Liverpool signing ‘offers nothing’ and ‘needs to be dropped’ long before ‘confused’ Wirtz

Only one Liverpool player has appeared in all ten of their games so far this season, but he has been ‘abject’, ‘offers nothing’ and ‘needs to be dropped’.

We also have thoughts on Manchester United and Chelsea.

Send your thoughts to theeditor@football365.com.

Lost Liverpool

So, when Liverpool got all those late winners after varying degrees of pants performance, I will tell you what I thought – ‘When this all clicks, we are going to blow teams away…’

And I think I wasn’t the only one. I mean, yes, we hadn’t been playing well, but we were getting wins regardless and considering the strength of our team/squad and what we could do when everyone was fit and firing, yeesh, teams were going to be in trouble. Obviously, the other side of that coin was what if we continue to play poorly and performances don’t come, we can’t keep bailing ourselves out of trouble with late goals. That was mostly batted away. Of course, there was also the quiet thought that said something like ‘what if this is us not playing badly, but being worse.’ I gave that zero consideration though, because surely that wouldn’t be the case. Not after all that money. Not after being reigning champions.

Well, that thought it is well and truly ringing around my head now. And not because we played truly, truly awful against a mediocre Galatasaray team. Not because we were nearly blown away at the weekend by Palace in the first half hour. Not because we got completely outplayed by an Isak-less Newcastle team that played half the game with 10 men. And not because we looked absolutely toothless against newly promoted Burnley. It’s because this season has seen those awful performances surrounded by resoundingly mediocre ones. Every single game this season has failed to see Liverpool set any kind of bar of performance.

And the list of issues seemingly grows rather than diminishes. They are too numerous to entirely go through, but lets name the most obvious and excruciating.

The Press. Liverpool’s press has been variations of tired, lazy, disorganised, and mostly, extremely open. The front players seem to have no idea who is pressing where. Both Isak and Ekitike seem slower and less inclined to close than Diaz and Nunez who came before. The passing lanes are far too frequently left wide open, even with players in relative proximity, and without a coherent strategy from the front the midfielders are routinely left chasing about trying to close the gaps created by the absent front players.

Shape – Liverpool’s shape has been awful. We started the season wanting to create space for Salah by bunching lots of our creative players in the left half space. The logic seemed to be that the tricky interplay from those players would plot their way through the cluttered pitch, and when the time was right, and for variation, they would play a quick ball out to Salah that would leave him 1v1 with a full back who he could exploit. Instead, Liverpool rarely pass to Salah in the wilderness of the right hand side. However, if it does get out there we have our next problem…

Salah – The problem you have when you base a lot of your play around one superstar, is that you are rather reliant on that player always being bloody awesome. Up until this season, Salah had shown us we need not worry. He is always great and always will be great. But then this season arrived. Salah is 33 and finally is starting to show the weathering that age will inevitably toll upon one’s football game. A half a percentage of pace, a half of acceleration, a half of quick thinking. It adds up. And Salah is bang out of form and perhaps showing his first real decline. I have no doubt he will score goals and have moments of magic, but I fear they will be more far more fleeting than previously.

Macallister – He was the absolute glue that held our midfield together last season. His ability to take the ball deep and play passes through the lines, recycling possession and playing key passes was exceptionally important. Injury has robbed him of a preseason and the slow progress getting him back fit has left him exposed physically and in dire form. We need him back to his best. No one else in the squad has his skillset, and its possibly the most important to our overall style.

Kerkez – I am not entirely sure how Kerkez has not been dropped. For all the criticism of his defensive lapses, this seems to be the area he has been performing as expected, which is decent. It’s going the other way that he has been abject. Kerkez largely offers nothing on the left. He rarely makes an overlapping run and when he does its basic. There are no darts inside the FB, no whipped balls in from deep, no penetrating passes into midfield, no tidy intricate passing. He mainly stands relatively deep on the left and passes backwards. I had seen Robertson lose a yard of pace and start to get occasionally exposed by a winger with real speed, but his attacking prowess still remained. He still had rapier like balls in both from deep and from the byline. He could spot a run and play accurate balls through. Now there is none of that. Its short, its backward and its basic. Kerkez needs to be dropped.

Wirtz – Wirtz has done nothing wrong. He works hard, he tries to close down, albeit relatively poorly, he shows nice touches and occasional great feet to play a pass or take a shot. There is obviously a player in there. The problem is that he took the place of another player who did plenty of those things himself. But Szobo pressed better. And he shot better. And he worked harder. And although Wirtz hasn’t done really badly, he is either not in form or has not acclimatised enough to get that best form out. Shuffling him out to the left has not improved anything either. They know Gakpo, they understand his strengths, putting in Wirtz, who is very different, simply confuses an already confused team.

Slot – He needs to start addressing the obvious concerns. One of the moments I knew I had to worry during Klopp’s previous tenure was when he refused to acknowledge the Hendo/Fab midfield had run out of legs. It was painfully clear and yet he made every excuse under the sun to pretend other parts of the team were the problem. It didn’t help them, and it won’t help us now not to have Slot accept there is a problem. He doesn’t have to throw anyone under the bus. This isn’t necessarily new players coming and cocking it all up. But he needs to show a willingness to change our approach or lineup or something.

The defence is worse, the midfield is worse and the attack is worse. Maybe it will all magically click into gear, but there is zero evidence to assume so. We are conceding far more xG and creating far less. We don’t pass the eye test and we fail abjectly at the underlying stats. This is a team playing well below the standard of last season and we’re all lucky things aren’t considerably worse already. The stats would have us midtable, and they have not been skewed by red cards or second strings. There is no need to panic, but neither should there be a glossing over of abject performances. We have Chelsea next and then the international break. We need a reset.
Ed Ern 

Turkish VAR

Given recent officiating we can’t blame Arne Slot for being confused when the officials awarded a penalty against Liverpool and overruled the decision to award a spot kick to them. You get used to things always going your way.

Also, that penalty decision shows that VAR isn’t the problem. English Premier League refereeing standards are the problem.

What’s the solution? Introduce foreign referees and VAR officials to the Premier League.

No team can complain about it. Liverpool certainly can’t or it’ll look like they really do have PGMOL in their pocket and the other teams, and fans, would have their conspiracy theories debunked
Eoin (or proven) Ireland 

The sad state of social media fans

If you hang around on social media (most of us do) then you’re probably already aware of how absolutely mental social media football fans are.

After getting beaten by a very good palace side who give everyone problems I was shocked to see Liverpool fans on social media going in on Arne Slot with some absolute Swiss cheese brained morons calling for him to be sacked.

These will be the same fans who posted fsg out for years and years as well. As a Liverpool fan I don’t consider those fans to be part of the Liverpool family. They are FIFA brained spanners who just react to whatever meme they saw last and that meme is basically the screen saver for their peabrains.

This morning I read fans giving shit to slot about not picking chiesa for the galatasary game based entirely on James Pearce tweet saying there were no reasons to not pick him. Slot literally said on TV chiesa picked up a niggle which was still there in training. But because nobody online bothers to fact check anything anymore everyone just accepted Pearce’s tweet as gospel.

If you have posted that the man who currently holds the premier League trophy should be sacked after losing one game to the most inform team in the league you genuinely need banning from social media and the sport of football in general.

I understand now why arsenal fans hate afctv and why United fans hate goldbridge. These fans are an embarrassment and most definitely don’t represent the Liverpool fan base as a whole. The vast majority of us are disappointed with the loss but know it’s just one loss. We know wirtz will eventually get to grips with the pace of the league. We know isak will get match fit and bang them in.

If you’re one of these fans, from any club not just Liverpