-dust for TTT subscribers.)

All such transfers would obviously be utter madness.

Obviously.

And yet people would have rightly said “you can’t win the league if you sell half a dozen of your very best players all at once!” and “it’s insane for a club to leave themselves exposed by getting rid of five centre-backs”, or “£300m for players sold and no one bought with that money!”

But have them all be injured, and it’s “stop whinging!”

And as I noted the other day, there’s the madness of thinking this is just a case of one player (van Dijk) being out. An injury to the world’s best defender is major; an injury crisis including that player is beyond the worst of luck.

Of course, if Liverpool had sold or loaned those players (for a fee) they’d have had the money to buy new players. Maybe £300m. In the short term, it would be miles better to have sold them and spent the £300m on players than to have van Dijk, Gomez, Matip et al unable to play anyway.

But then the club wouldn’t have those players back in the summer.

Instead, the club have neither the use of the players nor the fees to reinvest. These group of players are still being paid millions per week, and cannot help the team.

In the long-term, Liverpool are likely to have £300m of talent, currently absent, available again in the summer. Some, in the cases of Jota, Fabinho and Keita (£150m-worth of talent), are due back in the team sooner than the summer, but about £150m-worth of centre-backs on the open market will move from the Kirkby rehab gym to the training pitches.

Even before signing anyone else, that’s £300m of talent to go into the squad. While they cost in excess of £200m, those players are now worth over £300m.

£300m!

(And let’s be clear: Henderson and Milner, also currently out, have a lot of leadership value too. I was just about to publish this piece when news broke that Henderson could be out for the season, too. This is now a flock of Black Swans. Three first-choice and one stand-in centre-back out for the season?! Fabinho also still not back?!)

Harvey Elliott, at least a £50m-talent if he was on the free market doing what he’s doing aged just 17 (with a ceiling to be a £100m player, no doubt), will return in the summer. He was due to be part of the Reds’ squad this season, having been blooded the season before.

These players will need no settling in, no adjustment to teammates, no adaptation to the league, no time getting their heads around new tactics, or adjusting to the pressure of the heavy shirt: just to have overcome injuries that, by then, they should have overcome. This is not a guarantee, but their operations went well, and the rehab just needs time.

That’s just one of several things to look forward to, as I will go on to cover in the rest of this article – but the way the luck is going (with injuries and in front of goal, and all season with refs and VAR), we may only have next season to look forward to at this point – this season is an un utter clusterfuck of insane obstacles, albeit one from which lessons can be learned.

The rest of this article is for subscribers only. See details below on how to sign up to our intelligent, troll-free community; even if the headline of this piece – rather than be intended as trolling or clickbait – is purposely designed to grab the attention of those who can’t see the irony in wanting new players in the summer (or tons of big changes) when there’s £300m-£350m-worth waiting to return.

Paul Tomkins

The Mother of All Black Swans In a Tailspin – TTT Subscribers & Writers Give the Real Reasons For Liverpool’s League Struggles by Paul Tomkins

2021-02-19T16:52:00.000+08:00

https://tomkinstimes.com/2021/02/the-mother-of-all-black-swans-in-a-tailspin-ttt-subscribers-writers-give-the-real-reasons-for-liverpools-league-struggles/

By Paul Tomkins

February 18, 2021

By Paul Tomkins, Chris Rowland, Daniel Rhodes, Andrew Beasley and various members of the TTT community

Liverpool got back on track with a very impressive away win against German neo-giants Leipzig – although the stats showed that the Reds have been lucky defensively in the Champions League (teams not taking their big chances) and unlucky in the league (opposition teams taking more of their chances than last season).

The league form continues to be well below expectations, for a whole host of reasons that– as this site’s writers and commenters – we will try to unpack below. This piece aims to add to previous attempts like my dismantling of the arguments of numpties like Roy Keane), with new dimensions, and with the intention to try to think of every last thing (whilst obviously accepting that such an undertaking, in a season of so much craziness, is nearly impossible).

A lot of the issues can be dated back to the utterly insane game at Goodison Park, so it’s timely that the return fixture takes place this weekend. (How many Liverpool players will Jordan Pickford and Richarlison try to maim this time? What a shame the Kop will not be there to give them a warm welcome!)

We’ve also tried to collate many of the most illuminating graphics and charts that we’ve created or which we’ve stumbled across, many of which have appeared in other TTT articles – but the aim here is to try and make this article as close to a full health check for the Reds from a team of medics, rather than a cursory glance from a distracted doctor. (Even then, we won’t catch every little ailment.)

Subscriber Tony McKenna first introduced us on TTT to the Black Swan a decade or so ago, and this is a piece he wrote in 2014 on the issue:

Based on the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the Wikipedia definition is that:

“A black swan is an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences. Black swan events are characterised by their extreme rarity, severe impact, and the widespread insistence they were obvious in hindsight.”

Chris Rowland: To say much has been made of Liverpool’s travails lately would be an understatement worthy of calling the Atlantic a ‘whole bunch of water’ (copyright Terry Gilliam, Monty Python!).

Little of it has been analytic or in-depth, or taken any account of context. Or even got the basic facts right. Just damn them with generalised and superficial cliches and pretend that’s job done.

Example: Martin Keown after the Leicester away game:

“That central defensive position is where the problems lie.
“Klopp has lost defenders and taken two midfielders out into the defence. That is four changes from the team who did so well and he doesn’t need to do that. It is too many.
“Without Gomez and Van Dijk they have one hand tied behind their backs. The wheels have come off. Klopp needs to get that position sorted.”

Fact: but it wasn’t just Joe Gomez and Virgil van Dijk missing injured was it? It was also Matip, Fabinho and new signing Ben Davies. Fabinho couldn’t have played in midfield, or defence, or anywhere else!

Henderson and new signing Ozan Kabak played centre-back because the only other two available were rookies Rhys Williams and Nat Phillips, neither blessed with great pace. Against Jamie Vardy and Harvey Barnes! Really? But that typical combination of ignorance of the full facts and failure to consider context, both of which Keown’s comments graphically illustrate, are the sort of reason why we decided to compile this article. So instead of blithely saying ‘he should get those positions sorted’, perhaps he should try suggesting how, within the confines he has to work in. That might be worth listening to.

When it comes to understanding and investigating the real reasons for Liverpool’s demise this season, TTT subscribers are in the habit of digging deeper, and examining context, of looking at the factors that are having an influence, and providing the data to back it all up.

So here is a round up of what TTT subscribers have had to say lately about the main reasons why Liverpool, after two seasons of 97 and 99 points, two consecutive Champions League finals, a World Club Championship and a European Super Cup, are finding those impossibly astronomic standards hard to match this time round.

‘Excuses’, as Roy Keane, Richard Keys and keyboard warriors with the attention span of an aubergine might say.

Or ‘extenuating circumstances combining to produce an inevitable conclusion’, as TTT subscribers might put it.

This in-depth read includes ground covered in other TTT articles, but also offers a more focussed rundown of the issues.

Overview

First, a summary from Aquaman:

Like many of you I’m sure, you’d be part of alternate forums like Twitter (which can swing to the extremes as fast as you can type your tweet mid sentence before posting) or WhatsApp groups (probably a set of closer friends you know). And the general narrative I’m seeing right now [so ignoring the obvious lunatics and those turning on the club and players] from these forums is that:
1. The officiating is utter nonsense and blatantly against us
2. Our injuries are deep rooted enough to expect not challenging for the title
These are independent narratives. It’s either or. But the reality is, each of it (and a few more factors) mesh together to make this the perfect storm. I’ll throw in another cliche. Each are dominoes that causes the next.
1. Pandemic
2. No crowds caused by pandemic
3. Compressed schedule caused by pandemic
4. Physical fatigue caused by compressed schedule
5. Injuries caused by fatigue
6. Bad officiating caused by no crowds (to a certain extent)
7. Injuries caused by bad officiating
8. Mental and emotional fatigue caused by bad officiating
9. Mental and emotional fatigue caused by physical injuries distributed within squad
10. Emotional fatigue caused by pandemic
11. Slow reinforcements caused by no crowds (no income) and pandemic (inflated prices)
I’m sure I’m missing a whole lot more, but it is indeed a Perfect Storm and our bright red ship is right now in the middle of it. And like all storms, you’ve got to ride it through, provided your ship is fundamentally a steady ship with a steady crew.
Crisis? I’m not sure we are in one yet because, as the underlying numbers and even our naked eye tells us, we’re still playing good football. The players are still playing for Jürgen. The owners haven’t deserted Jürgen (although there’s arguments that they should’ve been a little bit more flexible with earlier reinforcements, but hindsight’s always great, eh). Jürgen’s coaching team are still loyal to him. So, our ship is fundamentally steady. Our crew are fundamentally steady.
But why, as other clubs cheerleaders and our own doubters would ask as they scream joyously, is this a unique storm just for Liverpool Football Club? The pandemic and bad officiating is prevalent to all. It’s because they see the two narratives above as independent, and not see the whole storm, it’s full force of nature, and all the contributing factors leading to it.

RDucker: An extract from an article found on The Athletic. It seems we are much less likely to play a risky pass this season, compared to all seasons under Klopp. The author provides two examples in the City game when City were defending facing their goal but rather than play the ball forward we played it sideways, allowing City to get in a proper shape.

“The speed in which Liverpool typically turn defence into attack is what you most associate with a Klopp team. Using this transition to quickly get a shot at goal with the speed of their front three has been consistently strong, but interestingly this has dropped off this year.
Looking at the directness of the attack, we can see Liverpool were taking a shot 3.6 times per 90 minutes within 15 seconds of recovering the ball. As expected, that put them top of the list in the Premier League for direct attacks from front to back.
This year, their numbers are lower and, interestingly, the lowest of any season under Klopp. They are now average 3.0 shots per 90 within 15 seconds of recovering the ball — which puts them fourth in the league behind Leeds United, Manchester United and Aston Villa.”
“Liverpool are holding onto possession for two seconds longer this season than the last one. This might not sound like a lot, but it could be the difference between catching the opposition out of shape or not. Many might point to this change coinciding with the introduction of Thiago Alcantara into the team — it will be interesting to look closer into this once the Spaniard has played a larger number of games than his current eight league starts.
Likewise, the slower tempo is shown by more of their possessions consisting of at least nine passes compared with last season. Given how Liverpool typically like to play at breakneck speed, this difference is all the more noticeable.”

Paul Tomkins: regarding RDucker’s post above, as Thiago has barely played, it’s funny the author of that Athletic piece should mention his name, even if it’s to say that he may not have played enough. Personally, I think Thiago as a problem (beyond his dreadful sliding tackles) has been a red herring. To have only played a few games at the time the piece was written seems to prove that he can’t have slowed Liverpool down across the season. Also, he’s been one of Liverpool’s best pressers, so it’s not like he’s slow in that department.

Rather than it be any desired change, the team is different in so many ways from last season, due to injury, lack of preseason, etc.. I think it’s a valid observation – if the Reds have indeed been making more passes, then that is something to highlight to be aware of – but I don’t always agree with the conclusions: it could be game-state related (you may pass more or less depending on whether you are leading, drawing or losing), or many other things (including a lack of energy due to injuries and a lack of preseason, plus the loss of Virgil van Dijk’s pace-injecting long passes). For instance, if your best dribbler is out, your team may suddenly dribble less – it’s not that you can tell lesser dribblers to just go out and dribble like an elite dribbler.

Liverpool had games with over 900 passes last season (and won), and as we showed last week on the site, Thiago is miles ahead of anyone else in the Premier League for “progressive passes”. But so many things have gone wrong this season, which will be covered in this hive-mind piece. Even so, this Thiago graphic by Dutch data visualiser Kees van Hemmen is well worth another outing:

It’s also worth remembering how many of the Reds’ best pressers are not available right now. To ask for more energy is one thing (even when players are fatigued), but some vital pressers are injured, or have been injured for long parts of this season, as shown via this Anfield Index: Under Pressure tweet:

Set-Pieces

Paul Tomkins: No one else seems be picking up on how Liverpool have gone from elite to toothless at set-pieces due to the injuries to all the tall players. To focus only on van Dijk is wrong for a number of reasons, but obviously he’s a key player for the Reds in both boxes, and in starting moves. Indeed, his beautiful, defence-turning long-range passing has been sorely missed.

He also is worthy of a mention in terms of leadership effects by Dan Abrahams [covered in a post that appears later in this piece], but there are other players too, whose absence is costly.

There are so many factors, and it’s hard for simplifying soundbites on what’s wrong.

This (below) was a graph I created before the Leicester game, which saw another 12 corners – often well-delivered – easily defended.

I first introduced this graph on the TTT Substack Newsletter (click on the link to sign up). Remember, this is not the goals the tall duo score, but how many more goals the team scores from set-pieces (half of which the tallest duo directly contribute to, the other half they take up the time and energies of the opposition’s best markers to leave others free).

I’ve shown that we’ve scored one set-piece goal in 16 games without the Reds’ biggest two centre-backs, having averaged a 1-in-3 when both were in the team, and 1-in-4 when it was just Matip and no van Dijk. (Since I created the graph, it’s now one set-piece goal in 18 games without both van Dijk and Matip – pro rata, that’s the equivalent of just two set-piece league goals per season, when last season the Reds scored twenty. The effect on the goals column is the same as replacing Mo Salah with an ageing Rickie Lambert or a disinterested Mario Balotelli.)

In addition, the Reds’ strikers had a collective drought for the first time since they were formed as a trio, and sooner or later that had to happen. While they missed a ton of chances, at the other end teams took their chances, in contrast to last winter, when Liverpool got lucky as the opposition squandered chance after change in December and January (but where the psychology of the team was different, and it probably made opponents more nervous, in contrast to now, where the same has applied to Liverpool).

I’ve been very critical of a lot of Liverpool’s finishing and final passes in 2021, but I also don’t blame the manager, and don’t really blame the players most of the time, as these things come and go, and if you’re low on confidence you’ll tend to miss chances, or mess-up crossing and final passes.

Andy Robertson has been very poor on the ball, but as Jamie Carragher showed on Sky’s Monday Night Football, he’s played 95% of all PL minutes since the summer of 2018. Trent Alexander-Arnold hasn’t been as effective, and he’s been both ill and injured this season. To use 17 different centre-back partnerships, and 13 in the Premier League in just 24 games, must be some kind of world record.

So it’s not just players who are back fit – Alex Oxlade-Chamblerlain has been terribly off-form, as he has the opposite problem of not playing for six months and then needing to find his touch, and being off the pace of the games (and now he has more games in his legs, he’s coming off the back of those rusty showings that haven’t helped him). If the team is riding the crest of the wave you can more easily just jump onboard.

The finishing in general had a really weird run (which is continuing in open play in the league at Anfield), as TTT alumnus Dan Kennett shared a few weeks ago:

The more chances missed by a team that is under serious pressure (either to win things or to escape relegation), the greater the pressure grows, in a negative feedback loop. Missing chances breeds anxiety, which leads to snatching at chances. In addition, what headed set-piece attempts the Reds have had have often been quite tame, in part because they have been from smaller players battling to get an effort in when up against bigger, stronger players.

Injuries

Chris Rowland: First, some figures:

Nineteen (must resist the Paul Hardcastle reference) different Liverpool players have been injured this season. Nine were missing through injury at Leicester, and Milner limped off after 17 minutes with a hamstring injury to bring it to double figures. Afterwards, James Maddison made the point that Leicester had injuries too. They had – just not as many, and not all in the same positions. The extent of the two sides’ injury situations was not comparable.

In the match at Leicester on February 13th, Liverpool fielded their 17th different centre-back combination of the season. In a total of 34 games in all competitions.

Andrew Beasley has shown that the greater the number of players out injured, the less chance there is that Liverpool will win, to an uncanny correlation, based on Klopp’s career at LFC since 2016.

He also showed that, as things stand, the longest run of any centre-back pairing this season is … 2.5 games! “Phillips and Henderson played the second half against Spurs, then the full matches against West Ham and Brighton. The longest run of starts is three, for Gomez and Fabinho. But Fab had to come off after 30 minutes of the third game.” If Henderson and Kabak play together beyond half-time at the weekend, they become the longest consecutive partnership for the season.

First, just look at the injuries (which this season are double any of Klopp’s previous seasons), and then, with the points scale inverted to show “good” vs “bad”, how they have affected the Reds’ form.

Now, with the rolling form overlaid:

(Again, the blue line is inverted, so that “good” is lower, and “bad” is higher.)

Jürgen Klopp in his Leipzig news conference, covered the stark reality:

“All the weeks and months you can see easily it is a mix of different things that happened. Now is not the time to explain,” he said.
“Injuries have played part in it, you can’t ignore them, it changed everything.
“Its like building a house, if the foundations are not right things are a bit shaky.
“We cannot change things but we will work on it.”

This was also Andrew’s graphic from a few weeks ago, that gives a sense, visually, of how great the disruption has been. Since then, injuries fell to five one week, then ten more recently, before dipping back to seven for the Leipzig game.

RDucker: Some points from a sports psychologist on the impact on injuries on other players: (from The Athletic)

“Dan Abrahams is a golfer-turned-sports psychologist, who has previously worked for Bournemouth and the England rugby union team as well as with players at West Ham, Fulham and Derby County.”
“Injuries to key players create a different narrative across an organisation,” Abrahams says.
“It makes a difference to the emotional temperature in a dressing room and can result in anxiety. There are people who are game-changers with their mere presence. Their presence alone can lead to a release of testosterone in (other) players’ bodies and the adrenaline to perform.
“It’s that feeling of looking across, seeing someone like Van Dijk and knowing he’s going to help you. If you’re a defender who has played next to another defender hundreds of times before, you have that understanding about what they’re going to do, where they’re going to be. That’s going to make a difference to your perception action. Without someone like that, confidence and understanding reduces and executing game plans becomes harder.”

More Injuries Were Inevitable

It seems that any team can expect a 25% increase in injuries when playing so many games. Sometimes a team may have a 15% increase, other times it may be 40%. The average is 25%.

So, Liverpool already had several out injured when going into this recent phase, which is just another such run of games for the Reds in 2020/21. The remaining fit players, with less scope for rotation, are at an even greater risk than if everyone was fit to start with.

Research conducted by artificial intelligence platform Zone7, which specialises in injury risk forecasting and works with 35 professional football teams worldwide, shows that playing eight matches in a 30-day period increases the incidence of injury by 25% when compared with playing four to five matches in the same timeframe.

And remember, Liverpool have had seven serious ligament injuries, three of which have ended seasons and another three of which were at least three-months out – all six of those most serious ones to senior players – and that is not down to bad preparation or bad physios; it’s pure bad luck, especially if it was the result of a shocking foul.

Finally on injuries, this is worth repeating, relating to how it’s not losing your first-choice that really hits hard, it’s losing the 2nd and 3rd choice players as well:

Lubo:

“A point on the injuries to Gomez and Matip on top of that of Virgil. Ryan O’Hanlon writes an email newsletter and in his latest one, on Liverpool (he is a fan), he mentioned a study of NFL teams that looked at defenses and found out that it’s not an injury to you your first-stringer (top defender) that kills you, it’s the injury to the second and third backs ups that sink you, as that means you now have to play your fourth and fifth options and those are just never that good. Had Gomez and Matip stayed fit and healthy, and allowed us to play Fab and Hendo in midfield more often, it would be a completely different story. Alas. Here is a link to the study, btw, though it is paywalled.

Enforced Rookie Minutes – What Has “Killed” Liverpool

Paul Tomkins: While I have touched on the issue before (along with factors like the massive loss of aerial ability due to injuries), I thought it was worth looking in more depth at how many minutes have been played by “complete rookies” in the Premier League for Liverpool this season.

I defined a “complete rookie” as anyone under 23 who had never played a top-level game before, or who had previously played fewer than 600 minutes in the Premier League (or equivalent level in the other major leagues) and the Champions League combined, going into 2020/21.

As it turned out, I could have set the “rookie bar” anywhere between 300 and 900 minutes played prior to 2020/21 and still got exactly the same results. A lot of young players at rival clubs had played more than 900 minutes prior to this season; and across the top six (minus West Ham) there were eight rookies with less than 300 minutes. Five of those eight were Liverpool players.

I didn’t include domestic cups, as so many players get minutes in those competitions, but the standard of opposition faced can range from a top Premier League side to non-league opposition. Even the Championship and League One clubs rest players for the FA Cup and League Cup. And as Liverpool have had no real domestic cup runs in years, it’s not exactly been a chance to play the kids very often (unlike Man City and their regular easier fixtures that offer them little trouble, and are ideal for some rotation and some rookie-blooding).

To play in the Premier League or Champions League, unless in dead rubbers, is a mark of confidence from the manager, or a situation where no one else has been available.

In 2019/20, Chelsea, Manchester United, Manchester City and Leicester all had mixed seasons. Many of those clubs – the ones who are Liverpool’s closest rivals in the table right now (assuming West Ham will fall away) – played a lot of younger players last season. By contrast, this season they’ve played hardly any rookies, with most of last season’s rookies now considered experienced enough to qualify as senior players.

Frank Lampard, with a club transfer ban, was famously given leeway to blood some youngsters, and Manchester United had fielded Mason Greenwood and Brandon Williams for almost 4,000 minutes of football prior to this season. Someone like Mason Mount played over 3,300 minutes for Chelsea in the two major competitions last season, and at 22, he’s clearly not even contention for inclusion as a rookie, as he seems to start no matter who else is fit. Phil Foden is moving to the level of first-choice, after nearly 2,000 minutes in a City shirt (in the major competitions) up to August 2020.

By contrast, the five rookies Liverpool have relied on for almost 2,000 Premier League minutes this season had just 353 minutes combined in the Premier League and Champions League in their careers up to August 2020. The graph below is another staggering example of what has beyond Klopp’s control. (You could argue that the club should have had an even bigger squad – despite the wage bill already being maxed out – but with 6-12 players out injured for most of the season, it’s less about squad depth and more about going beyond the usual limits of a squad, and raiding the U23 team.)

Now, you could rightly point out that Curtis Jones is playing better than a mere rookie, and you’d be right. But if the fit midfield pool (which wasn’t also covering for centre-back injuries) had included Jordan Henderson, Fabinho, Gini Wijnaldum, Thiago and Naby Keita, would Jones have 884 Premier League minutes this season? No way. He’d probably have 200 at most.

Equally, if Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain hadn’t returned so rusty after six months out, and Thiago hadn’t missed several months after the second serious and season-changing assault at Goodison Park, Jones would have had fewer chances to shine, and even now, is still perhaps between 5th-9th choice. (I’ve discussed in comments on the site this week what a great player Jones is, and his incredible potential. But he’s still learning.)

He could now arguably keep James Milner (based on age, depending on the midfield role) and Oxlade-Chamberlain (based on form) out the side, but not Henderson, Fabinho, Wijnaldum, Thiago or Keita, if all were fit, sharp and available for the midfield. He might usurp Keita if Keita can’t get back to being fit, but at best, he will remain below at least four others for the three starting midfield berths.

Liverpool, and Jones, have gained from almost 900 minutes of league action, but as good as he can be, he’s had costly moments and some poor games, because he’s just turned 20 and this is his first proper season. What he’s doing for most of this season for a lad who was just 19 when it started has been superb, within the context of a rookie; but despite his flaws that have at times cost points, this is a transitional season for him: his first as a proper first-team contender. This is a teething stage, for him and the team.

He’s learning on the job, and learning with some speed. But players like Mason Mount, Phil Foden, Callum Hudson-Odoi and Mason Greenwood had each played thousands of Premier League and Champions League minutes prior to this season; Jones had played a paltry 122 minutes, or less than two games’ worth of time on the pitch.

Neco Williams probably wouldn’t have got a single minute (perhaps bar a few late-in-game introductions) if Trent Alexander-Arnold had been fit all season, and Caoimhin Kelleher, as good as he’s been, only played because Alisson was injured and Adrian – the no.2 at the start of the season – looked shaky. Without doubt, neither Rhys Williams nor Nat Phillips would have played a single minute had Liverpool’s first four centre-backs not all been injured, three of them seriously. Both have had very good games, and clumsy games. That’s often what happens.

I created the following chart just to show why I’m not including certain players (in green) as rookies, and the contrast with those, in red, who are clearly very inexperienced. Liverpool have relied on five rookies this season in the league; combined, the other four clubs have used just three (and Liam Delap of City literally just got 39 minutes in one game this season).

And although he’s only 20, I’m not including Ozan Kabak as a rookie, after two seasons in the German top flight (over 3,000 minutes played in the Bundesliga, in addition to playing 360 minutes in the Champions League with Galatasaray and 1,000+ minutes in the Turkish Super Lig, and seven full caps for Turkey), although he’s obviously in an unenviable position of having to step straight into an unsettled defence – in a new league – within a week of his arrival; and the lack of understanding with teammates that contributed to the Reds losing at Leicester.

(The second goal came about – and listed officially as a Kabak error – because he would probably not have been used to a sweeper-keeper clearing up so far out of his box, and maybe didn’t hear the call, or if he did, quite believe what he was hearing; these are issues that a settled defence do not have to deal with, as everyone knows each other’s game. It’s not just about shouting “keeper’s ball”, but appreciating that the keeper may even be on his way in the first place. Equally, Alisson may have just left someone like van Dijk to clear the ball, but perhaps didn’t trust the new guy. Either way, it was an issue of inexperience within the defence, if not Kabak’s own personal experience as a footballer. He’s also playing alongside a player with about half a dozen games as a centre-back in his career.)

Indeed, as I wrote in both my recent books, team understanding – due to making fewer new signings (if you can get by with the players you have, because you’ve already shaped the ideal team and squad) – often actually increases team performance.

Liverpool didn’t sign a single first-team player last season, and won the league; and the only rookie minutes were handed out after the title was won. Adding more than one new player to a team is often counterproductive in the short term. Now, the Reds are already at almost 2,000 minutes of rookie minutes; from zero when it mattered, to 1,852 and counting. Add the 1,400+ league minutes of new signings, and it’s a mixture of inexperienced players and a lack of team cohesion.

The problem is that obviously at some point you have to introduce new players, or the team gets old and stale – but last season Liverpool were at a sweet spot, relying on previous signings who had settled in and were now all at a perfect age. There was no injury crisis; no relying on the kids. Even now, no one is “melting” – they’ve just suffered serious ligament damage from bad luck.

The bonus is that the minutes played by Jones and any of the other kids, including 20-year-old Kabak if he is retained, all count towards an expected improvement next season. Last season, Liverpool’s rivals were either able to (as they were out of contention for the league) or forced to play the kids. Now those kids are a year older, but not just a bit bigger and wiser, but now more experienced.

While Liverpool never intended this to be a transitional season – the age of the XI and the subs was still ideal – injuries have enforced one.

The good news is that, all being well, three of the world’s best centre-backs will be fit again next season (even if Matip won’t be fit all season). Diogo Jota will be back in the equation before then, and Thiago will be that bit more settled, and in addition to increasing his fitness and team understanding, will perhaps have learned to avoid sliding tackles. And then, players like Jones and Kabak may force their way into the team (or become go-to bench-men), rather than being used because of injuries to the main men.

Injuries Have Removed Goal Threat

Paul Tomkins: as well as losing a huge cutting edge at set-pieces – going from prolific to toothless – Liverpool have also lost at least three players who can score goals and add something in the final third.

The midfield is more goal-shy this season, and while the team was never built to rely on them for goals, the best goalscoring midfielders have missed most of the season.

Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain is a pro-rata double-figures midfielder goalscorer from open play (i.e. if he played all the minutes, he would be in double figures; instead, despite not playing every game, he got a healthy eight last season).

Indeed, prior to this season – when he has returned looking rusty and then low on confidence – he had played the equivalent of 39 full matches in the league and the Champions League for the Reds, and in those games, scored 12 open-play goals and made nine assists. (He’s also played in the domestic cups and scored goals.) Obviously he missed a year with serious injury, and then half of this season. He’s one of those players whose touch vanishes when out of form.

Naby Keita is another goalscoring and creative player. Virgil van Dijk adds five a season from centre-back, and Matip adds two or three, as well as the aforementioned effect they have on set-pieces in general.

And Diogo Jota has played 862 minutes in the two main competitions for Liverpool and scored nine goals, at a rate of one every 96 minutes. In other words, he’s arguably the most prolific minutes-based striker in the country this season. That’s far more prolific than Mo Salah on a per-90 minutes basis, and it’s without taking penalties.

He has scored goals against good teams (Atalanta, Arsenal, Leicester), and/or at important times in matches. If you look at the 22 players in the Premier League to have scored six or more goals (he has only five, so just misses the list of 22 published on the BBC), then the most prolific is Mo Salah, with a goal every 113 minutes (Ilkay Gündogan, out of nowhere, ranks 2nd of Jamie Vardy).

Obviously Salah also has half a dozen penalties, and while he takes them at an elite scoring rate, they bump up his figures in a way that they do not for Liverpool’s other strikers (who, in fairness, would probably miss a few).

Sadio Mané has often been electric this season, but he has scored a league goal only once every 255 minutes. Roberto Firmino has never been a rampant scorer, but he appears on the 22 top Premier League scorer list, albeit ranked 21st on minutes per goal (but ranks a healthier 11th from those players when it comes to just assists). So a fully sharp and in-form Ox has been missed, as someone who can take the ball forwards at pace and lash in a shot from 20 yards.

When asking for a few words on Oxlade-Chamberlain, Andrew Beasley supplied this regarding the Reds’ recruit from Arsenal:

“Re Oxlade-Chamberlain – the main loss has been his scoring from distance. Liverpool have only scored three goals from outside the box in league and Europe this season, and two of them were the 4th and 7th in the 7-0 at Palace. Only Gini Wijnaldum (second in 4-0) vs Wolves could be described as even vaguely important really. But Ox scored two of LFC’s three long-range goals in the Champions League last season (both at Genk), and one in the league too (the opener vs Southampton), plus one in the League Cup vs Arsenal if memory serves. Only Trent Alexander-Arnold scored as many in the two main comps, and his were all from free-kick situations. Ox was the open play long range king!”

I have always said that in the age of xG and sensible shooting – working the best positions, for the best chance of scoring – the long-range shot has to remain in the armoury; just as I say that players who love to cut inside must also go outside at least one in four times, even if they lose the ball, because it puts doubt in the defenders’ minds and then it makes cutting inside (the next time) a bit easier. You should never become predictable, and for a while, Mo Salah was becoming far too predictable – but ever since he scored his first goal of 2021 with his right foot at Old Trafford, he’s looked a far more balanced attacking player, and has scored six mostly excellent goals this calendar year.

Similarly, the long shot, while going out of fashion, remains a speciality. As Andrew says, someone like Oxlade-Chamberlain is perhaps the most potent player for this, and you can include his stunning goals against Manchester City in his first season. (Equally, City can score goals from outside the box, as well as walking it into the net.)

Unless it’s someone like Steven Gerrard, then by long-range I mean 20-25-yards, not 35. Teams need to know that you will at least try some shots, or defenders need not throw themselves into blocks. It’s handy against low-block teams, as the goalkeeper can be unsighted, and it can lead to spills, deflected goals, deflected assists (Virgil van Dijk against Everton when Origi scored in a famous Anfield derby), and to countless corners – albeit Liverpool still can’t do too much with them without all four outfield players who are taller than 6’1″.

The long shot, as Villa showed against Liverpool, can be a great provider of deflected goals. Indeed, Liverpool have scored just two deflected league goals in the past 18 months. Yet in the game against Villa, in that Black Swan of all Black Swan games, the Reds conceded three (and each was a massive deflection, and each went just inside the post or top corner).

The problem comes when teams resort to aimless long-shots in desperation, especially from players who never score goals. (When Dejan Lovren or Nathaniel Clyne would hit one from 40 yards I lose the will to live.)

Another issue is that Curtis Jones, at 20, has yet to chip in this season in the way that I feel he can. At the same age, after 50 games, Gerrard had scored just one solitary goal (versus Sheffield Wednesday), that was admittedly so good that you thought he’d become a goalscoring midfielder (and he did, eventually). Jones has a very healthy six goals in just 40 games, and half were against some good teams (Ajax, Everton and Aston Villa), but has only one in the league so far in his career. In a couple of years, that should start to have radically changed. Goalscoring often goes up a gear or two for players between the ages of 21 and 23.

While clearly injury prone, Naby Keita has started six league games this season. The Reds won five and lost the other (one of Adrian’s nightmares), to average 2.5 points per game, way above the figure in games where he didn’t start. The Reds never scored fewer than two goals in those games he started – which were against Leeds, Chelsea, Arsenal, Aston Villa, Leicester and Crystal Palace – and averaged almost four goals per game. Unlike in previous seasons he didn’t score or assist, but when he’s on a football pitch, things happen. When fit he’s a special talent, even if not everyone can see it.

While Liverpool cannot bank on Keita’s fitness, his absences – even to not have him as an option – are a kind of hamstringing of the team. While it may be that he just happened to start those six games this season when the team was on top form (in the opposite way to Thiago only returning to the team after months out after the Reds had already gone 150 minutes without a goal against West Brom and Newcastle), the fact that Liverpool have consistently done better when Keita is available remains a constant.

Andrew Beasley wrote this piece for TTT subscribers at the start of the season, about how much of an impact Keita has; although there is the couched optimism that the Guinean might have overcome his injury woes. (But at some point he still might – players can overcome such issues if the problem can be identified and rectified, even if not all players will.

At Keita’s age, İlkay Gündoğan had missed major tournaments with injuries and had never played more than 28 league games in seven seasons in the Bundesliga and one in the Premier League, where he only featured 10 times in his first season with City. Now he manages 50+ appearances a season in all competitions (although has just got injured again, when the league’s 2nd-top scorer). Indeed, Steven Gerrard had a lot of injury problems earlier in his career, as did Ryan Giggs. Yet those two had long and illustrious careers. So never write a player off, even if there are no miracle cures.)

I’ll quote a few bits from Andrew’s Keita article, but the whole piece is a strong argument for why, even now, we should not give up on Keita – but instead, find a way to figure out, if possible, how to keep him fit.

It can’t be an accident that Liverpool’s number eight performs well in so many different aspects of the game, not least as we know for a fact that the club’s head of research, Ian Graham, was hugely impressed by his numbers:
“What scouts saw when they watched Keita was a versatile midfielder. What Graham saw on his laptop was a phenomenon.”
It therefore seems worth pulling details from a host of recent articles and updating the figures to include the complete 2019/20 season to see what they tell us about Keïta. And if nothing else, if a central midfielder matches up pretty well to Kevin De Bruyne over the last two years [based on a data “radar”], then they must be on the right track.
… So what have we learned here? The data shows us that Naby Keïta is (somewhat on the sly) one of the key creative players in Klopp’s Liverpool team, be that teeing up a teammate with the final pass or putting someone else through to play the shot assist.
The former RB Leipzig man is also among the elite in Europe for carrying the ball around the pitch when he has it, and for attempting to win at back when he doesn’t. The net result? Liverpool’s record is better with him on the pitch than when he is absent.
[PT: and this obviously continues to be true this season.]

Defensive Errors

Andrew Beasley:

I’ve been thinking about the point I made above about defensive errors so I’ve done a little research.

Last season, Liverpool made 25. As they’ve made 12 so far in 2020/21, their rate per game has actually improved ever so slightly.

But only five led to a goal last season, whereas seven have this time around, so straight away there’s a bit more of a problem. Like anything in football, errors are not all equal – the one today was only ever going to end in a goal, rather than a shot, after all. Some are inevitably easier to get away with than others.

And look at the five which resulted in a goal last season, the scoreline in Liverpool’s favour at the time of the error, and the final result:

Southampton A, Adrián: 2-0 at the time, ended 2-1.
Brighton H, Adrián: 2-0, 2-1.
Watford A, Alexander-Arnold: 0-2, 0-3.
Arsenal A, van Dijk: 1-0, 1-2.
Arsenal A, Alisson: 1-1, 1-2.

38 matches played and only one game where a defensive error by Liverpool made any difference to the actual outcome. Even then, it occurred after the Reds had been confirmed as champions.

Now look at this season:

Leeds H, van Dijk: 2-1, 4-3
Arsenal H, Robertson: 0-0, 3-1
Aston Villa A, Adrián: 0-0, 2-7
Southampton A, Alexander-Arnold: 0-0, 0-1
Manchester City H, Alisson: 1-1, 1-4
Manchester City H, Alisson: 1-2, 1-4
Leicester City A, Kabak: 1-1, 1-3

Liverpool have lost six games so far this season, and they’ve gone behind to an error in four of those matches. Another instance was a penalty to Burnley (not an error in Opta terms, but clearly a defensive mistake), leaving the recent Brighton game, and that goal saw a failed clearance hit an attacker who knew very little about it.

It’s yet another issue this season where the small margins have absolutely gone against Liverpool. And when they’re on their 17th central defensive partnership of the season and the first choice goalkeeper has clearly got a few mental gremlins, I’m not sure what they can do about it. It will pass naturally, but it’s all part of the tailspin.

Top of the injuries table at present? Ouch.
Bottom of the VAR overturns table? Ugh.
Top of the table for errors leading to goals? Aha.

What an absolute clusterfuck. We were well in the game against City last weekend and unquestionably dominant here and then in the space of a couple of minutes one or two of the above factors have done for us in both matches.

We have unquestionably shot ourselves in the foot with the errors a few times recently – Southampton winner, go-behind goals to City and Leicester – and the Burnley penalty isn’t included in errors but proved costly too. But even a reasonable shake of luck, not even heavily in our favour, just our fair share and we’re having a completely different season.

And while our record for the season for converting clear-cut chances is pretty good, we’ve missed another two from two today. I honestly don’t believe there’s anything massively wrong with the team (though confidence is presumably shot to pieces right now) but all these things are adding to the drip, drip, drip of intolerable pressure. This is intolerable, Junior…

Defence Vs Attack

Daniel Rhodes: the three charts below showcase the Reds’ declining attacking prowess as the season unfolded (and several players remain out injured), and how the defensive side of the Reds’ game only really dipped – the opposition’s big chances rising again – since all of the centre-backs got injured, after a more stable period in January.

Once the Reds stopped scoring goals and entered that several-game drought, the pressure was applied to the defence; and by then it was lacking van Dijk, Gomez, Matip and even Fabinho.

Officiating: Refs and VAR

Chris Rowland: Ah, the elephant in the room. We need to talk about Kevin (Friend). And Anthony Taylor. And Martin, Andre, Mike, Jon, Lee, Paul and co.

Let’s be clear – there have always been complaints about refereeing. But let’s be equally clear – what has happened this season has been on an entirely different level to the usual carping about officiating fortune.

Paul Tomkins: It’s never easy arguing that you’re being screwed by the refs (and the VAR) but there’s a shit-ton of neutral data that suggests that, this year at least, the Reds are being jolly-well rogered.

Chris Rowland: This is a subject that’s so complex and, this season at least, full of so many contentious and downright insane decisions, we will be covering it separately, in great depth, next week, including subscriber Vinnylfc‘s gargantuan effort in trawling through all this season’s TTT match threads (league games only, up to and including Leicester away on February 13th) to produce a deep, game-by-game dive into Liverpool’s troubled relationship with refs, screens and some folk concocting strange artificial lines on the pitch in the back of a van somewhere near Stockley Park.

For now, here are a few bits of information on where we are this season:

– the official stats on VAR overturns this season; anyone who calls Liverpool LiVARpool after this is officially and just plain wrong!

– Planet Football’s version of the latest VAR figures.

– A list of 16 refereeing decisions that went against Liverpool this season up till Jan 6th; there have been plenty more since.

–A video looking at various poor decisions Liverpool have had. It isn’t comprehensive, and we know other teams have had some shocking decisions this season too – but the totality of evidence suggests the Reds have had the worst of it, bar far. Even compared only against Liverpool’s previous seasons, it’s been a radical outlier. Often these decisions have been at vital points in matches: when the scores were close, and not when either Liverpool or the opposition were already well ahead.

Paul Tomkins: Plus, Liverpool have won a healthy six penalties this season, albeit plenty of other clubs have won more in a season where the numbers have increased across the board; but a scarcely believable eight have been given against Klopp’s men. Half of these were stonewallers, but the other half were iffy at best. Thankfully some have been missed, but it’s still cost the Reds points, and is already 8x the number conceded in the league last season. Perhaps Liverpool got lucky in conceding just one in 2019/20, although the first-choice defenders obviously defended better than the stand-ins this season. Even so, to concede one league penalty every three games is bonkers.

Until Next Week…

For now we’ll end there, and if we think of any other issues we may update the piece.

But now we’ll go away and flesh out the analysis of the officiating madness that has been 2020/21…

See below for details on how to sign up to TTT to join in the intelligent debate and to read paywalled articles – something we’ve been doing for 12 years, to keep the site’s hosting and staffing costs covered and to enable us to provide free content like this.

Paul Tomkins

Unbelievable Results For Liverpool – But Store the Pain to Use As Fuel to Go Again by Paul Tomkins

2021-02-14T15:43:00.001+08:00

https://tomkinstimes.com/2021/02/unbelievable-results-for-liverpool-but-store-the-pain-to-use-as-fuel-to-go-again/

By Paul Tomkins

February 13, 2021In By Paul Tomkins, Free, Subscribers Only, The Sanity Squad

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. And I’ve seen English officiating – purblind middle-aged men waddling on lush turf as their cronies fiddle awkwardly with the tech – with offside goals given as onside, and onside goals given as offside, week after week.

Indeed, I’ve seen too much. For now, at least. I would cancel all my sports’ TV subscriptions, were it not my job to write about this stuff.

So, a quick note on this site, and a message to underline what it’s all about.

I have never wanted this site to be just another football site, and I want it to stay that way, even if it ends up being just me and three other people.

TTT exists to analyse football, and to examine all the context and nuance that surrounds Liverpool’s results: good luck and bad luck.

We can be happy with a lucky win and unhappy with an unlucky defeat, but we need to understand what underlies both: the effort, the underlying numbers, the injuries, and the realities – and ups and downs – of elite sport, where there need not be any major issues underscoring a string of bad results or any genius responsible for a win; just as, when Liverpool beat Chelsea 2-0 under Roy Hodgson just over a decade ago, you could see the Reds playing a flat back six that only hoofed the ball upfield, and think “this isn’t right”. Hodgson had nothing in the bank with Liverpool, and yet still he acted like a bandit trying to get away with a big heist.

In the past few years, Liverpool have reached a Champions League final, and returned to win it – after suffering crushing disappointment the first time – a year later. We’ve seen Liverpool finish as runners-up with more points than all but one champion in the history of English football, and come back and win it with two extra points, after the best first three-quarters of a season seen in the entire 130 years of league football in this country, which meant the title was wrapped up earlier than ever before (in terms of games, if not actual time, as the season was locked-down for months).

We have seen Liverpool rise to be ranked the 4th-best team in history based on the Elo Index, but all achieved without an insane injury crisis, and in the days when there was a crowd at Anfield. (And mostly before VAR, which I thought would help, but has instead merely quadrupled the bad officiating.)

Now, with a clear injury crisis (all season long), no fans at games, and with the manager unable to even attend his own mother’s funeral due to the bizarre state of the world’s health, we would be utter fucking arseholes to not offer leeway.

To start talking about tactics when the goalkeeper has just had a terrible week (after missing a game through illness, with his deputy absent) and gifted the opposition game-changing goals, seems insane to me. Tactics play a role, but if your confidence is crushed, 10 players are injured and others are carrying knocks and fatigue, the tactics – whatever they are – are less likely to be effective.

When, week after week, borderline or just plain incorrect calls are given against your team (often at key moments), you will probably struggle. As things start to go wrong, you may make additional mistakes that wouldn’t occur had you got fair decisions, especially as tiredness sets in. Once players make mistakes, their effects will linger, until enough time has passed.

Indeed, if you don’t buy into the “underlying numbers”, then Jürgen Klopp would never have become Liverpool manager in the first place, and none of this amazing ride – which was mostly a case of flying high, up to the time Covid struck and altered the course of the world – would have happened. The underlying numbers are not everything, but they are a big part of the equation.

We do not ignore our own eyes on TTT, but we need to know if we can trust what we see. I’ve lambasted Liverpool’s managers and players in the past, when they’ve merited it. But we are not allowed short memories, as we are not goldfish. The world may grow increasingly impatient, but good things still take time; as can fixing issues, many of which simply need nothing more than time (i.e. several key players to be fit again).

Some other manager – someone riding a lucky crest of a wave – might have been appointed instead had Liverpool’s key men not mined the data, and trusted both Klopp’s recent record (after they proved that terrible bad luck blighted his final campaign with Borussia Dortmund) and his more obvious longer-term success in Germany. Had those same people not worked with him to build a world-conquering squad on a merely mid-sized budget (that was part-funded by selling a “vital” player), then you would not have been so spoilt for three seasons in a row.

Constructive criticism, when valid, is helpful almost all of the time in life (albeit the timing can be off). But so much criticism is mindless, baseless, and comes swinging from a point of ignorance and gut-based irrationality. It’s designed to make the moaner feel better, and to me, it seems like someone dropping a turd in the swimming pool, and leaving other people to deal with the mess.

Fortunes change quickly in football, as they can in all sports. Sometimes it’s for the better, and sometimes for the worse. To be any kind of participant in sport – to play and to support – you need to accept the good times and the bad; the ups and downs; the ebbs and flows. But if judging, you also go on the biggest sample sizes possible, and for Klopp and these players that’s one of unprecedented achievement. You also need to appreciate the context.

If there were no extenuating circumstances, that might be different – although after the last few years, I would genuinely forgive anything this season. But rather than “excuses”, Liverpool have faced situations that almost no team could overcome. As I said last week, a sprinter whose hamstring pops after 70 metres is not making an “excuse” when they can only crawl over the line. Anyone who would argue that it was would likely be the kind of person who has achieved nothing in life.

Liverpool have the most injuries (and the most key players absent) for most of the season, with 6-12 for almost the entire campaign; have had the most VAR overturns by far, and the most borderline calls go against them when they could just as easily have been given for them; have been underprepared for the season due to the lack of a proper preseason to give them their usual stamina, that in part defines their play in contrast to slower teams; have been going full-tilt for several seasons with no proper break, riding an emotional rollercoaster that can take its toll; and have no fans in games to add that special something extra, during a time of darkness.

Liverpool were constructed – designed – to play fast, passionate football in front of big crowds, with a spine that was supposed to be on the pitch and not on crutches.

If you want to rant and moan about the very people who provided the best few years for decades and decades (and by some metrics, the best seasons ever), that’s your right – I can’t stop you. But please, don’t join this site. Save your money. I don’t want a penny from you. I just don’t want to encounter your sourness, when life it tough enough right now. If you’re frustrated, I get it – we all are. But we don’t need to be pathetic about it. To be frank, I don’t need you to shit in my pool.

This is a site for supporters of the football club, and not for people who can’t see when it’s their time to contribute their side of the bargain, and not just take, take, take, as some might have done when Liverpool won 97 and 99 points and reached two Champions League finals, across just three seasons, when becoming champions of England, Europe and the world. Now is the time to stand together, not to walk out at half-time because you’re some fickle prick.

The final third of this article is for subscribers only. (As long as you’re not douchebags.)

Paul Tomkins
The creator of this website; author of several books on Liverpool FC, and of one novel. Co-creator of The Transfer Price Index (TPI). Columnist on the official Liverpool FC website between 2005-2010. International man of mystery. Possibly bald.

Happy New Year! But What’s Going Wrong At Liverpool? By Paul Tomkins

2021-01-02T06:30:00.006+08:00

Happy New Year! But What’s Going Wrong At Liverpool?

By Paul Tomkins

January 1, 2021In By Paul Tomkins, Deep Dive, Free, In-Depth Analysis

Happy New Year! And here’s a festive freebie to begin 2021…

What’s Going Wrong At Liverpool?

Multiple choice:

A) Nothing

This detailed TTT piece by Mark Cohen was written just before a narrow xG “victory” over Newcastle, which was itself a poor overall display (I can rarely recall so many poor touches by Liverpool players), but where the Reds still created several big chances, and also had Sadio Mané hauled over by the keeper to deny a clear goal-scoring opportunity (more on that later).

In terms of many underlying numbers, as Mark shows, Liverpool have performed at much the same level as at the same stage in 2019/20. The finishing fairy – the randomness of taking chances some games and missing them in other, and thus sometimes distributing the points in a weird way – has clearly played a key role in results; as has things like Aston Villa scoring from three heavily-deflected shots when, in the entirety of 2019/20, there was just one single defected goal out of the 118 scored by (85) and against (33) Liverpool.

Liverpool “merited” a 3-0 win against Palace, a 1-1 draw with West Brom and narrow win against Newcastle. That would be seven points; but the finishing that was so super-hot against Palace went cold in the next two games.

The Reds are also conceding far more penalties (some fairly, some ludicrously), and although they are winning more penalties too (as is everyone), the Reds still are still halfway behind the spot-kick leaders (this year, Leicester, with 10). Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool can be virtually guaranteed of getting only half the penalties that the top penalty-winners get, although the bigger change this season has been the ones awarded against the Reds, which in some cases were wrong and costly.

B) Klopp no longer knows what he’s doing

Prior to his back-to-back title successes in Germany with seriously cash-struck Borussia Dortmund, followed by only narrowly losing the Champions League final in 2013 after mega-spenders Bayern Munich pilfered Mario Götze on the eve of the final (activating his release clause in a pretty underhand manner), Klopp had taken the most impoverished club in the German 2nd tier (Mainz) into the top flight for the first time in their history.

So, Klopp has been exceeding expectations for nearly 20 years. There was a slightly fallow period where Dortmund became serial runners-up, but as well as Götze, Bayern also took Robert Lewandowski for free. (They later took Matts Hummels too.) Nuri Şahin, the playmaker, also left for Real Madrid while Klopp was at Dortmund.

Imagine Man City taking Mo Salah, Virgil van Dijk and Sadio Mané, with all three costing very little overall. So, not just one rival taking the other rival’s best players, but with no great compensation with which to rebuild. Dortmund tended to stay second, but Bayern had ripped the heart out of Klopp’s team, which had broken the German points record.

Klopp then had a few fallow years rebuilding Liverpool (two lost finals in his first season), but inherited a team that was 10th and finished that season 8th, before finishing 4th in his first full season.

Clear linear progress was seen by reaching a Champions League final (2018, losing in strange circumstances), A Champions League final again (2019, winning it), whilst finishing 2nd in the league with 97 points in 2019 (almost a 10% improvement on the Reds best-ever season), and wining it with 99 points in 2020, which, for all the travails, remains a high point in Liverpool’s incredible history. The Reds rose to be ranked the 4th-best team in European history based on a statistical model that has been around for decades, and the top English side. (This team and manager doesn’t quite get given the credit this merits.)

Right now, Liverpool are treading water somewhat, but I’ll get onto the reasons why – clear extenuating circumstances. (An ‘excuse’ is often flimsy; but if the 100m Olympic final favourite twangs a hamstring after 30 yards, that’s an ‘extenuating circumstance.’) You can mitigate against some bad luck, but not a ton of it.

Managers also do often lose their edge, in time, but not in one summer. It takes five years, usually. And the smart ones can see that decline delayed by constantly employing the best younger coaches, as well as psychologists, fitness gurus, and so on. (But not a lot can be done against grievous fouls on your best players. Alex Ferguson, in between a string of titles, once put a fallow season down to the injury of one player: Paul Scholes. Oh to have just one key player injured. And Ferguson had far more money to spend, relative to modern-day Liverpool.)

If anyone is doubting Klopp while the Reds are top, take a look at Arsenal. Their fans were sick of finishing in the top four and going out of the Champions League after the group stage, and harassed their legendary manager out of the club (even if it did start to look like he had lost his cutting edge, albeit in an increasingly toxic environment); since when, they haven’t even finished in the top four. Right now, they’re pleased with two wins that take them out of a relegation battle.

Arsenal remain the poster-club for ‘be careful what you wish for’, just those who badly wanted Rafa Benítez out of Liverpool got the manager they deserved in Roy Hodgson.

But as much as I still love Rafa, what Klopp has right now is a world away from the in-fighting seen in 2010, with those terrible owners, executives and administrators replaced by people with world-class reputations, and Klopp arguably the greatest manager, pound for pound, that the game has ever seen.

Liverpool, under the guidance of Michael Edwards, continue to buy brilliantly, but it’s hard to get the best out of a £20m midfield steal if some nutter chooses to put six studs in his knee. Even the best physios can’t bypass medicine and just perform magic.

C) The season is crazy. The world is crazy.

The whole league has been weirder this season; more like the anomaly of 2015/16, that saw Leicester crowned champions with just 81 points, which was followed by winning totals of 93, 100, 98 and 99. This is football at its most random.

It’s been a time of no crowds, or tiny crowds; then, recently and depressingly, back to no crowds. It’s been a campaign with no proper preseason, and a proper preseason is where the stamina is built up. While footballers can be “fit” (i.e. they are not currently injured), there is fit, super-fit, ultra-fit and überman-fit. Klopp’s success has been built on hard preseasons. This year, there was no hard preseason. That is what often gives players the extra energy in the final 15 minutes of games (along with the depth in the squad to rotate a few players here and there, without having to resort to wholesale changes).

Maybe this season suits lower-energy teams, as the highest-energy teams of the past two seasons often seemed to be Liverpool, Manchester City and Southampton, with Sheffield United working hard last season; of those, only Liverpool are in the top six, and the Reds, even if they beat Southampton to keep Southampton roughly where they finished last season, the Reds will be well down on points, like City. Sheffield United have made the worst start in all top four levels of English football since football began.

Low-block teams who hit fast on the break – as Klopp’s teams used to (albeit without such a deep block; doing it via a higher back line to press with more players) – like Manchester United, Aston Villa and Leicester are doing better, while Spurs were too, until a few games ago. Spurs, Leicester and United won’t be in the Champions League, so the second half of the season may favour them. Of course, Spurs and United haven’t suffered many injuries, and it may hurt them if they do.

This isn’t a normal season, and so many things are combining. It’s been a difficult Christmas for a lot of players, many unable to see their families who live abroad, and strange results seem more likely in times of a global pandemic; indeed, Liverpool were utterly consistent before Covid-19, but less so since the restart in June (although it turned out that they only needed one more win the clinch the league, and the inconsistency in the final few games – as Klopp blooded youngsters rather than go all-out for the 100 points – was understandable; and again, there was no proper preseason after lockdown).

One of the hardest things for managers is to handle players to keep them in the Goldilocks zone: to avoid the red-zone of overplaying (which massively increases the risk of muscle injuries), and to avoid the undercooked rustiness you can get when going more than a week without games. The sweet-spot for a Klopp team usually feels like a game every five days, but that’s also with some rotation involved in the front three positions; and it’s not guaranteed to win games.

On top of this, every player is different. Some are more prone to injury. Some have more capacity for incredible stamina. Some are more suited to sprinting rather than covering a ton of KMs. Each and every one will have played differing amounts of minutes spread across different stages of the season, with differing stresses on the body, and sometimes carrying different knocks and minor muscle twinges. Each will have different things going on his life, with different stressors. Even not getting a good night’s sleep can highly affect performance.

D) Knees Up Mother Brown!

As of a week or so ago, Liverpool had ONE-THIRD(!) of all the knee injuries in the Premier League: six out of 18, many of them serious. What are the odds of that? – to have a squad that comprises 5% of the entire league and to have 33% of a particular kind of serious injury. That’s insane bad luck. And knee injuries are not usually ones you’d put down to bad preparation, unlike a poorly-warmed up hamstring.

Several of these catastroknees were from very bad fouls: the shocker by Jordan Pickford on Virgil van Dijk; the shocker from Richardson on Thiago; and a heavy foul in Midtjylland on Diogo Jota, with Kostas Tsmikas also suffering a heavy blow to the knee in that same game. Joe Gomez, meanwhile, has to recover from a truly horrific and potentially career-ending injury sustained not with Liverpool but on England duty.

Of the four Liverpool players recently named in the World’s Best XI, van Dijk may not play again this season, Thiago has started just one match, and while the first two were knee related, both Alisson and Trent Alexander-Arnold have missed a third of the season so far (with the latter also having Covid-19, and looking well below his best) due to other issues.

Jota was only playing Denmark because he hadn’t started against Wolves the previous weekend. He hadn’t started many of his early games with the Reds (coming on as a sub), and arguably needed minutes to keep in the Goldilocks zone. At the time, Liverpool were doing a lot of travelling and very little training; and so some match-time was presumably seen as helpful. But injuries can happen; just as really serious ones can occur in training, when no one is even near the player (Gomez, or Danny Ings on Klopp’s first day at Liverpool in 2015, which was also the same time Gomez had his freakish ACL tear; and likewise, getting a broken leg at Burnley was not due to being injury-prone but because of an overly physical challenge, albeit not your stereotypical “leg-breaker”, which Fulham’s Ademola Lookman got away with against Neco Williams with a shockingly late “tackle”; it was so late the ball was barely in the frame of this photograph. You will be hard-pressed to find a later tackle, and given that lateness and the height on the shin, it’s about as blatant a red card as you will ever see; up there with Richarlison’s and, er, Pickford’s…).

With hindsight Jota would have been far better left in England. But just as you don’t want players to play too much football, you also don’t want them to sit out too many games either; especially if you cannot organise the normal (intense and testing, but not over-tiring) training sessions as there just isn’t time, due to the number of games crammed into the calendar.

E) The players aren’t good enough.

Pretty much the same squad exists at Liverpool that won the Champions League and won the Premier League with the earliest ever capture of the English league title in the entire history of the game. It’s much the same group of players that won 110 out of 114 points between game 27 of 2018/19 and the same stage of the following season.

Of course, Dejan Lovren has gone, but he was rubbish anyway, right? (That’s all anyone seemed to say.) And Adam Lallana, who barely played in his final two years at the club. Both are in their 30s now anyway. Lallana was also part of the limited injury-prone gang.

Aside from James Milner, who was already in it, not one single player has even entered the melt-zone of 31+, and Milner could be one of those fitness freaks who goes on until he’s 39. There is no Steven Gerrard or Jamie Carragher losing their legs, to go from super-men to also-rans.

If anything, the team/squad should now be better. Tsimikas, another victim of a knee injury, briefly provided cover to Andy Robertson. He’s a handy squad player that the club lacked last season, but who hasn’t had much luck this season; and another who had Covid-19.

Jota has been Liverpool’s most ruthless finisher this season; Mo Salah has more goals, but has played more minutes and taken the penalties.

And obviously, Thiago is probably the best midfielder in the world right now. Or he would be, if he’d been able to train for the past few months. Instead, he’s been training for just a few weeks, and only joined in full team training days before the Newcastle game. It’s January and he was injured in October, after having had Covid-19.

Liverpool won those major, major trophies with van Dijk leading the way. His knee is screwed. Joe Gomez or Joel Matip alternated as his successful partner; Gomez’s career is at jeopardy from a horrific freak accident, and Matip’s periods of staying fit are getting further and further apart. (Matip is, to me, one of only two “injury prone” players at the club, the other being Naby Keita. That said, Xherdan Shaqiri is starting to join the pair.)

Fabinho was the 4th choice centre-back, because there are 11 players who can play in midfield, nine of whom are actual midfielders (plus Takumi Minamino and Roberto Firmino, who played in the role in the past). But of late Fabinho – generally superb at the heart of the defence, as you’d expect from a former defender with his skillset – has been partnered with the 5th- and- 6th-choice centre-backs (both inexperienced), as part of at least 13 different centre-back pairings this season already. With Thiago fit, Fabinho is probably not even needed in the no.6 role, and he could become a permanent centre-back; in his brief time alongside van Dijk in the role they looked imperious together. Obviously Fabinho is missed from the midfield, but Thiago and Jordan Henderson are shoo-ins, as is Gini Wijnaldum.

Henderson may end up having to play centre-back, and I wouldn’t mind that, if the midfield could still contain Thiago, Wijnaldum and one of Curtis Jones (albeit his form has suffered in the last two games, after an excellent run of performances), Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Shaqiri, Minamino and the hugely effective but equally injury-prone Naby Keita. If they can all stay fit, Liverpool have a chance.

Last season, Man City were given a free pass on their poor form due to the injury to Aymeric Laporte, despite often having John Stones and Nicolas Otamendi on the bench. Now Laporte can’t even get in the team. By contrast, Liverpool have not only lost a much better defender than Laporte in van Dijk, they’ve lost the 2nd and 3rd choices as well, who are also arguably better than Laporte – but also, at least, arguably his equal, when fit.

In van Dijk, Liverpool have lost the best aerial player in the league from both boxes, and miss his stunning long-range passing – that stretches the pitch and enables the Reds’ full-backs to get very advanced to receive the ball – and the pace he offers. He started the season in strangely poor form, and there’s no excusing him in the 7-2 defeat at Villa, when the Reds’ high line came apart at the seams; albeit Adrian, in goal, set the tone with an early mistake. (The entire defence no longer seems to trust the Spaniard, who was great when he first arrived, then increasingly nervy. Equally, the Reds “only” created about 3-goals worth of chances at Crystal Palace when scoring seven, and the same was true of Villa against the Reds – it was a game of freak finishing, aided by three super-influential deflections).

It also felt like Liverpool’s players didn’t really trust Nat Phillips at Newcastle, and he’s an honest Championship-level centre-back, filling in during an emergency. He felt like a weak link that Fabinho, Henderson and Milner were trying to protect, at the expense of the team shape.

Despite the squad being stronger overall – with more options, and no players in the melt-zone – the insane injury list, which at times was into double figures, has made for a weaker XI on many occasions. More teenagers have started games than could have been anticipated or hoped for – Jones, Rhys Williams and Neco Williams have all played a lot more than expected, and all have made costly mistakes (as teenagers do). Also, you can’t expect Phillips or Rhys Williams to provide the same kind of calming leadership and gigantic authority that van Dijk brings, because it cost £75m, and van Dijk was 26. You can’t have many spare van Dijks lying around.

So it’s not been the same team; or even close. As incredibly frustrating as it was to not be able to put mediocre West Brom and Newcastle away, it’s a miracle that the Reds went into the New Year top of the table, given all the obstacles. There have been several weekends this season when all the big clubs have failed to shine, and the different fitness levels this season may have played a role. Playing a Champions League game every midweek is a new rhythm to football, as is three international games in eight days (not once, but twice).

The only positive from the crazy number of injuries is that the Reds could have a much fresher team in the second half of the season, as players continue to return.

But of course, they still won’t get that proper preseason in their legs, and more injuries will probably occur as a result of both that shortcoming and the generally decreased time between matches.

Some players haven’t played enough due to injuries, but due to those injuries, others have played too much. Unfortunately, returning after a long injury can lead to immediate new injuries, but if the Reds can get by with the likes of Thiago and Jota (when he’s back) staying fit, and picking up only the occasional minor injury (and the centre-back crisis can be solved in one way or another), this team can still win the league.

But clubs with fewer injuries, and who have spent more on their squads, may have an obvious advantage.

F) VAR and Refs have shafted Liverpool.

Ex-referee Mark Clattenburg – who was one of the best – bizarrely revealed this week that he felt he should have been giving decisions equally to both sides, rather than just deciding what he saw. He admitted to prejudicial ideas going into games, by researching players.

Ergo, as I always say: refs don’t referee what they see but what they think they see, or in some cases, what they want to see. Studies on ‘inattentional blindness’ have proven that people cannot see glaringly obvious things right in their field of vision if they are focussing on, or thinking about, other things. I’ve been talking about this issue for years, but no one seems to care about the science. When referees do see something, they have the foreshortening of one angle, which as with stage fighting, can make contact look like it occurs when it doesn’t (or vice versa).

I’ve also proven with seven years of all Premier League data (2012-2019) that referees give more penalties to British/British-qualified players than to overseas players (based on the minutes played by each category each season), and in a seriously statistically significant manner, award far more penalties against foreign players. And England internationals very rarely have penalties given against them (but win absolutely tons at the other end). Players like Raheem Sterling and Jamie Vardy win penalties at an insane rate.

Some English players are clearly the worst divers, but they often don’t do the back-arching, or as many theatrical roles as the stereotypical overseas player might have done in the past. In fairness, Luis Suarez was a total embarrassment on this, although even then, in the one outstanding season Liverpool have had in donkey’s years for penalties received, seven were won by English players (as many by a very young Sterling as by Suarez), and the manager was British. (Leicester’s English players and that same British manager win a ton of penalties.)

Unlike Suarez and the likes of Vardy, Kane and Sterling, Liverpool’s current strikers often tend to try and stay on their feet, and when they do go down after being fouled it’s often with a delay that gets them called cheats; but they only go over when fouled. Mané against Leicester last season and Salah against West Ham this season both got booted in the leg, but both went down a bit late – however, if you’ve been kicked and therefore fouled, and you stay on your feet, you rarely get them. This is different to the totally contactless dive, or the cheating by kicking the opponent to make it look like they foul you.

(Salah’s one dive in a Liverpool shirt was a correct booking outside the box on his first return to Chelsea.)

Players like Harry Kane, Raheem Sterling and Jamie Vardy are expert at playing for the contact – they are waiting for any kind of touch and as such, the fall is instant and seamless, with no back-arching and often, just a graceless flop to the ground. They’re not thinking of taking a touch and trying to score – they’re just thinking of winning a penalty.

Kane even backs into players to create the touch, as was highlighted by someone online with a litany of clips of his very dangerous play, that led to ex-pros condemning a move that is too dangerous for rugby!

While Jack Grealish, like Vardy and Sterling in particular, kicks out his leg to hit the defender, to then tumble. I felt Aaron Connolly of Brighton did this to Neco Williams earlier in the season, although that was still a penalty, as Connolly’s foot – dangled out strangely – missed Williams as Williams was too slow (having been drawn out of position), and then Williams, when he caught up, totally booted him up in the air. Sometimes you can look for a penalty and still get one: just as drawing a foul is perfectly fine, if the defender doesn’t get the ball and recklessly gets the striker instead (unless the striker is the one that initiates the contact; Gary Neville seems to think that Robert Pires started this, but it’s like everyone Neville trained with England a few years back has the trick).

If you watch most referees, they don’t know what’s happened maybe 80% of the time. The older, fatter, slower ones – of which the Premier League (Best League In The World™) has many – don’t even keep up with play. Our refs are on average many years older than those on the continent, and many inches wider around their midriff. (Not to “fat shame”, but referees should be almost as athletic as the players.)

The game is fast, and it’s hard to tell what happened as the ball zips around and players collide or nearly collide every split second. In the Reds’ game against Spurs, the ref gave three consecutive throw-ins the wrong way based purely on whose shout was loudest and/or fastest. They still often judge the seriousness of fouls on the number of rolls; watch how much a player squeals (much easier in empty stadia) and see how closely it correlates with an opposition booking. Players rarely roll around after serious fouls; I broke both an arm and later a leg playing football, as well as rupturing a hamstring. Each time, the last thing I did was roll around; and it’s insane to roll onto the part of your body you’ve just injured.

My thought was that VAR was going to change all these optical illusions, clear biases and all the prejudicial thinking (which includes the widespread fallacy that Liverpool get too many penalties at Anfield, especially at the Kop end, to the point where Liverpool went years without getting a Kop-end penalty, even for headlocks, high-kicks and defenders punching balls clear). But I didn’t envisage the VARs essentially just being the same group of referees, with the same petty beefs with certain clubs and managers, and the same prejudices.

And it’s got even worse in lockdown, with Liverpool basically getting the same group of referees and VARs rotating every week. There are very few refs I trust, but the Reds now seem to get none of them.

Another problem was the fallacy of LiVARpool last season, despite the Reds only ending up with a fractional balance of overturns in their favour, ranking mid-table for VAR saving their bacon. It was a “truth” (that was untrue), and so, just as Clattenburg said, refs must be seen to give equal decisions to either side, even if the situation doesn’t merit that at all.

The more serious “corruption” with VAR is that there is some terrible confirmation bias going on to even get to a decision being reviewed. That inconsistency is actually far greater than any refereeing inconsistency, which is more human and fallible, due to the split-second nature of only seeing things once, in full speed. VARs have the power to be all-seeing, but they close their eyes half the time. It has made the game worse, not better.

When Mo Salah was taken out in the box at Villa, with the score 1-0 to the home side, Sky’s replays showed (after the initial challenge in real time) a clear, undoubted spot-kick. But before Sky had even completed showing the angles that proved it – within 10-15 seconds – the commentators had already said that VAR had okayed it as a fine challenge. When van Dijk was karate-kicked into next season, the VAR didn’t even watch it. (He later lied to say that he had, but was suspended all the same.)

And now we have Sadio Mané being grabbed around the thighs by Karl Darlow as the Liverpool man went to tap into the empty net from a yard out. Now, I didn’t see the foul at the time in real-time, but that’s what the replays are for. Look at the image, and Darlow has his glove around the knee/thigh! Yes, Darlow is trying to get up from a prone position having made the save, but Mané tries to jump over him and he grabs his legs! It’s 100% a penalty.

Mané had a 99.9% chance of scoring himself had the foot/leg he uses not been illegally grabbed. But the institutionalised corruption is that the VAR did not choose to stop the game to investigate, and Liverpool had no way of appealing for it; Mané was “blamed” for not going down by people in the media, but even if he goes down in the box when fouled, he gets accused of diving (due to an overall provable anti-foreign prejudice, albeit not necessarily so in every incident; and maybe the notion that Mané dives when he does not).

Mané should have had the right to run straight over to Klopp and say “ask for a VAR review!” – it might not have led to them admitting that he was clearly fouled, but it would have made it clear to the viewing public. Add microphones so we can hear if the VAR is honestly discussing it or fudging it, which again, as with giving teams appeals, would bring football into line with sports that use technology far more honestly.

Now, I also didn’t see the “foul” on England striker Danny Welbeck from Andy Robertson in real time. And to be honest, I could still barely see it in slow-mo, as they showed it time and time again. It was the last minute, it was not going to allow Welbeck to get the ball and score, and Welbeck fell over and screamed. A second Brighton penalty was awarded for it, and they got a point, thanks to that VAR decision. The difference in punishment seems ludicrous.

As of a few weeks ago, there had been 16 offside calls that disallowed goals, and of those, five were deemed by the neutral reviewer as good as level. Three of these five were for Liverpool goals being chalked off. The Reds were cheated out of the win at Goodison Park, as Mané was not offside for the injury-time winner. David Coote spent the entire match as the VAR trying to find Liverpool offside, to the detriment of allowing crazy fouls on their players, and didn’t even review the assault on van Dijk; as such he got demoted, only to be re-appointed on his next game to … do Liverpool again!

There were, I believe, something like 53 replays of Fabinho’s perfectly fine tackle at Fulham, that took three minutes to analyse. Some angles made it look like it could have been a foul, but other angles showed him clearly getting the ball by nicking away with his toe while the Fulham player’s leg was drawn back ready to kick it (so he ended up kicking Fabinho as he planted his standing foot after Fabinho had touched the ball). The referee took a couple of looks and thought “What the fuck are you talking about you daft twat?” (my interpretation of what he said to Lee Mason).

When Mike Dean – who doesn’t usually do Liverpool games, but has during Covid as refs seem to be sticking to their vague home area – gave Sheffield United what looked a fair free-kick 19 yards out, Andre Marriner turned what was actually, on the replays, another great tackle by Fabinho outside the box (it looked a foul initially, but replays show he got the ball and not the man, same as at Fulham), into a penalty. It was surreal.

But shit happens. My issue, though, is that Liverpool’s own clear penalty calls are not even being checked by the VAR, and there is no one for them to answer to. Equally, any tiny infringement at the other end is micro-analysed for minutes and minutes, almost always to the detriment of the Reds.

Think about it. If it takes three minutes to see the foul on Welbeck, the offside against Mané at Goodison, the offside against van Dijk in that fateful moment in the same game, and various other calls that have gone against the Reds, then it suggests that these incidents can require that much scrutiny to find a possible infringement. Not only does that not make it a “clear and obvious” error, but it shows the folly in “okaying” several clear penalties for Liverpool in 10-15 seconds, when all the replays can’t even have been watched in real-time, let alone super-slow-mo with extra zoom.

If that had been done for Mané at Newcastle it was surely a penalty and a red-card. But it wasn’t done. It’s like the police only ever taking DNA samples from one particular group of people in a murder case, and then not finding the one that matches. If you don’t even look, you won’t find it. If you only review potential fouls by Liverpool defenders and not potential fouls on Liverpool attackers, you won’t find anything to help the Reds, just hinder them. I don’t think a single penalty has been given via VAR for a foul on a Liverpool player in the box, despite at least three clear cases this season. And the VAR did not disallow the West Brom goal for a clear foul on Fabinho, that didn’t even have the usual get-out clause of being off the ball. (While the West Brom player makes a great jump, he pushes down on Fabinho to stop him jumping too; not just getting a leap on Fabinho but fouling him in the process. Harry Kane can get a penalty for literally backing into someone – by looking back at them as he does so – but this is not a foul? Again, England players have their own rules.)

This is why the clubs – managers, assistant managers, coaches – need to be able to view the incidents themselves on pitch-side monitors and, within a minute or so, call for a ref to give it a proper review.

Right now, it’s utterly arbitrary as to what even gets to be reviewed, and if the VAR doesn’t like your club, your manager or the various players he has prejudged – if he doesn’t even bother to check – then you don’t even get a shot a fair outcome. The VAR can be 200 miles away, with no one from the club able to appeal to his better judgement. They can hind from Klopp there, and mete out their petty revenge because, the poor lambs, he shouts at them during games.

While decisions can go for you or against you, Liverpool are at -6 for VAR overturns in 2020/21, and that doesn’t include all the other obvious errors from the referees and the ignored penalty claims.

It has cost the Reds a lot of points this season. Thankfully it’s not been as bad overall in recent games, but the madness of Andy Robertson being deemed to have fouled Danny Welbeck going nowhere, and Sadio Mané being stopped from scoring a certain goal a yard out deemed irrelevant, is maddening. These two decisions alone were worth a swing of four points, based on Salah continuing his 100% penalty conversion ready since 2017; and that’s without the definite winner at Goodison, and other key decisions.

And whereas you can say that Liverpool did not play well enough against West Brom or Newcastle to “deserve” the point, you “deserve” accurate, consistent and honest officiating at all times. That’s a given, and should apply the same to the worst team in the league as it does the best. It’s not a judgement of your performance but of the incidents in question.

There’s no doubt that injuries and officiating have hurt Liverpool more than any other club this season. That’s a statistical fact. So to still be top as 2020 became 2021 remains a minor miracle.

All that said, the side will have to dig deep, and also play better than in the last two games, without question. But as ever, it’s a complex situation, with various extenuating circumstances – and it’s hard to be at your best without several of your best players. It’s just not logical, especially over a longer period (players like Phillips might shine in the occasional game, but are not ready or suited for more).

More injuries, and more VAR madness, and Liverpool are unlikely to win the league, no matter how hard they try or how well they play. But a bit more fairness from VAR, and the likes of Thiago staying fit (with others returning sooner rather than later), and this side can still prevail.

Here’s to Liverpool winning the title again, or at least being able to give it a bloody good go; but above and beyond that, let’s hope the world gets back to normal and the pandemic is finally brought under full control. Once the dust settles on Covid-19, we’ll still have a fair few years left of this brilliant Liverpool team.

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Paul Tomkins

Tomkins Rants; Tomkins’ Head Explodes; Fuck The PGMOL by Paul Tomkins

2020-11-29T07:21:00.002+08:00

https://tomkinstimes.com/2020/11/tomkins-rants-tomkins-head-explodes-fuck-the-pgmol/

Tomkins Rants; Tomkins’ Head Explodes; Fuck The PGMOL

By Paul Tomkins

November 28, 2020In By Paul Tomkins, Free, Tomkins Rants

Four big decisions went against Liverpool in this single game (in a season of bizarre big decisions going against Liverpool), three by VAR. Two were correct, and two were examples of VAR ruining the sport.

Sadio Mané was offside when putting the Reds 2-0 up, and it was a stonewall penalty from the young and inexperienced Neco Williams in the first half.

But Mo Salah was offside only by imagined degrees based on seriously flawed technology, and the penalty, awarded in injury time, was not a clear and obvious error by the ref. It might have been a foul, but then again, it might not.

If anything, consistency is getting worse as VAR and the refereeing community continues to be run by a eunuch with the gumption of a dead mouse that’s been put through a mincer, and the video refs are just part of the same pally bunch of blokes who all referee the games, and have their favourites, their biases, their ability to “unsee” the obvious.

Liverpool had a lot of VAR calls go against them last season, but also some go for them.

Many of them, for and against, were shocking, and illogical, and inconsistent. I didn’t necessarily like them either way, but as long as it evened itself out in that unscientific way, it was less of an issue.

And it worked out to be fairly neutral in terms of net result (Liverpool ranked mid-table for VAR damage/benefits), but it made the games all about the officiating. I hated the way a good idea like VAR was being used, even if it benefitted Liverpool – albeit, on the whole, it didn’t really benefit Liverpool.

This season, Liverpool are currently running away with the trophy for “how much damage can VAR do?”.

And this season it’s been worse overall, including the farcical application of the handball law. England stands alone with its use of three subs and its misuse of VAR. Even the Championship have now voted for five subs. The TV companies care one about themselves and not the clubs, and when a manager like Klopp complains, they “disappear” the evidence. (At least, Sky do. BT Sport at least doesn’t resemble Communist State TV.)

Now, a foul outside the box is taken into the box for a penalty, even though the official didn’t look to see that, actually, Fabinho only got the ball (outside the box), if not a clean contact on the ball.

That clear and obvious error was not overturned, as the official apparently only looked at where the offence may have taken place, not if it actually took place at all. Now, with super-slo-mos not even making it clear what happened, Andy Robertson is penalised for something more minor than most things that take place in the box each weekend, to gift Brighton a last-minute equaliser. If it’s a foul, fine – let’s just set the bar really, really low for a foul.

And all the time Liverpool spend in the opposition box – they had three of the four players in the league with the most touches in the opposition area last season – will lead to a deluge of penalties for the Reds (any time that Liverpool get penalties there’s an outcry and referees stop awarding them).

Jürgen Klopp speaks his mind and that terrifies officials and TV companies (and some hypocritical journalists who work for the purveyors of nasty, hateful news that destroys lives), to the point where they set out to stop him. How dare he! A pally Englishman would have no such problems; just as British managers have always wined and dined British journalists to curry favour. (Then, gang up on the foreign manager.)

We all want to enjoy the football more, and focus on the officiating less, but what’s the point if late (or timely in terms of the scoreline being delicately balanced) and terrible decisions keep killing your team’s hopes?

We can’t even enjoy goals anymore, in case someone with inaccurate equipment makes a decision on a mere millimetre when full inches are the tech’s margin for error. The spiffing lines drawn are accurate to within a pixel, but the pictures they are drawn over are full of distortions, and delays, and inaccuracies. It’s bullshit, dressed up as science.

In cricket, with better technology, they have a massive margin for error on whether a ball was going to hit the stumps or not, and even if they think it might have hit the stumps in an LBW shout, they’ll go with umpire’s call, as they know the tracking software is not accurate to within fine margins; in football they draw super-thin lines that turn inaccuracy into imagined perfection, and find someone’s pubic hair offside.

The schedule is making good football harder, injuries more frequent, and VAR is then rubbing salt into the wound of these soulless games by ignoring blatant fouls in the box one week then jumping in, to change the game, with something minor the next week. A bit of balance would be nice, but Liverpool are at seven (against) for net VAR overturns, in just ten games. Maybe three of them were the correct decisions, and the rest were either debatable or terrible. (At least three of them were terrible.)

And that doesn’t include things like the VAR not spotting Jordan Pickford kick Virgil van Dijk into hospital.

As subscriber andklopp noted on here after the game, “How can it take slo-mo to spot a clear and obvious error?”

What the fuck are the rules? Does anyone know? And even with the rules, the implementation, the emphasis on what is and isn’t allowed, are fudged week by week.

The rules change every summer, but the application changes every couple of weeks. Some officials don’t even know the latest rules, as seen by the mistakes they made; such as Brighton scoring against Liverpool last season with a player in the Reds’ wall (outlawed at the start of the season) or David Coote not knowing that you can send someone off for serious foul play/violent conduct even after the offside (that he had just invented) had been given.

Coote’s mistake meant that Everton didn’t have to take off an outfield player (likely Richarlison) to send on a sub keeper, with just 10 minutes gone. It also meant that violent conduct was condoned, and allowed Richarlison to violently and deliberately place his studs into Thiago’s knee. Coote essentially caused the injury to Thiago by not doing his job of protecting the players.

I pay good money to Sky and BT to watch Liverpool, but I want to see Thiago, and players like him. Why can’t I? Because of officiating disasters. Thiago’s career could be on the line, if his knee doesn’t heal, just as Virgil van Dijk has a less than 100% chance of returning to normal, and that won’t be before next season. Both are 29. We are being robbed of their prime, and the chances of Liverpool retraining the league title are lessened. Why? Because of officiating disasters. And that was just one game.

And if that was a penalty in the last minute today, for the slightest of touches by Robertson on Danny Welbeck as both tried to kick the ball (and both missed), then let’s see the VAR jump in when Mo Salah and Sadio Mané are tripped in the box, or grabbed around the neck, week after week. How much contact is allowed? Is it allowed around the neck? Is it allowed around the neck, with both hands, gripping tightly, if you’re England International Harry Maguire? Yes, it is.

If you’re England International Harry Kane, and you jump into an opponent outside the box, can you win a penalty? (The answer is: yes, yes you can.)

Why did we at TTT gather video of two and three players wrestling Virgil van Dijk to the ground at several corners last season, which the VAR ignored? It’s cognitive dissonance to just pretend you haven’t seen what you’ve just seen. I have my biases and I get stuff wrong too, but I’m not earning a fortune to make big decisions. When is WWE wrestling allowed in the box? Why do some officials spot it and others ignore it? Why have refs in all but one incident agreed that the VAR was right? Surely there should be more dissent than that?

Even when Salah was scythed down in the box away at Aston Villa this season, when the score was 1-0, the commentary team that included Jamie Carragher said “VAR has ruled no foul” or words to that effect with seconds as Villa broke out of their own box, only for Sky to show replays of a clear foul on Salah; Carragher, then seeing the replays, able to discern, like everyone else, that it was a clear penalty. Hang on, I thought we were now analysing these incidents?

[Edit: just to add, it occurred to me whilst debating the article with subscribers that in this instance the VAR intervened to give a “soft” penalty. Now, a soft penalty is usually still technically a penalty, but several get waved away every game, for various reasons, often because there’s not enough contact to constitute a foul. Yet, if it’s a soft penalty it can’t really be “a clear and obvious error”, but usually just a judgement call by the referee that, once given, is hard to overturn, as it’s soft, but it exists. However, for VAR to give one is just bizarre. How often do you get soft penalties by VAR? Have I just been missing loads of them? Why would you intervene for soft penalties? As I say elsewhere in this piece, I’m happy for them to be given if they are all given, but they are not; and some serious, clear and dangerous fouls are not given as penalties by the referee or VAR. That means we now have powerful, all-seeing tools and still reach bad decisions, which is harder to accept than a referee simply not seeing something, because he’s human, and may have been unsighted. If VAR can see soft penalties with minimal contact that’s not clear to the human eye, then there’s no excuse to miss the obvious ones – yet they still miss them.]

The decision to analyse or ignore is therefore just as prone to biases, laziness, cognitive dissonance, cronyism or any of the things that make referees so fallible to start with. There is no right to appeal, unlike other sports. You have to hope the VAR was paying attention.

Why was that okayed within a heartbeat, before the video could be properly viewed? It reminded me of those old court trials for murder: the trial, in 1907, lasted 43 minutes, and the jury reached its decision in 10 seconds. Seems just.

There is some kind of implicit bias at work in how referees choose to see the footage. They can ignore assaults one week and see the slightest of touches the next. It often seems to hinge on who is involved; an England international almost always has a free pass.

We also know that David Coote forgot to even view the assault on Virgil van Dijk due to forgetting the rules, in a game that continues to leave Liverpool without two players shortlisted for the best player in the world due to serious foul play damaging their fucked-up knees; but then we get about three different explanations from the Premier League afterwards, as they make stuff up to cover their tracks.

That’s the most galling thing, how they change their explanations like guilty criminals giving a fifth account of what really happened. They give us a load of old flannel, to fit a narrative, not the facts.

It was then said that Coote had indeed seen the incident and deemed it not worthy of a red card, and as ever, an England international or ex-international gets away with something few others would. No ban, as the VAR saw the flying two-footed assault, and … well, who knows? Welbeck got that decision today, but no way Mo Salah would via VAR. Instead, he’d be questioned for going over too easily. (Michael Owen brought that up again, yet he dived far more for Liverpool than Salah ever has.)

I wouldn’t be at all sad if all England’s players end the season too tired or injured to turn up to the Euros, and if the 14 clubs who effectively blackmail the rest of the game (stifling the Big Six and denying fairness to the 72 clubs below them, as they keep the financial gulf too large in order to fill their own pockets) continue to ruin our game with god-awful managers like David Moyes, Steve Bruce and Roy Hodgson, who, in 2020, can only spoil matches anyway, with dogshit football, and who couldn’t win trophies at major clubs even if/when given bigger budgets. Several have tried, and failed.

(At least some younger English coaches are getting their chances, and some of them seem to have more about them than just ruining football, and Graham Potter seems to be one of the better ones.)

If Klopp was English his team would get far more penalties and his players might get more protection; but he’s not English, as most English managers are rubbish, and couldn’t do even a tenth of what he has done in the game. When they get the big jobs they screw up, time and again, only for their drinking mates in the media to cry “foul play!”.

Liverpool also got lumped with the blame for Project Big Picture, but it was an Englishman at the FA and an Englishman in charge of the Football League who conspired to plot it; yet two American owners got blamed, as it’s always easiest that way. Little criticism was made of Greg Clarke, and then he got sacked for some unpleasant things he said, rather than being a deceitful gobshite who tried to shift the blame of the whole revamping idea. Only David Conn of The Guardian seemed to call him out over his duplicity with PBP.

Since then, Liverpool have had an insane number of bad calls go against them, and we continue to have 14 clubs – half of whom offer nothing to the top flight except big, talentless bodies clogging up the pitches – continue to have all the voting power.

Strange decision after strange decision follows, as 14 clubs – essentially “the Premier League” – protect what they have and try to deny the other 78, even though most of these clubs are instantly interchangeable with half the Championship. They made it to the top flight on merit (although some broke Championship FFP rules) but it’s almost like gerrymandering how they get to stay there.

Which isn’t to say Project Big Picture was fair or just; but overall, it was more fair and just than the 14 largely mediocre clubs protecting the crapness of the lower reaches of the Premier League, as they fight to stay up and sod the rest.

(Again, not all of the 14 are like this, but some of them were happy to expunge last season from the records after 29 games were played, despite playing in state-funded stadia as they reclined within their gold-plated suntanning beds, the fucking awful gobshites.)

If it wasn’t my job to write about football, and keep this site afloat, and sell a few books along the way, I’d be done with football for this season.

Books like this one…

Maybe Klopp is another reason to stay, as he cares, he’s smart, he’s passionate, he’s considerate, and he wins big, big fucking trophies. The biggest. Time and again. Not League Cups – league titles, Champions Leagues. If Covid was combined with Roy Hodgson then I think I’d take up watching professional knitting.

It’s horrible with no fans, and that’s not really anyone’s fault within the game; shit happens, and Covid-19 is crap for us all. But the TV companies are actually getting to show more games, and were having bigger audiences the last I heard, but also took money back from the clubs.

The TV companies then tried to pull a fast one with the pay-per-view – and then no one wanted to watch Burnley or whoever play whatever alehouse dogshit nonsense for £15 a pop. Who knew!? Some of us would pay that much to watch a proper match, between two good teams, but not to endure that nonsense. Then they tried to blame the clubs. But hang on, aren’t the clubs essentially the block of 14 with all the voting and veto rights?

And books like these ones…

Several weeks ago Klopp stood up for Ole Gunnar-Solskjær and Manchester United, to say that the timings for the early games were daft and dangerous to players; yet BT Sports continue to pit Champions League clubs playing on Wednesday nights against teams away in the league just over two days later.

We are already paying good money to watch the matches on TV and as Liverpool fans, despite world-class fitness specialists, we’re getting to watch reserves, due to all the unavoidable injuries. Throw in the terrible officiating and the empty stadia, and at least try not to make a mockery of the action that does take place. Liverpool play Ajax on Tuesday, then have two more games within a week, one halfway across Europe. It’s a ceaseless treadmill that’s wearing everyone down.

Whoever Klopp selects he’ll get slaughtered; and the TV companies and media toadies will tear him apart for not winning a game, when he has so many injuries that players who were not even registered with the first team are being drafted in, and when some, like James Milner and Joel Matip, cannot play three games in a week; had Matip started today he’d probably be alongside Milner – asked to do too much – in the ever-expanding new rehab centre. The alternative was to ask a teenager to risk his developing body for yet another start, or someone coming back from an injury sustained with the fucking England team.

Meanwhile, England and the FA take the players whose wages we fund (as the club fans pay their wages, and fund that through TV subscription mainly), to play three games in a week, and hand them back on stretchers. Yay!

I don’t want special treatment for Liverpool, just some of the kind of competence Klopp shows, Michael Edwards shows, those running the club show.

Everything about the club is world-class, and they step onto the pitch to have their actions adjudicated by people who – and get this! – when deemed to have an incompetent game are then briefly demoted and brought back to do the same job involving the same team! You couldn’t make this shit up.

“Sorry, other clubs won’t get to have Coote for a week or two, as he serves his punishment for doing some/several things horribly and ruining the result and causing injuries, but we’ll bring him back to VAR you again”.

And the people who run the game are themselves fucking amateurs and chancers, who must bow the Little 14. (Almost sounds like a Depeche Mode song, that.)

I don’t want to be all elitist and entitled about Liverpool, but it seems that the club has found the smartest, most emotionally intelligent people and players, and the league is being run and officiated by a group of toadies, incompetents and wide-boys. We get to have all the sensible decisions made by WFH and DFM! (West Fucking Ham and David Fucking Moyes)

And all the planning, the hard work, is distilled into whether or not someone who is not very good at their job makes a call that suits you or harms you.

I can accept human error. But the handball law seems to change by the week, and is, along with the offside law, interpreted differently from match to match. Apart from the schedule and the injuries, I have no problem when Liverpool play badly and drop points, as it’s rare, and they are not perfect; they were crap in midweek, but it’s been an insane run of fixtures. The players have to make decisions that aren’t based on 12 camera angles. They have milliseconds to decide. They aren’t in plush VT suites in London.

The types of incidents VAR reviews is utterly arbitrary, based on who rolls around and screams, according to Danny Welbeck. If these decisions were merely cosmetic, that would be one thing; but they keep deciding games. And the games themselves are being ruined by injury after injury; there were as many injuries and incidents in the first half yet just two minutes were added, then suddenly five were added to the end of the second. The refs just make it up. I’ll add two minutes, despite six minutes of stoppages; maybe mindful of the TV companies getting all of their ad-breaks.

Liverpool started the game with their 11th centre-back pairing of the season and ended it with about the 5th or 6th right-back of the campaign.

As Klopp says, this is a Covid season, and special rules should apply – it’s shorter, there are more games crammed in, more often meaningless and uninteresting internationals crammed in, more illness as well as injuries, and there was no proper preseason. The TV companies keep telling Klopp that the clubs signed a contract; but the TV companies were happy to renege on their promised payments last season. If I were so inclined I’d ditch Sky and BT and look for streams instead. It’s what the smart people do.

Having an overbearing schedule when people’s careers are at stake shouldn’t be compared to people who work down a mine or frontline workers in the NHS, in order to say that it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things; by that logic, just cancel the whole fucking shebang. Cancel your entire TV operations, as anything shown by Sky, BT and the BBC is not as important as people who go down the mines or those on the medical frontlines.

This is the same week that Peter Shilton came out as horribly bitter over the death of a remarkable player who far transcended his own limited ability (he was a goalkeeper, for fuck’s sake), and called him a cheat, when Gary Lineker was happy to go down easily twice against Cameroon in the following World Cup, in which Shilton was a waddling old embarrassment in the nets. No one brings up how we cheated the poor Cameroonians. No one went on about how Michael Owen threw himself to the ground in the Argentina box in 1998; yet these Brits continue to call the foreigners cheats. It is up to the officials to spot handballs, and dives, after all.

And we still have to accept the players we fund going off to play in three internationals in a week, including heading overseas for a god-damned friendlies, at a time when there’s a global pandemic killing millions. We pay the big TV subscription money, and money is tight right now. But Gary Lineker can lecture us on how there’s no need for player welfare, when he stopped playing because he had a sore toe, and famously once shat himself during a match? (Needless cheap dig, I admit. In fairness, he did play on, once he’d smelt it, just to make sure. We’ve all been there.)

I don’t really support Liverpool hopping off to a European Super League, but any big club would be nuts to not do do if given the chance to join something much bigger and better arose, as the game moves forward – just as it always has; after all, the Premier League itself was formed as a breakaway, lest we forget. England was too superior to even enter World Cups and European Cups early on. All leagues were breakaways at some point.

I don’t know if the refs are better on the continent, but the tournament organisers seem to think so, and the VAR implementation seems more sensible; there are few fewer daft decisions in Germany, it seems. They might even plan it so that teams can be at their best, to see great football, and not tired and decimated squads trying to just get through 90 minutes without being stretchered off (most can’t). But I’d take it, if it meant exciting German teams and fast-passing Spanish teams.

Anything to not have to watch Brit-dinosaur-managed Burnley, Newcastle, Crystal Palace and Sheffield United play a load of attritional turgid turd-ball to try and finish 17th. (Because, guess what? – few people want to watch that. It fucking sucks.)

I’m clearly ranting (I like to stretch my rant-muscles every now and then, albeit not every three days; not least as I occasionally do a Lineker if I get too excited). It’s partially tongue in cheek, of course, and not to be taken too seriously; but rooted in genuine frustration and disillusionment all the same. I want to learn to stop hating the officials, and start to love referees and their ilk, but as soon as I resolve to do so they make me lose all faith in even their basic abilities. We are stuck with them, and we need them; but can we have some better ones please?

And, fingers crossed, Burnley and Sheffield United go down this season, and football-playing lower-budget clubs like Norwich and Bournemouth, who prioritise “proper” football, can replace them.

And while I don’t think we can be picky about how any team chooses to play and phrases like “proper” football (I am not judging those teams because they play shite football), we can be choosy about what we pay to watch – and if it involves Brit Dinosaurs, and no Liverpool, I can take my hefty Sky and BT tariffs and do without it. If you want me to watch it, and continue to charge fortunes, then I choose to watch “proper” football. Okay?

New Books here: “Perched” … and here “The Quarterly“.

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Paul Tomkins

When I’m 64 (Unbeaten) – Liverpool Pummel Leicester by Paul Tomkins

2020-11-24T09:22:00.000+08:00

https://tomkinstimes.com/2020/11/when-im-64-unbeaten-liverpool-pummel-leicester-free-read/

By Paul Tomkins

November 22, 2020In By Paul Tomkins, Free, Tomkins Smokes A Cigar

For the third game running, Liverpool absolutely mullered Leicester on xG, with Sky showing the Reds’ two best ‘expected goals’ scores since December 2019 have both been against Brendan Rodgers’ men (while the 2-1 league game last season fell before that timeframe and was another mass of good Liverpool chances in what xG had as a 4-0 win). Both were about as one-sided as big games get, with Leicester touted as title challengers at kickoff on both occasions.

It meant yet another all-time record for Jürgen Klopp’s Reds, passing the Bob Paisley team of the late 1970s – for which the recently and sadly departed Ray Clemence was an absolute legend – for unbeaten home league games: now set at 64, which also included the club-best winning sequence of 22.

As such, it’s worth making this piece a freebie and getting out the metaphorical cigar.

And this was a very under-strength Liverpool side that absolutely battered the Foxes. (Indeed, the xG was over a goal better than Villa’s in their 7-2 win over the Reds, which was a black swan event in terms of bad fortune.)

While I think it’s difficult to talk extemporaneously on a microphone live on national TV without making some odd word choices (I’d be crap at it), I did wonder why Jamie Carragher had to say in the first half that Liverpool were “slightly depleted”? Does he feel obliged to underplay Liverpool’s achievements at times, given his allegiances?

I do worry that some commentators (like referees at Anfield) are more concerned with looking unbiased than sticking to facts. Mo Salah, Thiago, Virgil van Dijk, Trent-Alexander Arnold, Joe Gomez and Jordan Henderson would be in the Reds’ best XI, so that’s six starters missing. Over half the team!

Four of them would probably also get into a World XI. Another of them would be in a world XI if it was picked on leadership and will to win.

Meanwhile, Xherdan Shaqiri, in fine form (and fitness) of late, was due to start, but he suffered a muscle injury, as did Naby Keita, who did start, only to be the latest to succumb to a problem in an insane schedule. (Liverpool will need to build a bigger rehab centre at the new training complex.)

In addition, many of the Reds’ players had played two or even three international games this past fortnight, several in different continents, and Gini Wijnaldum has started six games for Holland since the middle of October. The man is an absolute machine; Dirk Kuyt once said that his compatriot had “the lungs of a horse”, and he has needed those gigantic lungs this season. (As an aside, I hope Gini signs a new deal, but I also wouldn’t begrudge him a new challenge in another league. He’s been a wonderful asset, and – touch wood – not susceptible to many injuries.)

Leicester, meanwhile, had the same matchday 18 as their game two weeks ago; although they did also have a small number of players out already. Yet again they looked clueless against a purring Liverpool team, except this was a makeshift Reds side with two midfielders in defence, and which played the final 30 minutes with another teenage rookie in the backline.

But it is a show of the strength in depth that the Reds could still field a fairly strong XI (and maybe that was the point Carragher was making), but that obviously meant a weaker bench. Yet another teenager (the stylish midfielder Leighton Clarkson) was thrust onto that bench for the first time, to show how deep the injury crisis runs. Liverpool have already fielded several 19-year-olds in major matches this season.

The elusive third goal, which looked like it would never come – to the point where Roberto Firmino found the ball repeatedly hitting him with an open goal at his mercy (and then, in one ricochet, the ball was 99.9%, if not 100% over the line) – but it finally fell to the Brazilian to kill the game, with the second goal from a “first” header at a corner in the game; the opener expertly directed into his own net by Jonny Evans, as if the back of his head was the front of van Dijk’s forehead. Boom!

However, the lateness to the much-deserved third goal meant it was hard to freshen things up with subs, other than Keita’s latest muscle twang. (Yet again Takumi Minamino came on in the 90th minute.)

It takes Liverpool joint top, although Spurs have still only played two Big Six games, albeit they won both (and those Big Six sides, from Manchester, are currently mid-table).

Their tactics remain quite basic in the games I’ve seen, calling to mind the Leicester of 2016 – defend in numbers and hit on the break with searing pace (albeit Spurs have a better team and squad) – but it can occasionally be effective enough, especially in seasons where fewer victories are required, which should be the case this season, with such a bonkers fixture list. And it feels a long time since Jose Mourinho got teams into the 90+ points range – I think it must have been all the way back at Real Madrid in 2012 – in contrast to his record up to that point. It’s also effectively a Champions League squad (albeit wisely assembled over the years) that doesn’t actually have to endure the Champions League.

Mourinho has the advantage of being able to use the Europa League strategically, and to not deploy his best players unless they actually need the extra minutes. Liverpool, by contrast, have already played Man City, Chelsea, Arsenal, Everton and Leicester, and it’s just nine games in. The Reds have also gone away to Ajax and Atalanta, in the first three Champions League fixtures. The chance for Klopp to rest players would be lovely, if the Reds can beat the Italians at Anfield this week.

While it took a long time, I’m not sure I’ve been as happy for what was possibly a meaningless goal (albeit it did kill off any faint chance of a late two-goal Leicester revival) than when Firmino thumped the header in, having already hit the post and scored 99.9% of a goal in a move that also saw Sadio Mané strike the woodwork. This has been the most surreal season in living memory – as outlined in our new mini-book The Quarterly – and the denial of a goal by about one pixel on a video screen keeps happening to Klopp’s side.

This time it was the goalline technology, which, as some crumb of comfort, is ten times more detailed (500 frames per second) than the offside cameras (a measly 50 frames per second). That said, if that’s “10mm over the line”, as they said on Sky, then the ball is about three metres wide!

Add the injuries to so many key players, and they look every inch a team that can retain the title, having looked like a team losing its way as recently as the trip to Aston Villa in early October.

Since that game, which – surreally – had three times as many deflected goals as were seen in all Liverpool’s league games last season (for and against, 118 goals in total), defenders have fallen like flies. Yet Liverpool are generally defending superbly, with an ever-changing backline. With Villa 7th, and West Ham in 8th, as well as the fact that the Reds can’t play themselves, it means it’s only Spurs they haven’t faced from teams in the European places, in addition to the match-ups with Man City and Arsenal.

But Klopp’s trust of fringe players paid dividends yet again, with the most mature performance yet from from Curtis Jones, who is learning when to dribble, when to pass and when to cover back, and James Milner is defying time, logic and gravity; as well as defying the laws of physics, the Highway Code and the Night Poaching Act of 1828. He was one of the best players on the pitch and he is due to turn 100 later in the season.

Andy Robertson has been much better this season, after some struggles (with extenuating circumstances) last season by his own high standards, even if he was often still effective in the title win. His powerful surges forward look stronger than ever, and this is a player currently running on only one hamstring.

Meanwhile, at the back, Joel Matip has oozed class and calmness, as has Fabinho alongside him. There’s no blistering pace there, but they both read the game so well, and have legs longer than a giraffe.

If anything, maybe the team – in his absence – no longer feels it can just rely on van Dijk. I do wonder if the Reds got a bit sloppy in thinking he could solve every problem, but while his laser-guided passing and his unstoppable set-piece threat have been missed, so far his defending (which had grown a bit sloppy) hasn’t.

Still, it would be far better to have him available, but after two years when barely missing a single game, maybe he was a little jaded, and feeling the pressure as the team’s quasi-leader; but a couple of weeks off would have been far nicer than a totally fucked-up knee.

And as great as Matip and Fabinho have been at the heart of the defence whenever each has played this season, it leaves zero experienced cover, with the main two out for the entire campaign. That may catch up with the Reds later on in the season (although I presume Milner will just drop in there).

Up front, Mané is an unplayable live-wire, and Diogo Jota is a superstar goalscorer, whose game has gone up a level already, as have so many players as soon as they start training with Klopp and his team. Jota is so thrillingly alive to any bouncing ball, with excellent anticipation – and has great speed in getting his shots away, which is also a massive asset to have. He is such a clever footballer, and clever footballers with pace, and who can score goals, are worth their weight in gold. (Although presumably, footballers these days exceed their worth in weight of gold?)

The game was a joy to behold, and was so comfortable for Liverpool that I spent the final part spellbound by how much Marc Albrighton looks like Brendan Rodgers, and wondering how I’d never noticed before. From the side they look like twins.

And the bonuses of Liverpool doing so well without so many key players actually multiply: not only do the fringe players still win the Reds games (and the younger ones gain valuable experience), but the key men – aside from the two centre-backs – will presumably be fresher later on in the campaign. It may be a surreal season, but it’s also been fairly incredible in the difficult circumstances.

The Quarterly is out now; as is Perched, my look at the title win. Also, please sign up for our new Substack newsletter.

Paul Tomkins

Liverpool Don’t Look Ready” – Preseason Anxieties Justified? by Paul Tomkins

2019-07-31T06:23:00.000+08:00

https://tomkinstimes.com/2019/07/liverpool-dont-look-ready-preseason-anxieties-justified/

By Paul Tomkins

July 30, 2019In By Paul Tomkins, Free, Transfer Debate

Well, let’s be clear: it’s hard to look ready when your players only finished their competitive club season in June (three weeks later than every other English club bar Spurs, and the first time since forming in 1892 that the Reds had a competitive game that late in the summer), then saw players go to the Nations League (four first-XI players and an impact sub), the Copa America (two first-XI players) and the African Nations Cup (three first-XI players and a borderline first-XI player), whilst others were out injured.

Last summer it was Spurs and Man City who had the greater number of players away during the summer, all at the World Cup, and in Spurs’ case, it probably contributed to their domestic collapse in the run-in (although playing in knockout Champions League games tends to damage league form, on average – compared against their league tallies from the season before and the season after a run to the final; and the less-expensive the squad, the greater the damage). Liverpool had an insanely tough start to last season on paper, but a lot of the players had come home early from the World Cup, or not even gone there.

Indeed, as I noted at the time, when Liverpool went to Napoli and lost 1-0, it was just days after they put in a mind-blowing 154 sprints at Chelsea, trying to until the end to rescue a point in a game where they played very well indeed. That kind of effort takes its toll; and so, despite losing all three away games in the group stages, I never wavered from my belief in the team. It was largely the circumstances, with tough league games penned in by tough Champions League games. Something has to give.

Between them, Liverpool’s two main rivals in the two main competitions signed just one player last season, and Spurs rushed all of their stars back for the first league game. That may explain why they ended the domestic season on their knees, but it was still their best overall season since 1961 (4th in the league and a Champions League final), and Manchester City had their best season ever in terms of silverware. They were not integrating new players (bar bench-option Mahrez), and were able to rely on greater understanding. But they probably didn’t start the season in peak physical condition; Chelsea made a better start that City, after all, and were top after five games.

In order for Liverpool to look fully ready now then they’d have had to have given all their stars zero time off this summer. That would mean they would be sharp and available for the start of the campaign (having lost no residual fitness), but likely done for by December. And the scheduling at the start of this summer is another huge spanner in the works. There’s no way around it. A crazy summer and a crazy number of additional games is the way the cards have fallen, in part due to the success of last season.

Liverpool have to play the Community Shield, the European Super Cup and then, before the turn of the year, the World Club Cup. That will make this season more challenging than last season in that it’s three additional “competitions” (no matter how brief and relatively unimportant they are in the grand scheme of things), and yet this is a team that I believe will improve due to time spent together, and the way it can mature from one of the youngest teams in the Premier League last season to a mid-spectrum average age this time around. Long-term, the future looks incredibly bright; short-term there may be some bumps in the road, just because the road ahead is full of potholes.

(Where it can get easier is in not facing teams as good as PSG and Napoli in the Champions League group, but a kind draw isn’t guaranteed. Longer domestic cup runs could then counter that, but these can be used as “reserve team” games. And I’m still in the “glorified friendly” camp on the Community Shield, but pretty much all foreign coaches see it as a proper trophy.)

Had the African Nations Cup not been put back from the winter of 2018/19 to this summer, Liverpool may have gone out to Bayern Munich in the Champions League (with players away or just returning, or injured on duty), and/or dropped more league points. We cannot now turn around and say that it’s unfair, because it worked in the club’s favour in securing a 6th European crown.

However, the decision by Guinea to call up an injured Naby Keita was reckless, and it sucks that Sadio Mané made it all the way to the final only to return with nothing. (Yet, of course, this is still an education for even players as old as 27. It can serve him well, long term, but he will need a long rest this summer, or, if he is to bypass that to some degree, rest has to be worked in at some point before the league’s first midwinter break. For instance, he could be excused the World Club Cup.)

The only Liverpool players who looked good – or “fit” – against Napoli were those who were at Melwood at the beginning of preseason: James Milner, Fabinho, Harry Wilson and a raft of kids who had no heavy international commitments.

That cannot be coincidental. Indeed, some of these kids look incredible every time I see them, with 17-year-old Ki-Jana Hoever, at full-back, having more tricks and turns than most top-class wingers (also, look at the goal he scored for the Dutch U17 side this summer for more outrageous skill, although that tournament is not gruelling like the others), and so many of these teenagers will only benefit from the social multiplier effect (training intensely against better players, with utter dedication and focus – as dictated by the manager but echoed by the non-stop professionalism of the senior pros – improves you like nothing else).

Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, two very promising dribbles aside, looked below par, but is playing with a calf injury; while the midfield thrust of Keita and Xherdan Shaqiri – important in the absence of the ultra-cutting edge of the front three – are out injured (both from international duty). It all made for a bit of a lumpen XI, but take out so many excellent players and any team will look more prosaic. One or two can usually be mitigated for; six or seven, and any team will see a drop in quality.

Keita, Shaqiri and Oxlade-Chamberlain are the midfield “injectors”, and yet none is fully fit. And yet, of course, they offer Liverpool a lot of depth with that type of player – but when all three are out or impeded at once, it’s misleading to say there’s an issue with depth. If your 4th-choice goalkeeper isn’t very good (he’ll certainly be no Alisson Becker) or is just inexperienced, but you have the first three out injured, that’s just life; you can only build in so much insurance without having a 70-man squad. Probably only one of those attacking midfielders would start for the Reds in an ideal world, but none is “ready” right now. Shaqiri hasn’t even been able to reprise his role on the wing; he’s missed all preseason – although both he and Keita are at least now back in training.

And Adam Lallana, who seems to have an increasingly severe form of Cruyff-turn Tourette’s, is a handy midfield option to have, even if it’s well down the pecking order these days.

So even if there’s often a correlation between preseason form and the actual season form, I don’t think this summer can be counted, with first-XI players Alisson, Virgil van Dijk, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Jordan Henderson, Sadio Mané, Roberto Firmino and Mo Salah all at international tournaments, having had to extend their club seasons by three weeks, and with Keita and Shaqiri, who also played for their countries in the summer, totally absent. We have essentially been watching Liverpool’s B-team, often playing strong European opposition (after the two easier domestic matches). Even Van Dijk, Wijnaldum and Alexander-Arnold are only just back, and looking rusty.

Also, Liverpool do double and triple training sessions in preseason, designed to provide stamina for the campaign ahead, not to win preseason games; indeed, the club often trains on the day of a game in preseason, something no club would do before a meaningful match, as it’s counterproductive for the performance (as it saps vital energy). But this is not about performances, it’s about fitness. If you are building foundations, you cannot care if those foundations are pretty to look at or not – they have to serve the purpose for the long run. You could construct a building on shoddy foundations and it stay upright for a short while; but it will cause problems further down the line. The foundations are not to be seen, but are there to prop the whole thing up in the future.

Add in the travelling across time zones (jet-lag), the searing heat of previous games, and just the fact that pretty much every player – several of whom are yet to even feature – is at a totally different stage of fitness (and that Jürgen Klopp rarely picks his best XI at any one time in preseason before the final game/s), and you cannot read much into this preseason. It’s a freakish set of circumstances.

If someone looks electric, as Rhian Brewster has, then great, that’s a big bonus; but if they don’t, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. In this case it probably meant that the kids, including the prodigious new arrival Harvey Elliott, are just unburdened by busy summers.

Indeed, Elliott, along with Sepp van den Berg, was wanted by a ton of Europe’s elite clubs. Elliott, from a family of Liverpool fans, was at Real Madrid’s training ground over the summer, but chose his beloved Reds instead. On hearing the news that he was Anfield-Bound, Zinedine Zidane made a last-ditch effort to try and tempt him to the Spanish capital. But it – along with the offer of more money – failed, clearly.

I’ve no idea if Elliott is ready for the first team right away, aged just 16, but he certainly has the ability and the confidence, as well as being a quiet and respectful young man off the pitch, lest anyone think that his haircut is indicative of some kind of rebellious streak. This is a player with immense skill to beat players in one-on-one situations and the eye to spot the kind of passes you usually only see from someone like David Silva. He is part of the new breed of young English player who has a great awareness of space, receives the ball on the half-turn and has sumptuous technique. But he will need to work hard (in games and in training), remain humble and avoid the bad luck of injuries. He may get games early on, but few players become regulars at big clubs before the age of 18 these days, and even then, it can be 20-21 for many of them. But equally, he doesn’t look like any ordinary 16-year-old. If he keeps his humility then the world is at his feet.

He is joining the perfect setup at Liverpool, with the “no dickheads” policy employed by the club in the Klopp era reaping dividends, which means everyone can get lifted up by the collective attitude. If you don’t train hard enough you’re gone, no matter how gifted. And there are no senior players arsing about to undermine the ethic; young players have supreme role models.

That said, some of the squad may still be adjusting to becoming European champions. Most athletes say that you can get a comedown after the elation of winning something incredible. They often talk of being depressed once they’ve achieved their aims, as something is then missing. But this can be overcome, and Liverpool have something big and as-yet unachieved to aim for – the Premier League title, and a first domestic crown since 1990; so it’s not like all their ambitions have been met. However, this season it seems that everything is set up to make that difficult; and the league must not become an all-or-nothing obsession.

And there’s the psychological resetting process, that can take time. Anyone who has played a video game for days, weeks or months (not in one sitting!) to continually progress, only to then die (within the game, unless you are indeed trying it in one sitting) knows how depressing it feels to start from scratch again, all previous progress lost. Liverpool won 97 points last season as well as the Champions League, but it’s all reset to zero now.

And of course, a little of the buzz from the glorious night in Madrid has gone, with the past four preseason results, but the confidence gained from digging in all last season long has to be drilled deeper into the core now.

Part of the issue is that clubs and television companies now seek to monetise preseason, when the games remain glorified training sessions, but the players have to be flown all over the world. It’s a great chance for fans on other continents to see the players in the flesh, but they cannot expect those players to be ready; they are watching the rehearsals, not the final production. In this case it’s not even the rehearsals with the main stars – it’s a run-through with the understudies.

People paying to view these games on TV cannot expect to be entertained. Yes, it’s lovely if it’s all beautiful football, but you cannot demand it.

Trent Alexander-Arnold, Virgil Van Dijk, Andy Robertson, et al, have been back for little or no time, and a Liverpool side without its world-class goalkeeper and all three of its world-class attacking triumvirate is going to be a weaker team, fitness or no fitness. That’s just indisputable.

To have the same kind of quality in reserve is nice in theory, but in practice it’s difficult to achieve, not least because someone is going to be very unhappy at not playing enough football, and that can affect the mood of the camp; while signing someone as good as the front three (which once at this level cannot be easy) is made harder by not being able to guarantee that new signing a starting position.

Adding players also means a further spike to the wage bill which is already increasing all the time (in line with increased revenues), in order to keep the team together (in contrast to 2009 and 2014, when key players left, and in 2009, the club was mired in an internal war).

Liverpool, it seems, will not offer higher wages to any new signing, because – based on my reading of it – the highest earners have to be those who have already proved their worth to Liverpool. That avoids the Alexis Sanchez shitshow at Man United. As soon as you go against a meritocratic wage structure you are planting a time bomb. But Liverpool’s younger players who have done well are getting new contracts, as are those who are becoming superstars.

And fans can only “improve” a team in their minds by adding players. They cannot coach or develop talent, or offer ways to make the team more unified, because they have no idea to do any of those things. Just add “better players” and it solves all issues.

Fans have no idea what the chemistry would be like, or how to make that side of the game work, or if signing those players would destroy the wage structure and therefore undermine the group ethic. They don’t know if players they crave are actually “dickheads”, whom Klopp and co. refuse to sign. (See my new book for far greater detail on all of this.)

And when some of the understudies are also out, or hampered by niggles, then it’s going to be hard to look good, and impossible to look “ready”. Some kind of compromise and “muddling through” the opening weeks of the season seems unavoidable.

Liverpool cannot bypass the late return of players, nor can they alter the fixture schedule. Signing someone to cover this temporary shortfall does not mean much if that player then takes six months to settle; and then, when everyone is back, there’s an excess of players when everyone is fit, and the problems that can cause (even if it’s lovely in theory). Liverpool also have players returning from loan (Wilson), and have promoted several world-class (in their age group) youngsters to the first team squad.

Another problem is that the league campaign now feels like you cannot afford to even draw a game; it has to be 38 wins, week after week after week, or panic will set in. But that’s not healthy. Liverpool cannot be expected to be at peak condition from August to May with such an insane summer that fell beyond their control, after a season that lasted 3 weeks longer than that of their man rival.

Go back to the last time Liverpool won the Champions League, in 2005, and by the August of that year I had just started writing my Wednesday column for the official Liverpool website. I was inundated with emails telling me that Rafa Benítez didn’t know what he was doing and had to go, after a start that saw Liverpool languishing in 12th in November. Indeed, the emails started raining in well before then (and to be frank, they didn’t stop for the next five years). Winning things just raises expectations (aka the hedonic treadmill), and so many people can never be satisfied. You don’t want your club to rest on its laurels, but equally, it cannot deliver relentless success, especially when the playing field isn’t exactly fair.

The Reds ended up finishing 3rd with 82 points in 2005/06, then the club’s highest of the Premier League era, and won the FA Cup after a tough run to the final. It improved greatly, overall, from the much weaker XI and squad that won in Istanbul.

The team was then at its best in 2009, after years of tweaking and development. It won nothing, but it would beat the 2005 side eight or nine times out of ten.

Because you don’t always get what you deserve, and you can’t always control the circumstances. You can only try your best.

Mentality Monsters: How Jürgen Klopp Took Liverpool FC From Also-Rans To Champions of Europe is available now via Amazon.

Don’t Laugh At Us! Don’t Pity Us! Klopp’s Liverpool One of the Greatest Teams Ever by Paul Tomkins

2019-05-17T06:15:00.000+08:00

https://tomkinstimes.com/2019/05/dont-laugh-at-us-dont-pity-us-klopps-liverpool-one-of-the-greatest-teams-ever/

By Paul Tomkins

May 13, 2019

No one will ever forget this Liverpool side. I mean, ever. To quote Outkast, I mean ever ever ever ever.

And it feels like nothing is gonna stop this Liverpool side. You can only delay it.

I left Anfield yesterday not in regret or sadness but suffused with a Reds-red glow of pride in the
glorious Merseyside sunshine – at the team, the manager, the backroom staff and executives, and at the
Liverpool fans, who were just majestic throughout the game, as they have been on my five recent trips.

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(Unlike the Wolves fans, who were typical of the “let’s all laugh at you fucking it up, apparently, when
ur own team fucked up a 2-0 lead in the only semi-final we’ve been to in years, despite spending tons
more than the team that came back to beat us”, and “let’s just sing about your team, not ours”. This is
an increasing trend in visiting teams: singing about Liverpool. Come on, people – sort your own lives
out. Support your own team.)

No English team has ever got 97 points – or even close – and reached a European Cup/Champions
League final; and even pro-rata with the old points system, I can’t even see that it’s been done with 40
or 42 games. While the number of points top teams can get may vary from season to season, this is the
first time any country has had all four European finalists. So this is not a weak league. This is Liverpool
being exceptional at a time when English football is arguably at its most exceptional. This is Liverpool
being one of the two best teams in the world right now.

Liverpool got 98 points in 1979, but after exiting Europe early; winning the European Cup in 1977 and
1978, and in 1981 and 1984. The Reds got 90 points in 1988, but with no European football.

In 1999, when Man United did the treble, they racked up just 79 points. They got 87 when winning the
Champions League in 2008, and an impressive 90 when reaching the final in 2009, when the Reds
managed 86 and made the quarter-finals (the previous best season for the club in the Premier League
era). The last time United made the final, in 2011, they racked up just 80 points. Chelsea got just 64
points when Champions of Europe in 2012, and as my research has shown, on average a team reaching
the final loses seven points compared against its previous season and its subsequent season; a club on
Liverpool’s budget (so Liverpool and Arsenal, on four previous occasions) loses an average of 11 points.

We can see what has happened to Spurs’ league form, and they must have lost an absolutely staggering
20 games across all competitions this season. (But they are a still a threat in a one-off game.)

Only two teams have bettered 97 points (or the equivalent pro rata) in the history of English football,
and they are both Man City. Yet they never progressed further than the quarter-finals of the Champions
League in either campaign. And this year they didn’t even face that many good teams: this season, they
played the 8th and the 15th-best teams in Germany, the 4th best team in England, the 3rd-best team in
France, plus Shakhtar Donetsk. Of all those teams, only Spurs look imposing.

By contrast, Liverpool racked up 97 points whilst also facing, and beating, PSG, Napoli, Bayern, Porto
and Barcelona; the best teams, as things stand, in France, Germany and Spain, and the 2nd-best team in
Italy and Portugal (but Porto can still finish top). Liverpool have had an absolutely punishing European
schedule. With a smaller squad than City.

City had far more domestic cup games, admittedly, but again, almost all against very weak opposition. However, Liverpool just added 22 points to their league season whilst also reaching the Champions League final for the second year running, having faced even better teams this season.

That is insane.

Liverpool also beat Spurs, Man United, Arsenal and Chelsea this season.

And maybe the only reason Liverpool didn’t beat Man City was because a referee from Manchester didn’t send the Manchester City captain off in the game in Manchester between Liverpool and Manchester City. (Spot the theme.) Keith Hackett, FIFA referee from 1981-1991, tweeted:
“The turning point in the Premier League title was decided in the Man City v Liverpool game. 31st minute when Kompany went in from distance with two feet off the ground on Mo Salah. Anthony Taylor failed to red card the offence! City won 2-1”

That cost Liverpool the title; a 10-point gap could have opened up, instead of it being narrowed to four by two in-off-the-post goals. Kompany is a great player but he has escaped red cards like no other player on the basis that he’s a good bloke.

And none of this is to take away from what City have done; the financial doping aside, which makes it hard to say “fair play” (when it may not indeed be financial fair play), there is little more that any manager could do than what Pep Guardiola has achieved. He has done an immense job, and they play
some amazing football.

Until they were rivals I loved watching them. But is their squad unfairly bolstered by iffy financing? Der Spiegel certainly seem to suggest the evidence is there, from the masses of Football Leaks documents. We shall see if anything comes from the four major investigations into their spending. If it’s proven to be shady, then maybe this achievement will be severely tarnished. To have spent money they were not allowed to spend would be a form of cheating; not just financial doping but financial juicing.

Liverpool spent big last summer by selling big the winter before; Jürgen Klopp making a very good play er look like an excellent player, and the Reds pocketing £142m in the process. With Kloppian fitness and preparation, Philippe Coutinho was an instant hit in Barcelona, arriving mid-season. But in his second
season, without Kloppian fitness, he has bombed and been booed. Meanwhile, players bought by Liverpool from clubs like Southampton, Hoffenheim, Charlton, Lille, Schalke, Stoke (when relegated),Newcastle (when relegated) and Hull City (when relegated), and rejects from bigger clubs – flops who
would never make it in England – are at the pinnacle of the European game. Coutinho has his medals, and the Spanish sun; but Coutinho has no joy. Would you rather be Mo Salah or Sadio Mané right now, or Philippe Coutinho?

If you can’t see that the coaching, attention to tactical detail, astonishing fitness work and man-management/motivation isn’t a big reason why these players look so good at Liverpool,then you’re missing something.

Look at the supposedly better players – at the time of their transfers – that have rocked up at Man United the past few years. Look at the fees and wages paid, to try and corner the market on proven big names at ripe old ages.

And if any Man United fans think they can laugh at us – you just had to beat relegated Huddersfield who were losing every single week, but drew, and then lost 2-0 at home to relegated Cardiff. That is fucking shameful. I’d take 2nd, with 97 points and a Champions League final, over not being able to
beat two of the worst teams you’ll ever see, when attempting to finish higher than 6th. If it’s hard to give City full credit given the way they may have financed their success, at least they’ve spent the money infinitely better than United, with brains rather than braggadocio. Seriously, if you think you
can laugh at Liverpool right now, think again. If you think we’re crying, think again.

Jürgen Klopp is the antidote to the modern football fan muppet, and the financially rigged clubs. He could go to Bayern, steal the best players from anyone who comes close, and get silverware. Where’s the fun in that? I’m sure he’s actually probably already said “where’s the fucking fun in that?”.
Coutinho can go to Barcelona and get trophies, but where’s the fucking fun in that?

The love inside Anfield for the 30 minutes after the match will stay with me forever. I wasn’t at the Barcelona game, but I can imagine the love in the stadium that night. The scenes around Anfield before the game was like a carnival, even if we all knew City would beat Brighton. Win, lose or draw, it was
gonna be a party. Because football should be fun.

As such, I think Klopp is the first Liverpool manager to enter into the club’s pantheon of great managers without winning a trophy. Three seasons in Europe, three finals. That is up there with the best achievements in football. Three full seasons in the Premier League, and 97 points in his third full campaign. That is
an historically significant landmark. No trophy – but clear, indisputable greatness, particularly when combined with the way the Reds have reached the Champions League final.

Now, that final is a mere 50-50 shot, with Liverpool’s superiority counting for nothing against underdogs as dangerous as Spurs. If Liverpool fail to win it then it will be a great shame, but equally, Spurs have done amazingly well to get to the final, and if you add the national derby element, form goes out the
window.

As it was, Liverpool were outplayed in 2005, but won. They were then the better team in 2007, but AC Milan won. They were the better team for 30 minutes against Real Madrid, until Sergio Ramos set about trying to maim everyone, and sent Mo Salah to the hospital. Finals aren’t always about who is the better
team, or who wants it more; it can be random, just like Liverpool at Man City, where Kompany should have been sent off with 60 minutes to play, and the ball was 11mm from a goal for the Reds, and went the Reds also hit the post – as did City’s two goals. That’s how it rolls, sometimes.

Trophies are great. But thousand separate little joys, added up, can be the equal of, or even better than, trophies. Famous nights are all part of the experience, and this season Liverpool have beaten PSG, Napoli, Bayern, Porto, Barcelona, Arsenal, Chelsea, Spurs and Man United.

Equally, if Spurs lose to Liverpool in the final, then that won’t undermine the amazing work Mauricio Pochettino has done. Because trophies can be random; and the minor trophies (domestic cups, Europa League) are not so hotly contested anyway. Pochettino has done more this season than any League Cup
silverware could replicate.

Seven days ago, but what now feels like a lifetime, I tweeted that whatever happened this season, it had been a success. At the time I thought the Reds were going out of the Champions League, and it looked like City were gonna win the league.

In response I saw the familiar: no one remembers who came 2nd in the league and who reached the Champions League semi-finals or lose the Champions League final. No one remembers the runners-up.

Bullshit.

This is such a reductionist argument. This is the argument for those who only experience joy of football through the honours list on a club’s Wikipedia page; those who just want to trade “we’ve won more than you” barbs on social media, rather than think about “what do you remember?” We remember things that
capture the imagination and stir the heart; trophies, or not. You get dull trophy-winners and you get fantastic runners-up.

In terms of only remembering the winners, there are hundreds of winners in football that I cannot call to mind. I’d have to go look them up to tell you who they were.

I can call on more than just my usual response of Holland 1974 and 1978, Hungary 1954 and Brazil 1982 , who were amongst the greatest an most influential football nations ever – and add South Korea in 2002, and clubs like Monaco of 2004 and 2017; Atlético Madrid in 2014 and 2016, and Klopp’s Dortmund in
2013; Leeds in 2001, and yes, Ajax and (if the Reds win in Madrid) Spurs this year. There are many others.

I vividly remember Arsenal in 2006, losing narrowly to Barcelona, more than any of the Gunners’ late-Wenger trophies, some of which I didn’t even bother to watch, as domestic cups are only treated seriously by about one-third of the clubs who enter. I will always remember Sarri’s Napoli last season, with the great
football they played, and the staggering achievement of finishing 2nd with … 91 points.

And Napoli didn’t also reach a Champions League semi-final in the very same season, beating Bayern, PSG and, of course, that very team Napoli along the way. (Obviously Napoli couldn’t beat themselves.)

I don’t remember the Reds’ 2003 League Cup at all fondly, other than beating Man United in the final – because the team was so dreadful in the league that season – but I do think far more fondly about the 2002 team that came 2nd in the league with 80 points and went to the Champions League quarter-finals.

I don’t think particularly fondly of the 2012 League Cup success, when Kenny Dalglish won the Reds’most recent trophy, but I loved every minute of the second half of 2010/11, when Roy Hodgson was finally sent packing and King Kenny put the smiles back on our faces with some free-flowing football. (A League Cup/FA Cup double in 2012 would have been more memorable, but the margins were super-fine in that other final, against Chelsea.) I don’t think as fondly of Roy Evans’ 1995 team, which won the League Cup, as the 1996 team, which won nothing – but was a much better team.

But so many things about this season, including the win in Bayern, and the 4-0 thumping of Barcelona after being (unfairly) 3-0 down in the first leg, will stay with me forever. And in my last eight visits toAnfield I’ve seen the Reds score well over 20 goals and not concede once. I may not be a regular anymore,
but I’ve seen some special performances from a special team.

You remember great teams. It’s as simple as that. You remember Herculean efforts, and when sport becomes this outstanding and elite – when the air gets so rarified that you’re almost 30 points aheadof the nearest other competitors – then people remember the vanquished as well as the victor. This
Liverpool team broke the scoring record in the Champions League last season, with so many goals that shitloads is not adequate to describe the quantity, and has now racked up 97 points in the leaguethis season, with another Champions League final to come.

And if people forget this Liverpool team, that’s their problem, isn’t it?

This is the fatal modern psychological flaw of “compare and despair”. Nothing is ever good enough if you cannot find satisfaction in being great because someone else was great too. This is just likeMark Manson’s example of how the guy who formed Megadeth, who sold millions and millions of records, but is never happy because he was kicked out of Metallica, who sold even more records.

No, we are happy, and we are proud. And this is just the start.

Indeed, I have been writing what must be my 8th or 9th book on a Liverpool season, although this one is more about the evolution under Klopp since 2015 than just 2018/19. Many of those books ended with no silverware, and Man United and Everton fans flooded book sites with mocking reviews, but if you
chronicle a season you don’t know where it will end; just as, in late 2004, I did not know my first book would end with me sprawled on a piece of cardboard outside the airport in Istanbul at 7am, having just had probably the greatest night of my life. (Apologies to any ex-girlfriends reading this, and also,
apologies for everything else. I now accept that screaming Jerzy Dudek! during sex is not such a good thing.)

But this book (initially available only to TTT subscribers, in a special boxed edition complete with a second book written by our contributors on the matches they were at) has been the hardest to write. Because, there’s just so much to cover. So much keeps happening; too many great moments to document in one book without making it 15,000 pages long. I have to keep rewriting sections, as so much keeps getting better than I ever thought possible. The sections on the really good games have to be edited down, as there are so many fucking awesome games. And this season has been the hardest on my health, as it’s
just been non-stop must-win games for 10 months.

The book will be finished this summer, and will be released on the back of a Champions League trophy,
or on the back of an amazing, amazing season with no silverware.

The book will end, because you have to draw a line and tie things up – just as the season will end, one
way or another, on June 1st. But again, for Liverpool and Klopp, this is only the start…

Paul Tomkins

The creator of this website; author of several books on Liverpool FC, and of one novel.
Co-creator of The Transfer Price Index (TPI). Columnist on the official Liverpool FC
website between 2005-2010. International man of mystery. Possibly bald.More by Paul Tomkins

Three Years of Upward Liverpool Projection And Soaring Hope By Paul Tomkins

2018-10-20T08:26:00.000+08:00

https://tomkinstimes.com/2018/10/three-years-of-upward-liverpool-projection-and-soaring-hope/

By Paul Tomkins

October 16, 2018In By Paul Tomkins, Deep Dive, Free

Given the recent anniversary of a certain gregarious German being appointed Liverpool manager, I thought it was time to present, in a free-to-read piece, a few facts and snippets of analysis, in response to some of the reactions to the Man City draw; but also to bring focus – and full context – to the overall body of work Jürgen Klopp has delivered.

As ever with our free pieces, feel free to share if you enjoy it (although it’s the subscriber/paywall model that we mostly focus on now, as that’s what pays all of our bills.)

Trophies Are Random

Cup football is notoriously random; the very premise centres around the possibility of being drawn against top teams, average teams or terrible teams (although the Champions League generally weeds out the weaker teams).

By contrast, aside from Leicester City, the top end of the Premier League is far from random, and determined in no small part by having a big budget: won every single season since 2004 by one of the three richest clubs in the land, based on their £XI (the average costs of all of their 38 league line-ups, adjusted for Transfer Price Index football inflation; more on that later).

So far Klopp has taken Liverpool to two European finals and one domestic final; losing all three, but one was on the most random of random cup outcomes (which Liverpool have of course benefited from in the past), the penalty shootout; while the two European finals pitted the Reds against the Spanish team who in recent times always won that particular trophy.

In the league Klopp has not had one of the top three budgets (either £XI or wage bill), and even now, Liverpool only rank 4th on the £XI score, a long distance behind Manchester City, Manchester United and Chelsea, but ahead of Spurs and Arsenal.

Was Gérard Houllier a genius and Klopp a muppet because Houllier’s Liverpool beat lowly Birmingham City on penalties after a 1-1 draw in 2001 and Klopp’s team lost the shootout in the same competition against possibly the best, and joint-richest, side in England?

We all talk of the miracle of Istanbul, but even that (after a monstrous second-half effort) was won randomly with spot-kicks, while Liverpool outplayed AC Milan two years later and effectively lost to a (random) deflected goal. In one-off games, randomness happens: including a mixture of judo, karate and goalkeeping gaffes in Kiev, to deny Klopp a trophy he arguably deserved on the amount of goals the Reds scored (a new competition record). But that’s cup football: you don’t always get what you deserve. (If football was fair, Sergio Ramos, after umpteen acts of shitbaggery up to that point, would have had to give up football in 2013 due to being anally impaled on a corner flag, or some such other karmic justice.)

And to be frank, Klopp has been right royally rogered in the domestic cup draws lately. Apparently Liverpool got ‘lucky’ in the Champions League last season by facing no one of an elite standard in the knockouts – other than Man City (and Real Madrid in the final, too) – although Porto and Roma, while not elite, were not exactly mugs. Roma in the semi-final was a fortunate draw, given that it was the semis, but there were worse teams than Porto to be paired with in the last 16. And if the one favourable tie was Roma in the semis, that luck only came about months after overcoming a good German side in the playoffs. (The group stage was fairly routine, however.)

Last season Liverpool were handed Leicester, Everton and West Brom (freed from their league worries and suddenly fighting) in the domestic cups, and this season, so far, it’s been Chelsea. So that’s essentially four additional Premier League games, and no easy lower division opposition. How often do clubs draw Premier League opposition four times in a row in the early rounds of competitions?

This will also affect a manager’s win-%, given that, say, four or five wins a season in the domestic cups against lower league opposition could really bump those figures; just as a good win-% in the Europa League is not as impressive as having the exact same win-% in the Champions League.

Unlike his predecessor, for example, Klopp is managing a far greater number of his European games against top sides, not Europa League flotsam. (And even Klopp’s run to the Europa League final involved knockout games against Man United, Borussia Dortmund and Villarreal, who were more like Champions League teams; while last season’s Champions League qualifying round, against Hoffenheim, was not a ‘gimme’ like Qarabag – Hoffenheim are now indeed themselves a Champions League team.)

This is not making excuses for Klopp – simply pointing out that, aside from the domestic games in 2016/17, he’s not really had much luck in the draws of the cup, with this season’s Champions League group another example of what have not exactly been favourable situations. So, “he must win trophies” is utterly nonsensical to me.

What was Roy Evans’ best Liverpool side? For me, 1995/96. But no trophy; just a late-lost FA Cup final against Man United. A weaker Liverpool team the year before beat lower-tier Bolton in the League Cup final. Worse team, but a trophy, due to much worse opposition.

What was Rafa Benitez’s best Liverpool side? Without doubt, 2008/09, with only two defeats in the league and making it to the quarter-finals of the Champions League, including a 5-0 aggregate thrashing of Real Madrid. But nothing won that year. It was a far better team than in 2005 or 2006, but the randomness of penalties gained a trophy both those times, with the games themselves taken to penalties by some speculative late long-shooting that on other days goes miles wide (ditto on goals to reach those finals).

For me, Gérard Houllier’s best team and squad was 2001/02, when the Reds finished 2nd in the league with 80 points and reached the quarter-finals of the Champions League/European Cup for the first time in almost 20 years. Obviously the season before ended with three trophies, and you could perhaps argue here that the treble-winning side was better because of that, but even if you make that call, the contrast between three trophies and no trophies had zero to do with the difference in quality of the two teams. Houllier’s next team, 2002/03, was dire to watch and the wheels came off in the league, with some terrible summer additions. But they won a trophy. Lovely at the time, but utterly meaningless in terms of the progress and general health of the club. Despite beating Man United in the final, I couldn’t give two shits about that team. It has no place in my heart, made no dent on my soul. Indeed, I try my best to forget some of those players.

Liverpool’s 2013/14 side was indubitably better than the one of 2011/12, when reaching two cup finals and winning the League Cup; and 2013/14 was better than Houllier’s 2003 side, that also won the League Cup, and Evans’ 1995 side, that won the same trophy. (If this doesn’t show the randomness of trophies, then just look at how Arsenal had to win some after years of drought under Arsene Wenger, then, when they won some, no one cared. In that time, Spurs won nothing but were objectively better.)

With Daniel Sturridge’s recent resurgence I’ve heard a lot of talk from neutrals (on various media podcasts) about the thrilling Sturridge/Suarez/Sterling/Coutinho/Gerrard combinations from 2013/14, and they had a point; but I never hear effusive memories of 2011/12, 2002/03 and 1994/95; and even the 2001 win over Birmingham is only remembered in the broader context of what followed.

These resulted in great days out, but they weren’t even indicative of the best of those managers’ reigns, with Kenny Dalglish’s rescuing of Roy Hodgson’s mess in 2010/11 – with some exciting football in those first few months – the abiding memory, rather than some dogged cup runs (one trophy) and stodgy league form a season later. I always use the examples of Holland in 1974 and 1978, Brazil in 1982, Hungary in 1954, and all those teams who won nothing yet are remembered decades later; and all those long-forgotten winners of minor trophies.

So, for the most part, trophies are random – and certainly the domestic cups are, given that clubs at all levels rest players due to the importance of the league (and Europe). A competition where half the teams don’t even want to be there is not a good gauge of a team or manager’s quality. (Equally, Liverpool had an insane injury crisis a couple of Januarys ago, so that put paid to cup progress then. And here’s hoping the Reds have at least a five-a-side team left after the decimation during this latest international break.)

“He has to win something” is therefore total guff. Being competitive, and trying to win things, is what matters, but focusing on the League Cup, just to say “look, we won something!” is a near-waste of time. It’s almost as facile as counting the Community Shield as a proper trophy.

Fixtures

Form follows function is the old design adage, but football form relates to who you play, and the spacing out of those games, as to whether or not you can adequately function. We should all know now that it’s tougher to be successful with fewer days’ rest; saying “they’re professional athletes” could not make a marathon runner or footballer repeat their best efforts if told “right, now do that again”. We know players tire during matches, and get cramp, etc., but some people still don’t seem to fathom the concept of full recovery time.

(As an aside here, I recently watched a BBC documentary on the late Sir Roger Bannister, the first person in the world to run a sub-four-minute mile, back in 1954. Sports science has obviously moved on since then, but even then he knew not to train for five days before going for the record, to spare his body and save his energy. He didn’t run his fastest possible miles day in the build-up – he gave his body time to be at its optimum level. Sportsmen train harder now, but would a marathon runner run a full-speed marathon on the eve of a big race? Even now, only 1,000 or so people have broken the magic four-minute barrier, thought to be “physically impossible for mankind” at the time; just like driving 30mph in a car at one point was considered beyond what the human body could endure intact. Anyway, three times as many people have scaled Everest, another feat first achieved in the mid-‘50s, than run sub-four-minute miles… and here ends the brief historical interlude.)

While Arsenal’s encouraging run of nine wins in a row is getting them noticed, they’ve beaten struggling Premier League teams (often whilst actually “losing” on xG), and smashing away the worldly wonders of Vorskla Poltava, Brentford and Qarabag. Easy league games followed by easy cup games: a dream for a team of flat-track bullies (even if, to win any nine games in a row is still an achievement, albeit one further tainted by the opposition having so many chances and failing to take them. Arsenal are clearly now a good side, on the right path, but what more?)

The fixture list is becoming something of a joke for Liverpool. Liverpool’s two toughest 10-game starts on paper – using the ELO rankings index to gauge opposition – in the past 26 years (at least) have been last season and this season.

Now, these two recent runs include European opposition too, and so being in the Champions League increases that possibility of a couple of additional tough matches; although to play PSG and Napoli in your first two European games, whilst also playing Spurs (a), Chelsea (h), Chelsea (a) and Man City in the same short timespan – where each game’s tolls adds cumulatively to the next – is pretty grim luck.

The idea that Liverpool are having some kind of wobble is to ignore, for example, the effort required to go to Chelsea and Napoli in the days before the team with the most successful league season in English football history turn up after a far less daunting schedule. (If anything, that Chelsea away game looked brutally fast, and the Londoners we then able to rest key players for their midweek game, to be fresh for the weekend, while Liverpool went to an Italian team who got 91 points last season.)

Klopp’s only other full season ranks 5th for the 10-game opening difficulty, behind two of Rafa Benítez’s. (Not only do Liverpool genuinely win far more penalties on average when they have British managers and a greater number of British players in the team, but the fixture list also seems to count against its foreign bosses. Which is not to say that the fixture list is a scam, but it’s another odd occurrence; only partly explained by those foreign bosses having a better record at taking Liverpool into the Champions League. Perhaps the other contributory factor is that English Champions League teams face each other in the first few months of the season, but is this consistent? Not everyone seems to get the tough schedules.)

In other words, no other Liverpool manager since the title was last won has been so up against it from the start. That does of course mean that theoretically things get easier later on, and that’s potentially good news. But as we can all see lately, league titles seem to be (all but) won earlier in seasons, with unassailable leads racked up; often by teams not in Europe. To have a tough Champions League group and a tough opening couple of months of Premier League fixtures makes a genuine title tilt extremely difficult. As it happens, the Reds probably have more points than anyone expected from the run of games.

So three cup finals and two top four finishes (and joint top with 2.5 points per game) in three full seasons – after inheriting a team in mid-table – is a vast improvement on the “norm” for Liverpool in over a decade.

Of course, as my research has showed, an excess of cup games – as Liverpool have had in Europe under Klopp – takes a lot of points off your league campaign. To reach the Champions League final an English club will on average lose seven league points when judged against their own tallies the seasons before and after; but if the club in question doesn’t have a mega-squad in size and cost (and Liverpool did not last season) then the average points dropped reaches 11. (The costliest squads to also excel in Europe since 1999 – Man United and Chelsea – have lost some league points when reaching the big European final, but the less costly squads – Liverpool and Arsenal in the 2000s, and Liverpool last season – average double-digit league points losses.)

I heard the theory on the Independent podcast (I think) that Klopp’s teams always do well in either Europe or the league; never both together, dating back to his time with Dortmund. But this is the basic science of a non-financial behemoth in a top European league. Who does well in both the Champions League and their domestic league unless they have a monstrously big squad?

Only the über-rich clubs with the mega-squads tend to be able to compete on two fronts; and at Dortmund Klopp was already pushing the envelope compared to the budget he had. This failure to compete on two fronts could be put down to his intense style of play, but it’s more about not having 24 largely interchangeable players due to unlimited funds.

Squad size and squad quality almost always comes down to money, as you can beat the system with more clever buys than the average, but to do that in order to build – and then pay the wages of – a big squad is almost freakishly impossible.

The same was true of Rafa Benitez’s Liverpool in each of his seasons: poor in the league with a weak squad but won the Champions League; very good in the league and FA Cup, but out early in Europe; Champions League final, decent in the league but tailed off when Europe became the priority; reasonable in the league and good in Europe (semis); and then finally, in 2008/09, good in Europe (quarters) and excellent in the league (86 points and only two defeats).

(Even in Rafa’s sixth season, when the league form fell away quite badly, yet another European final was arguably only denied by Eyjafjallajökull erupting in Iceland; meaning that, like Barcelona in the big cup, the Reds had to travel across Europe for their away ties by road and rail – in Liverpool’s case, to Madrid. Both of the teams that had the tougher journeys – when their away games in the semi-finals coincided with the flight-halting Eyjafjallajökull, before air travel resumed – were surprisingly dumped out; in part because it’s a frigging nightmare to prepare for a football match that way. Again, randomness. Eyjafjallajökull has to count as force majeure, i.e. fucking bad luck.)

Only in Rafa’s 5th season was a decent attempt made on the two main fronts; but at the same time, Man United were interchanging or combining Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Dimitar Berbatov and Carlos Tevez in attack, whose fees (after inflation) and/or wages absolutely dwarfed what Liverpool were paying for, and paying to, their best players – in pipping the Reds in the league and also making it to, but losing, the Champions League final. Liverpool could probably match United’s first XI (bar full-backs) from that time due to an outstanding spine, but United, whose squad cost almost twice as much, naturally had more depth. In 2018 football money, the squad cost differences in United’s favour were £1,201bn vs £725m, and the £XI differences were £635m vs £388m.

You simply can’t do it all unless you have a £1billion squad.

This side could match the “achievements” of 2008/09, but again, trophies are random. The strength of rival teams varies from season to season, on top of the general randomness, such as Fernando Torres missing a lot of that season, and he and Gerrard rarely able to play in the same team that year.

This current vintage is perhaps the best all-round Liverpool side since 1987/88, but Man City are obviously up there with the best English sides of all time. (So, on a par with that 1987/88 team.) City under Pep Guardiola are more of a force than City under Manuel Pellegrini, and Klopp has no control over such things. If Guardiola went back to Barcelona instead of Manchester, Liverpool’s odds of winning the league would improve through nothing that Liverpool themselves had done.

While I’m a huge fan of Gini Wijnaldum, and James Milner is having a great twilight to his career, and Jordan Henderson is underrated by many, a midfield three of peak-years Steven Gerrard, Xabi Alonso and Javier Mascherano would turn this team into a force beyond belief. Indeed, assuming everything balanced up with the existing defence and attack, it would probably make for the best Liverpool side ever.

But in 2018 money the two imports cost Liverpool a combined £157m (£77m for Alonso and £80m for Mascherano), while Gerrard, if he had to be bought from elsewhere, would be a £200m player based on what Chelsea were offering in the mid-2000s.

Liverpool’s current midfield, including backups and players being eased in, was not free, of course (just as Liverpool’s backups in 2008/09 were not free). But it shows how having an extra £200m to spend – and the capability to pay the wages of that calibre of player – can really make a difference. Liverpool might have been able to buy “world-class” midfielders in 2018 – the established elite world stars – but, based on the way the books need to be balanced, at the cost of not having Virgil van Dijk and Alisson.

And of course, therefore there’s not the kind of depth seen at Man City, and possibly even Man United (squad costs of players used this season by each of those two at over £1bn, compared to Liverpool’s £554m), although all United’s established elite players are currently being devalued by the football the team plays.

Gary Neville was 100% right to say a few weeks ago that Liverpool would have a better chance of winning the league this season if they went out of Europe early; but where he was wrong was to say Liverpool should “bin off” the Champions League. You can’t choose to opt out, especially as City could get 100 points again and then everyone will be saying to Klopp “where’s your trophy?”, and “why didn’t you focus on Europe?”

My guess was that Klopp was trying to win in Napoli a fortnight ago with his strongest XI, to try and go a long way to getting the group stages wrapped up early, to allow for some resting and rotation in the final two games.

But Liverpool looked leggy after the monumental Chelsea battle, and then were not as fresh for the City game as they were in previous clashes with the Citizens. It backfired, but had Liverpool won in Naples, confidence would have been sky-high and maybe the tiredness would not have been felt so immediately against City; and of course, it would have allowed more rest-time later on, as the group became a series of dead rubbers if Liverpool performed as they should be able to in the Red Star games, to be on 12 points.

So I think these can become no-win situations, in some senses, as there’s always some kind of cost: dropped points vs fatigue, with rotation, the other option, protecting players but leaving the either-way outcome of a disjointed team stuttering or those fresher reserves pulling together well.

Ratings Performance Index

Over the past couple of seasons subscriber Tim O’Brien has posted on TTT about applying the American model – Ratings Performance Index – to the Premier League, showing in 2016 and 2017 what the RPI table looked like after a quarter of the season – more-or-less where we are now. Each time Liverpool had endured a tougher-than-average fixture list, so it was a helpful guide to some of the underlying factors.

Both Graeme Riley and Terry Dolan have created their own RPI models and have been discussing them on the site this past fortnight. (Not to be confused with TPI – the Transfer Price Index – that Graeme and I created in 2010, to provide a tracking of transfer inflation, and also, to look at how much each team costs each season: the aforementioned £XI; nor to be confused with the Retail Price Index, which tracks the costs of produce.)

Basically, the concept of this RPI is to “score” each team’s league season so far by weighting it against the quality of the opposition, with the quality of opposition determined not by the ELO, or last season’s finishing positions, or spending power, but the percentage of points won by that opponent this season; so, a kind of form/quality hybrid. (The methodology is explained in the footnotes to this piece, to save bogging the article down in the mechanics.)

So, teams with fewer actual league points may be listed as higher in the table if they had good results against higher-rated teams (Liverpool, West Ham), rather than excellent results against poor teams (Man City). Indeed, it’s the same top four as in the actual Premier League table, just in a different order; with West Ham 5th in the RPI table, on account of having played pretty much only teams in good form, and at least got a couple of very good results.

This does slightly punish the “you can only beat what’s put in front of you” narrative, but the point is to create a table that will more closely resemble the final league table than the current league table is ever capable of doing; and over the past two seasons, that’s exactly what the RPI table has done.

For our book Boom! I went back just before the end of last season and looked at how Tim’s RPI table from the 9th game (PL9) looked compared to the table with two games to go at the time of writing (PL36); and did the same with the actual league table from PL9 vs PL36.

Well, if you took the league table from PL9, you’ll find eleven teams who, seven months later (PL36), currently sit within three positions of where they were in the actual league table in October, with an overall average of 3.9 places difference. However, when comparing Tim’s RPI from PL9 against the actual league table after PL36, no fewer than 15 teams sit within three places, for an average of 2.9 places difference.

At the time of writing Liverpool have risen from 9th to 3rd in the actual table, having been 2nd in the RPI table after PL9. In October West Brom were 13th in the actual table, but sat 20th in the RPI version.

So basically, RPI called Liverpool being much better than mid-table (no surprise, although some fans were panicking), but said that mid-table West Brom were in big trouble; at a time when people were talking about Liverpool’s crisis and nothing was being said about West Brom’s impending doom.

Now, RPI doesn’t guarantee that your team won’t have a total loss of form, an injury crisis, a managerial meltdown or a mass food-poisoning – or that an owner won’t sell the entire team in January and replace it with the U16s (I’m looking at you, Mike Ashley) – but it does give a bit more context to the league table, which, according to a friend of Jonathan Wilson’s (as mentioned on the Guardian podcast), would need 35 years to even itself out in terms of luck and randomness.

Which, of course, is not possible – but even the final table tells some kind of lies (such as Man United last season being deemed the luckiest in the league by an academic study by Bath University, in terms of refereeing decisions and other factors, and Liverpool the most unlucky, with a double-digits loss of points due to officials making basic errors; whilst xG tables put Liverpool closer to Man City, and Man United closer to mid-table).

Add that Liverpool, as noted earlier in the piece, probably lost around 10-12 league points from making it all the way to Kiev with a non-massive squad, you cannot say that United were “the 2nd-best team in England last season”; especially after the kind of early and abject surrender in Europe usually only seen from the French. (Topical humour there.)

However, what’s most remarkable here is that Graeme, using much the same RPI methodology (see his whole explanation and comment at the end of this piece) – backdated to the start of the Premier League era – cannot find another single team in those 28 seasons with an RPI score as high as 0.57.

In other words, no other team has had as many as 20 points when having played such a tough opening league schedule. Some teams may have had a very small number of points more than Liverpool at this stage, but only with “easier” starts – based on the form of all the teams in the league up to that point of each season and other form criteria.

To see the latest RPI table, visit Terry Dolan’s site.

Klopp vs Spending Model (£XI)

Okay, we’ve had RPI, now back to the TTT model of TPI, which dates back to 2010, when Graeme and I co-created the model. On this site we’ve been using this, with the exact same methodology, to take the temperature of Liverpool’s fortunes ever since; not creating it to favour Liverpool, or any particular Liverpool manager – just to get an objective view of performance vs finances.

On average, ever since the Roman Abramovich era began, if an £XI costs £600m+ in 2018 money it can on average expect a haul 80.7 points.

Since 2003 there have been 33 teams with an £XI between £600m and £1,007,000 (the latter being Chelsea in 2006/07, the highest average XI cost in our records). These are Manchester United (13 times, or seasons), Chelsea (12 times) and Man City (eight times). Remember, the £XI is just the average cost of their starting XI in each of those seasons, adjusted to 2018 money; not the total cost of the squad.

There are a further four “teams” who have £XIs in the next bracket down: £500m-£600m. These are, in descending order, Chelsea, Chelsea, Man United, Man City, Chelsea. Combined with the £600m+ teams, that’s the 38 most expensive teams each season in a 15-year period limited to just three clubs.

This is why I talk of them as the Rich Three, within the Big Six. The Big Six is a misleading term as the financial gulfs between the Rich Three to the Poorer Three is similar to that between those poorer Big Six clubs and, say, Crystal Palace or Leicester. Arsenal, Spurs and Liverpool have a Big Six pedigree and history, but not the funds to compete with the Rich Three.

That said, Chelsea are falling away; from a £1bn £XI eleven years ago to around £500m so far this season.

Liverpool are currently around the £390m mark. That’s right – “big spending” Liverpool have a team that would not be classed in the 50 most expensive Premier League club seasons since 2003. Every title in that time, aside from Leicester, has been won by a team that costs £585m–£916m.

So, to expect Liverpool to win the league based on spending is preposterous. The club rank 4th in the £XI rankings this season, over £100m behind Chelsea and c.£200m behind the Manchester clubs; while the financial gap between the squad costs is bigger still.

Now, Liverpool’s figure is currently lower than I anticipated it being this season, and the average is more likely to increase than decrease. To date, cheap or free players – in transfer terms – like James Milner, Joe Gomez, Andy Robertson and Trent Alexander-Arnold have been in the side in pretty much every league game; while more expensive players (c.£40m or more in TPI terms), such as Jordan Henderson, Fabinho, Dejan Lovren, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Adam Lallana have featured much less than expected – or, due to injuries, not at all.

This currently ranks as Liverpool’s 6th-most expensive £XI of the Abramovich era (2003––), ranking behind all of the teams funded by FSG’s initial spending spree (2011/12 – 2014/15), when the value for money in the market was not so great.

And the 2018/19 £XI is more-or-less exactly level with the £XI of 2008/09, which was Rafa Benítez’s most expensive side, and also his best (but which was still a long way behind Chelsea and Manchester United’s).

The average number of points for clubs with an £XI of £390m is 69; while the current side’s pro rata total would extrapolate 95 – which may seem fanciful (and way beyond what we are used to), but of course, Liverpool have had a much harder than average fixture list so far, so it’s not too fanciful. In reality we can’t expect 95 points – nothing in the past 30 years suggests as much – but to be on course for it after a tough schedule is hugely promising.

Indeed, there isn’t a lot of difference in the points tallies of clubs with £XIs of £300m-£400m and those between £400m-£500m. This mid-range is almost exclusively clubs like Liverpool, Spurs and Arsenal.

Go below £300m, however, and the average points tallies from £200m-£299m (30 teams) drops to 60 points.

Go above £500m and the average rockets to virtually 80 points – a financial mark Liverpool have not hit in the Premier League era (peaking at £465m in 2011/12), and a points tally only reached by the club in 2002, 2006, 2009 and 2014 – which makes all of those seasons overachievements against the £XI-Points model. (While often, being below 65-69 points is an underachievement, although as ever, cup runs maybe mitigations for this.)

Liverpool’s £XI last season – and remember, all of these £XIs are all converted to 2018 money – was £348m; so, almost £50m lower than so far this season. Even without several of the Reds’ more expensive players, the sale of Coutinho and the ever-presence of Alisson and van Dijk have upped the ante by a net of £50m so far – just not to anywhere near the levels of the Rich Three. Getting Fabinho into the team isn’t going to radically alter this, but it could bump things a bit, especially if he replaces Milner.

Of the nine teams to have £XIs around that value (£390m) since 2003 (all either Liverpool, Spurs or Arsenal), Liverpool’s tally of 75 points in 2017/18 is five points better than the next-best contender, and 11 points better than the average. And none of those other eight teams reached a European Cup final at the same time.

(As an aside here, only three times has a team with an £XI less than £300m finished with 80 or more points: Spurs two seasons ago, with 86; Arsenal in 2007/08, with 83; and Leicester when winning the title with 81 points in 2016, with an £XI of … £58m! To put the Foxes’ miracle into context, no other team with an £XI below £100m since 2003 has finished with even 60 points, let alone 81. That season will nevermake any sense…)

I’d still expect Liverpool’s £XI to be over £400m this season, unless there’s a major injury crisis. And I’d expect – and hope for – more than the 65-69 point average the kind of outlay usually guarantees. (Including only his full seasons, Klopp is averaging 77 points, but again, that includes the league damage incurred from the European run last season, and so far this season the points per game is better than ever.)

But both Manchester clubs could easily end up being over the £700m mark, just like last season. Chelsea will be over the £500m mark. So if Liverpool top £400m, it’s within this context.

What Klopp is attempting to do – be very good in Europe and win the Premier League – is utterly unprecedented in the modern English game on a financial wherewithal basis. It may well be asking too much, but it’s hard to not even try.

To reverse the Points–£XI study, all the teams that got 90 or more points have an average £XI that’s over £700m. The teams that averaged 85-89 points have an average £XI of over £600m. The teams that averaged 80-85 have an average £XI of over £500m. The teams that averaged 75-79 points had an average £XI below £500m. And this continues; as the points averages drops, then so too does the cost of the to reach those levels.

The graph below shows that the eight points bands between 90+ and 55 all have a fairly similar stepped declines in how much those teams cost to achieve those tallies.

To me seems one of the starkest examples of the correlation between money and success.

Maybe this isn’t unequivocal proof of causation, but there continues to be a strong correlation between the £XI and what your aims are; barring, of course, the occasional outlier.

(NB: below the 55-point mark is an utter mess, with no such beautifully stepped patterns in relation to spending, although the teams with really terrible points tallies tend to be cheap. Teams of all ranges of £XI – from the cheapest recorded £11m of Blackpool in 2010/11 up to the near-£600m Chelsea side of 2015/16 – can get dragged down into the morass of the sub-55-point territory, but since 2003 only Leicester have done the reverse and been ultra-cheap and at the top end. Ergo, as I’ve always said: it’s easy to fuck it up on a big budget but near-impossible to work miracles – at the top end – on a small one.)

Win-%

Klopp’s win percentage of 53% is not a massive improvement on the 52% of Brendan Rodgers, but it’s vital to mark the contrast between the side Rodgers had one exceptional season with and the one he bequeathed almost 18 months later. After all, his final 18 months had a win-% of just 45%, and he lost a staggering one-third of all games in that time.

This is the most important bit of context surrounding the job Klopp is doing. In terms of £XI there hasn’t been much difference between those from Rodgers’ time and Klopp’s.

More important than anything else, you have to look at the canvas and materials a manager works with – and Klopp had to rip up a hell of a lot of what he inherited.

(Also, as an aside, people have been saying that Jose Mourinho’s win-% at Man United is the same as Alex Ferguson’s, but that ignores that Ferguson had several poor seasons to start with, and that win-%s in the 1980s and 1990s were generally much lower than now, with the rise due to the mega-squads developed by the über-rich clubs and the increased financial gulfs across the league as a whole; in the ‘80s and ‘90s the poorest clubs were not as cut adrift as they are now, and the richest clubs were more closely clustered together. Rodgers had a better win-% than Bill Shankly, to show how dodgy the comparison can be.)

Inheritance and Transfers

It’s a little disingenuous to look at the bench for Klopp’s first game in October 2015 – full of rejects and never-has-beens – in order to assess what he inherited, as that wasn’t representative of the squad Rodgers left, not least due to several injuries at the time.

Equally, we can’t escape the nightmare of the majority of Rodgers’ personally-driven transfer business, even if some of his picks – James Milner, Dejan Lovren and Adam Lallana – are having, or have had, some kind of renaissance with the better fitness conditioning and tactical structure now seen at Liverpool.

Milner, Lovren and Lallana are good, but not necessarily the kind of players you build a team around. (Which isn’t to say that the committee were necessarily opposed to them. It’s hard to think of anyone opposing the procurement of Milner on a free transfer, for example.)

I’ve discussed this before, but I just can’t get away from the way Liverpool were operating under Rodgers to the way they are now. The fact that the committee and the manager couldn’t agree on players was hugely problematic, causing a kind of fudging that meant some committee picks were bought but then weren’t selected for the team by Rodgers, and he himself put his faith in Christian Benteke, who appeared to have lost the pace and confidence that made him a danger at Aston Villa, within a totally different style of football.

Benteke wasn’t actually terrible at Liverpool, but like Joe Allen, Nathaniel Clyne and Danny Ings, had certain limitations that made it feel that Liverpool were assembling something closer to a mid-table side. (While Fabio Borini and Rickie Lambert looked very mid-table in all respects. Kolo Toure was simply too old.)

Obviously the Reds were not in the Champions League in all but one of the four seasons Rodgers started, although that was in part due to the Reds falling short in two of his three full seasons – which, even then, wasn’t entirely his fault, due to the Reds having the 5th-biggest budget at the time, in trying to break into the top four. As I said back then in his defence, 5th was par; although the incredible 6-1 defeat at Stoke turned that into 6th, and below par. (And from then on the wheels totally came off.)

And I have no problem with signing players from mid-table sides, as not everyone is at their ceiling at such a club; see Sadio Mané, for example. And I argued at the time that some of these could have been good signings.

But between three and six years on, none of Rodgers’ signings, bar Milner, are amongst the first-choice players at clubs better than mid-table in the Premier League or other elite leagues. (Borini is at AC Milan, but of course, they’re mid-table right now. And last season he was converted to full-back.)

The committee had some big gaffes in there too, including Lazar Markovic, who, even if harshly treated initially by Rodgers, has done nothing to help himself out of the hole into which he was put. Indeed, some of the committee signings are also now at mid-table teams or below. There will always be flops in the transfer market.

But of course, the committee gave the Reds the wonderful Bobby Firmino, and in the January of 2013 (after Rodgers’ terrible summer business in 2012) provided the huge uplift generated by the arrivals of Daniel Sturridge and Philippe Coutinho (before Rodgers regained more say in transfers, perhaps understandably – if mistakenly with hindsight – after the hugely impressive surge in 2013/14; albeit a surge, perhaps crucially, powered by players he didn’t buy).

Firmino, Coutinho and Emre Can are all regulars for massive title-hunting Champions League clubs (and still at great ages), while even much-maligned committee signings Iago Aspas and Luis Alberto are having much better subsequent careers than almost all of the players Rodgers brought to Anfield. And of course, Daniel Sturridge was an elite player, before injury struck. Firmino, Coutinho and Aspas all now star for major nations, even if the latter is never going to be world-class.

In fairness, Lovren had a great World Cup, but now aged 29, will soon join Lallana and Milner on the wrong side of 30. These are players with limited resale value during their entire time at Liverpool, and while the concept of resale value gets mocked, it is the £142m that Coutinho brought in (after several years of good-to-exceptional service that, like Luis Suarez before him, propelled the team into the Champions League) that allowed Liverpool to buy one of the best goalkeepers and one of the best centre-backs in the world. Rickie Lambert wasn’t going to do likewise.

Rodgers seemed intent on raiding his ex-club Swansea, in the way that managers do; but there was no great advantage for Liverpool due to Swansea’s mid-table existence, and where further mediocre targets, such as Ashley Williams, were also sought. Players can be improved with coaching, but none of Rodgers signings significantly improved under him.

And Rodgers went for obvious, but often uninspired, “proven” Premier League players, from the pool he knew, rather than those capable of becoming truly exceptional talents from the vast oceans beyond – the other 99% of the football-playing world, which you need scouts and analysts to cover, and is why some kind of transfer team is now so important.

(For the record, I’m not sure whose idea Victor Moses was, but he’s had a really good time since leaving his Reds’ loan. Ditto Mario Balotelli, who was a compromise that worked out dreadfully, although he’s gone on to star in France – but despite this, nothing he could do after leaving Liverpool would convince me he wasn’t a terrible fit at Anfield.)

As I’ve noted for three years now, even Joe Gomez was a committee pick that Rodgers vetoed for 18 months until his new assistant manager, who knew the player, reversed this decision (but without Rodgers publicly acknowledging that Gomez was actually a long-term committee choice, and instead giving all the credit to Sean O’Driscoll, which then reflected back on himself).

If the distinction here seems petty, in that Gomez was still signed during Rodgers’ watch and with some input from his new assistant manager, it’s indicative of the internal battles that were driving the club towards mediocrity. Gomez should have been signed when he was first identified, not due to the vagaries of backroom staff appointments just happening to know them personally; and in those 18 months Liverpool got lucky due to no one else moving in on the Charlton defender.

All this work needed undoing.

To quote Jonathan Northcroft from his excellent recent Sunday Times’ piece on Klopp, Michael Edwards and club president Mike Gordon:

“Gordon looks back on the signings in January 2013 of Daniel Sturridge for £12m from Chelsea, and Philippe Coutinho for £8.5m from Inter Milan, as the point when he knew a corner had been turned. Despite the brilliant 2013-14 season, however, an obstacle was Brendan Rodgers — because the then manager did not believe in the model.”

(And this – Rodgers’ distrust – was after the transfer committee gave him those aforementioned jewels in 2013. Edwards was also presumably part of the process that brought Luis Suarez and Jordan Henderson to the club.)

The truth is that the bulk of the team now revolves around signings driven by Klopp and the transfer team. Only Milner from Rodgers’ own picks remains a first-choice just three years later, with Henderson dating all the way back to Kenny Dalglish and Damien Comolli (and Edwards). So while listing the subs from Klopp’s debut game is unhelpful in showing what Rodgers bequeathed, that part isn’t.

The reason I believe Rodgers – clearly a talented coach – didn’t get a vacant Big Six job in England this past summer is because of how poorly he performed on transfers, working against the committee – when pretty much all major clubs now want their managers to coach, and limit or partly limit their input on transfers. (Klopp is different here: he worked with his Director of Football at Dortmund, and he instantly united the transfer process at Liverpool. At Liverpool he has the final say on players, but ideally everyone has to be in agreement.)

Arsenal, it seems, didn’t even consider Rodgers – but spoke to the assistant managers at Man United and Man City, and given what happened at Liverpool (and the timing of it all) I’m guessing they spoke to Klopp’s assistant too. They were looking for coaches, not traders. They’d already assembled their transfer team.

Comparing Klopp and Rodgers may seem like old news, or an irrelevance in 2018, but the direction of the club in 2015 was largely determined by Rodgers. Not every decision Klopp makes now relates back to Rodgers, but many of the main ones in the first year or two did.

Klopp didn’t have a blank canvas to start with: he had Rodgers’ canvas, and relatively limited funds – beyond what he could help the club generate – to make sense of Rodgers’ painting, and to adjust it into something more appealing.

And part of the time he has spent has been in painting over most of it with whitewash in order to start from scratch. (Klopp generated extra money by qualifying for the Champions League in each of his full seasons to date, enjoying two financially-rewarding European campaigns, and from helping Coutinho to become a player worth £142m.)

Rodgers did some great work while at Liverpool, but it was fleeting; none of it resulted in any solid foundations. And I think that’s the main point I keep coming back to, and actually what I have been trying to articulate whenever there’s some kind of Klopp vs Rodgers stats (52% vs 53%, for example), or a look into the progress being made.

And it’s why I think it’s vital to clarify that Rodgers did some great work, rather than did a great job. Because the latter would have meant a much better bequeathment, and a superior overall performance. Vladimir Smicer wasn’t a great Liverpool player, but he did well at times, and did a great job in Istanbul.

Perhaps painting is the wrong metaphor here, and it’s fairer to say that Rodgers built a wonderful sandcastle, that was all-too-briefly beautiful – ephemeral, if you will – while Klopp is building advanced modern architecture with concrete and steel.

But even what Klopp is doing won’t last forever; nothing does. However, if there’s only one player from this Liverpool team in the side in 2021, I’ll eat my sombrero.

Appendix: Footnotes and Further Info

Appendix: Explanation of Ratings Performance Index by Graeme Riley, Plus His Variations and Analysis

TTT has previously taken a look at RPI (Rating Percentage Index) in the past, but as background I’ll give a brief description of the way it works. In American college sports, there are so many different colleges that it would be impossible for every team to play each other and so a system was designed to be able to compare teams who play different numbers of matches against different quality of opposition.

Each team’s results are added together but assigned a weighting of only 25%. A home win in this case is given a score of 0.6 and an away win a score of 1.4, reflecting that it is more difficult to win away from home. A loss is given a zero rating in every case. Given the American aversion to ties (or draws), there is no consideration given to these as they simply do not occur (or so rarely as to be ignored) and so unfortunately, we will have to do the same here, effectively leaving a draw as the same as a loss. You either win a match, or you don’t. The points gained are then divided by the number of points available.

Where the calculation becomes more difficult, is that a second component is then added. The same scoring methodology is calculated for the opposition team’s results, this is then added with 50% weighting to the first team’s score to reflect just how good the opposition have been.

In a final calculation, the difficulty of match of the opponent’s previous opposition is calculated and assigned a 25% weighting to your score.

So we have 3 elements – how well have you done, how difficult were your opponents and how difficult were your opponents’ fixtures. Clearly the higher your combined score, the better you are doing against expectations. The maximum score is 1.00, but even if you win every game, this is likely to drop as the quality of opposition will drag your rating down.

I will slightly deviate from the methodology for one piece of the calculation however. Normally, this will take place to cover a whole season and so at any point during the season, all previous rankings are retrospectively taken as the year end position. Instead of this, I have calculated the RPI based on matches to date and then used this for the next match without restatement. This, to me at least, gives a better feel for the rating based on current form and most importantly quality of opposition at that point.

The impact of this change can be demonstrated by looking at the top three teams, Chelsea, Man City and Liverpool, who are locked closely together within 1% of each other under the full season method. However, based on the cumulative method there are some significant changes.

So how does this measure up? Looking at the table after 8 matches in each season since 1992-93, we get a feel for how well Liverpool are doing in reality this season. The low point, naturally, was 2010-11 when the rating stood at 0.19, reflecting the dire start to the season and lack of success against the likes of West Brom, Birmingham and Blackpool where only 1 point was won between match-day 5 and 8. Indeed, out of all clubs, this ranks in the bottom 10% of worst 8 games starts to a season.

At the other end of the scale, Liverpool’s best start to a season was 0.50 during 2008-09, a run of six wins and two draws even if the quality of opposition was not at it’s best. Above this come just three other wonderful starts to a season by other clubs, Chelsea (0.56) and Man Utd (0.52) in 2009-10 and at the top of the tree was Chelsea’s 0.565 in 2005-06. So clearly any score above 0.50 is excellent, having occurred only 6 times across all clubs so far. Indeed Man City’s start last season was good but not spectacular, rating at 0.48 with a series of easy wins, the most difficult being against 10 man Liverpool and a struggling Chelsea side.

So this is the context behind the current season, which sees table toppers Man City rated at 0.38, Chelsea coming in at 0.40, both behind surprise success stories Bournemouth (0.42) and Watford (0.42). Ahead of these are Spurs, rated at 0.46 and so only just below the pace set by Man City last year. However, top of the pile come Liverpool…..with a record, all time Premier League rating of 0.57.

Hopefully that puts into some perspective the relative disappointment of successive draws against the top two teams. So not only is it a fantastic start for points gained by the club, it also reflects the best ever return given the quality of the opposition faced.

Appendix: Article from Boom! On How the 2017/18 Season Panned Out vs RPI

Earlier in the season (and indeed, in this book) I discussed TTT subscriber Tim O’Brien’s version of the American statistical model, the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI), to highlight how unreliable I suspected the league table of being in October (after Premier League match nine, aka PL9), when Liverpool sat 9th. RPI is calculated by looking at the form of the teams played, to add some context to unbalanced fixture lists.

At the time of writing, with two league games to go, the table should now be a more ‘honest’ reflection of quality and consistency. So, how did RPI compare?

Well, if you took the league table from PL9, you’ll find eleven teams who, seven months later (PL36), currently sit within three positions of where they were in the actual league table in October, with an overall average of 3.9 places difference. However, when comparing Tim’s RPI from PL9 against the actual league table after PL36, no fewer than 15 teams sit within three places, for an average of 2.9 places difference.

At the time of writing Liverpool have risen from 9th to 3rd in the actual table, having been 2nd in the RPI table after PL9. In October West Brom were 13th in the actual table, but 20th in the RPI version – so Tim’s model perhaps foresaw trouble for the Baggies that maybe wasn’t picked up on at the time by the wider football public. The model also said that Everton under Ronald Koeman should have been 7th, not 18th, based on the difficulty of opposition faced, and that the few points they gathered were in essence more “valuable”. To see them rise to 8th is merely realigning with reality for a team that spent big over the summer, and nothing particularly miraculous from Sam Allardyce.

Indeed, in the past I have written extensively about predicting team performance when compared against financial outlay; working with Graeme Riley to create the Transfer Price Index in 2010, from which we devised the metric of the “£XI”: the average cost of a club’s line-ups across a league season, when adjusted for inflation.

With near-identical results to the league table from PL9, the £XI rankings for the season have eleven clubs finishing within three places of their ranking, for an average of 3.9 position difference. (So the headline figures are the same, but the finer details of the results vary slightly.) In other words the finances present a reasonable guess at the final table, as does the actual league table with three-quarters of the season to go. But the Ratings Percentage Index is more accurate than the £XI and the league table at PL9, as it was in 2016/17.

To test this, I went back and compared everything to the first league table of the season, which should logically be very random indeed – although not totally random. After one game, both Manchester clubs were in the top three; but so were Huddersfield. Spurs and Arsenal were in the top six, as expected, but West Brom were 8th. Liverpool were 9th, and Chelsea 14th. Overall there were still ten clubs within three places of their position 35 games later, so only one fewer than the RPI and £XI models; but the overall average was that clubs were within 4.8 places, compared to 3.9 places from PL9 and £XI, and against 2.9 places from RPI.

However, where the financial predictor of the £XI comes into its own is in the top half of the table. If you look only at the top 10 £XI rankings, then its predictive power improves to within 2.6 places of expectations, whereas PL9 remains much the same as it was, at 3.7; while the RPI gets better still, at 2.3 places different to the league table in early May.

Look at the top seven, however, and £XI becomes the best predictor of how things will look at the end of the season, compared against the league table after PL9 and the RPI model. The average disparity between the £XI and the league table falls to just 1.3, with RPI at 1.9 and PL9 at 2.7.

In other words, the richest clubs gravitate to the top.

This is probably because the financial gulfs at the top are so marked compared to the differences lower down the table. For example, Southampton’s £XI, at £100m, is only 5% greater than Crystal Palace’s, at £95m. These two are the 8th and 9th richest clubs in the country, based on the cost of their selections, and with such a little difference it’s hard to say which should be finishing above the other. But the two Manchester clubs’ financial advantage over Liverpool is over 200%; their £XIs costing more than twice Liverpool’s. Meanwhile, the Manchester clubs’ £XIs cost over five times the amount of Southampton’s; so if, in a way, the Mancunian pair are twice as likely to finish above Liverpool based on their wealth, they are five times as likely to finish above Palace, and twenty times as likely to finish above bottom-ranked Huddersfield, whose £XI averages out at just £26m.

This (like any other model) can never take into account all the external or unpredictable factors, like luck, injuries, fallouts, inertia, and the number of cup games played, as discussed at the start of this book. Remember: if a club like Liverpool, Arsenal and Spurs plays 20 cup games in a season, then something will most likely be shaved off the league points tally (and the tougher the cup games, the more damage it will logically do). If a club like Huddersfield plays ten cup games, the same will happen. Even the Rich Three could lose ground in the league if playing a lot of cup matches, although it usually takes around 25 extra matches to make a marked difference.

Tottenham 1-2 Liverpool

2018-09-16T07:09:00.000+08:00

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-6170837/Tottenham-1-2-Liverpool-Wijnaldum-Firmino-extend-Reds-unbeaten-run.html

Tottenham 1-2 Liverpool: Georginio Wijnaldum and Roberto Firmino extend Reds unbeaten run and keep Jurgen Klopp's side top of the Premier League table

Liverpool extended their unbeaten run by defeating Tottenham Hotspur at Wembley Stadium
Georginio Wijnaldum opened the scoring for Liverpool with a looping header on the cusp of half-time
Goal-line technology was used to confirm the Dutchman's header had crossed the line and beat Michel Vorm
Roberto Firmino made it 2-0 for Jurgen Klopp's side less than ten minutes into the second half
Substitute Erik Lamela pulled one back for the hosts in added time with a powerful yet placed volley

By OLIVER HOLT FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY

PUBLISHED: 14:22 BST, 15 September 2018 | UPDATED: 17:28 BST, 15 September 2018

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Harry Kane is tired, people are saying. Spurs are tired, people are saying. Liverpool, though, are not tired. Liverpool are playing like a team that wants to make up for lost time. Liverpool are playing like a team possessed, a team that wants to chase its ghosts away, a team that has not won the league for 28 years and desperately, furiously does not want it to become 29.

Last season at Wembley, Spurs overwhelmed them 4-1. It was a result that exposed Liverpool's limitations. This time, Liverpool overwhelmed Spurs. They overwhelmed them with their class and with their conviction and with their energy and with their desire. The 2-1 scoreline may not sound as if it were an emphatic performance but that does not tell the story of the game.

The murmurs of dismay that spread through the ranks of the home crowd whenever Liverpool broke with the kind of speed and intent that spreads terror among opposing defences told the story of the game. The way Liverpool made a good Spurs team look sloppy for most of the 90 minutes was the story of the game. The truth was that Jurgen Klopp's side were in a different class.

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Substitute Erik Lamela pulled a late goal back for Tottenham with a powerful volley, but Liverpool held on for a 2-1 victory

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Liverpool quickly built upon their lead early in the second half, as Sadio Mane picked out Roberto Firmino for 2-0

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The Brazilian smashed the ball home from close range after it hit the post and scrambled through the Spurs defence

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Mohamed Salah jumped on his attacking team-mate as the pair headed off to celebrate with the travelling Liverpool fans

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The away end burst into scenes of jubilation as Liverpool doubled their lead to go two goals ahead at Wembley

They have five wins from their first five games now, their best start since the 1990-91 campaign, and this victory more than any of the rest was a sign that they are the real deal. That is not to say that they will win the title this season but it looks likely that theirs is a challenge that will test any team that aspires to finish above them to the very limit.

'I am not the kind of personality to wait for problems,' Klopp said after the match, when he was asked about the eye injury that forced Roberto Firmino off the pitch and how he thought his team would react when they had to cope with key absences, 'but I am old enough to know that they will come. I have been in this game long enough to know that no one plays a perfect season.'

For the moment, at least, Liverpool look formidable. Their investment in Alisson and Virgil van Dijk has made a huge difference to their confidence. Their strength has always been their attack but they had an achilles' heel and other teams knew it. Now they are armour-plated in defence and other teams know that, too. They are no longer a soft touch at the back.

They have set this pace even without their talisman of last season, Mo Salah, playing at his peak yet. 'Playing our football that way, that is really nice for a manager,' Klopp said as he lavished praised on his players. This was by far our best performance of the season so I like this kind of development. They are such a good side that if we had played five per cent less, we would have lost.'

Those who have revelled in their long title drought must be starting to get a little worried. Manchester City will take some beating in the race for the title, sure, and Chelsea are looking impressive, too, but every game Liverpool has played this season has been a statement of intent. This time, they don't look like a team that will fade away.

MATCH FACTS, PLAYER RATINGS, LEAGUE TABLE AND MATCH ZONE

TOTTENHAM (4-3-3): Vorm 4; Trippier 5, Alderweireld 6, Vertonghen 6, Rose 6; Dier 5.5 (Wanyama 83), Dembele 5(Lamela 60, 6), Winks 6 (Son 73, 6); Moura 6, Eriksen 6 ; Kane 5

SUBS NOT USED: Sanchez, Gazzaniga, Aurier, Davies

GOAL: Lamela 90+3

MANAGER: Mauricio Pochettino 6

LIVERPOOL (4-3-3): Alisson 6.5; Alexander-Arnold 6 (Matip 90), Gomez 6 , Van Dijk 7 , Robertson 7; Wijnaldum 7, Milner 7, Keita 5 (Sturridge 83); Salah 6.5, Firmino 7 (Henderson 74, 6), Mane 8

SUBS NOT USED: Mignolet, Fabinho, Moreno, Shaqiri

GOALS: Wijnaldum 38, Firmino 53

MANAGER: Jurgen Klopp 8

REFEREE: Michael Oliver 7

ATTENDANCE: 80,188

Georiginio Wijnaldum got Liverpool off the mark with a looping header. CLICK HERE for more from Sportsmail's Match Zone.

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Earlier, Georginio Wijnaldum leapt high to head the ball back in from a clearance and put Liverpool ahead just before half-time

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The Tottenham defence attempted to jump in unison to deny Wijnaldum's looping header the chance to reach the goal

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But the effort evaded all and goalkeeper Michel Vorm was unable to prevent it crossing the line for 1-0

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Goal-line technology was used to confirm the whole ball had crossed the line and Liverpool had broke the deadlock

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Liverpool hands immediately shot up to appeal to the officials that the ball had clearly crossed the line for a goal

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The Dutchman was mobbed by his team-mates after giving Liverpool an all-important lead just before half-time

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Relief spread across the faces of the Liverpool players as they took the advantage heading into the half-time break

Without the injured Dele Alli, Spurs, whose resounding win over Manchester United feels like a long time ago now, seemed to lack conviction going forward. Without the injured, repentant Hugo Lloris, they seemed to lack their usual certainty at the back, too. Eric Dier looked uneasy and out of sorts on the right side of a midfield three and Liverpool seized the initiative from the start.

They thought they had scored in the first minute when Firmino got the faintest of touches to a Milner cross and it eluded Vorm but Mane had tried to prod it in, too, from an offside position and even though he didn't touch it, the officials ruled the attempt out because of his involvement.

Spurs were too careless too often and six minutes before half-time, Liverpool finally scored the goal that their conviction and their brio deserved. It was a surprise, perhaps, that it came from a set piece but when Milner curled a corner in from the Liverpool left, Spurs' normally excellent defending deserted them.

Vorm tried to punch the corner clear but he was distracted by the presence of Van Dijk in front of him and failed to make proper contact. The ball popped up to the back post where Dier headed it away. His clearance lacked power but Gigi Wijnaldum's rejoinder did not.

Ten yards out, Wijnaldum rose and headed the ball in a firm arc over Trippier who had retreated to the line to try to cover Vorm's uncertainties. Vorm flung himself at the ball as it cleared Trippier and pushed it out with both hands but referee Michael Oliver signalled immediately that goal line technology had ruled Wijnaldum's header would stand.

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Goalkeeper Alisson Becker roared in appreciation along with the travelling Liverpool fans as his side took the lead

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Liverpool had the ball in the back of the net within two minutes of the tie, only for their effort to be ruled offside by the officials

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Roberto Firmino got the final touch on a glancing cross, but the position of Sadio Mane meant the goal was chalked off

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Jurgen Klopp quickly took up his post at pitchside and began barking commands to his players at Wembley

It was Wijnaldum's first away goal in the Premier League and he sniffed a second a minute or so later when he found himself in space on the edge of the Spurs six yard box. Mane and Firmino lurked in the middle but Wijnaldum was drunk on the glory of goals and shot himself. He dragged his effort across goal and it rolled tamely over the byline.

The crowd was dismayed by Liverpool's superiority. They desperately needed encouragement and hope finally came when Lucas Moura spun away from Joe Gomez and drilled a low shot against the foot of Alisson's right-hand post. The home fans roared in relief as much as excitement. They took it as a sign Spurs were not out of the game yet.

A minute later, they began to reassess. Liverpool just had too many ways in which to hurt them. Trippier was caught out of position, Mane broke free down the left and his pace took him to the byline. Vertonghen stretched to intercept his cross but could only deflect it on to the inside of the post. The ball bounced across goal and squirmed agonisingly through the hands of Vorm as he lay on the floor. Firmino reacted quickest and lashed the ball into the net.

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Trent Alexander-Arnold jumps to control the ball in front of Klopp, on his 50th senior appearance for the Reds

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Virgil van Dijk goes up to battle with striker Harry Kane in the opening stages of the midday showdown

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Both opposing managers greeted each other in the dug-out prior to the kick-off at Wembley

Liverpool should have gone three ahead midway through the second half when Mane led a lightning counter attack that brought more murmurs of disquiet from the home fans. With Keita free to his left and goal machine Salah free to his right, Mane chose Keita. He hit his shot too close to Vorm, who was able to divert it over the bar. On the touchline, Klopp spread his arms wide in irritation.

His anger at his team's profligacy was given focus in injury time when substitute Erik Lamela took advantage of some sloppy Liverpool defending to control the ball at the back post, let it drop and then volley it with superb technique across Alisson and into the corner of the net.

Spurs pushed desperately for an equaliser and should have had a penalty in the dying seconds when Mane kicked Son Heung-Min's standing foot away from him but Liverpool escaped. Even Mauricio Pochettino admitted his opponents deserved to win. Klopp and his team march on.

Liverpool “Thrash” Spurs 2-1 – The Dream Is On! By Paul Tomkins

2018-09-16T07:03:00.000+08:00

https://tomkinstimes.com/2018/09/liverpool-thrash-spurs-2-1-the-dream-is-on/

By Paul Tomkins

September 15, 2018In By Paul Tomkins, Subscribers Only

For years I’ve been preaching calmness, and not to get drawn into all-or-nothing thinking. But since the first leg victory over Manchester City in the spring, I’ve been just about more nervous than at any other time I can recall when it comes to the Reds. And I’m nervous because it all feels so fucking close.

It doesn’t help that the Reds are still having (albeit increasingly rare) lapses in concentration, and too many of the great counterattacking overloads are ruined by selfish or poor decision-making; all of which made the result at Wembley an arse-twitching 2-1 rather than the 5-0 it could so easily have been by halfway through the second half.

Indeed, the expected goals from Michael Caley had it at 0.9 to Spurs vs 3.4 to Liverpool, and bear in mind that Liverpool fluffed about 15 other promising breaks before a shot was even got away, which don’t go into the equation. In xG the expected tally is rarely much above three, even in routs. When Gini Wijnaldum is scoring an away goal you know you must have been dominant.

In fairness, Liverpool don’t look like conceding many goals these days, and always look capable of scoring, which makes five wins from five feel deserved, even if they are doing their best to keep things just below perfection.

It’s dangerous to think in terms of ‘now or never’; not least when you are following a young team; one younger, on average, than Spurs, the media’s “young” darlings.

But 2018 has felt like “this is the time” for the Reds, even though next season and the season after could still be the time. After all, in 2020, the only current first-team Liverpool player who’ll be older than 30 will still be James Milner. (Jordan Henderson will turn 30.) And we know that James Milner was reverse engineered, to get better with age.

But in 2020 Jürgen Klopp will be five years in, and these days, that usually means things will have gone stale; especially with an energy-sapping style.

Of course, Klopp managed seven years at both Mainz and Dortmund, and it trailed off around year five or six. So – given the age of almost all the Reds’ best attacking players – the next two-three years feel vital. (As a note here, the defence has an average age of 22.75, which is insanely young!)

The purchases have added a new pressure too; the way the managers of generally bigger-spending clubs (with far greater wage bills and far bigger overall squad costs) are shifting the emphasis onto Liverpool, because the Reds spent the money raised from selling the most saleable asset, which is obviously different to spending the money raised from worldwide marketing schemes or overinflated commercial deals – in that a massive talent is lost in the process. The Manchester clubs don’t have to sell in order to buy big.

Also, breaking a world-record on a centre-back and goalkeeper is nothing like breaking the world record – full stop! – on other positions. To pay a lot of money for undervalued positions is not the same as paying even more money for other footballers you need (and these figures do not include inflation, which would put some defenders and goalkeepers at more than twice what Virgil van Dijk and Alisson cost).

One summer’s buying does not obviate all the previous mega-buying by richer clubs. If I pay £30,000 this year to build an extension on my modest three-bed semi, and you spend nothing but live in a 30-room mansion, you still have a 30-room mansion. Liverpool are still only the 4th-costliest side, and after inflation have a squad half the cost of the Manchester clubs.

But the nerves are there because, despite not having an expensive squad in relation to Chelsea, Manchester City and Manchester United, Liverpool seem to have what it takes, and have set themselves up for an insane 23 days with a mauling of Spurs, to go five wins from five in the Premier League so far. It feels like there’s no time like the present.

The remaining two-thirds of this article is for subscribers only. See below for details on how to sign up.

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Overview

Set-Pieces

Injuries

More Injuries Were Inevitable

Enforced Rookie Minutes – What Has “Killed” Liverpool

Injuries Have Removed Goal Threat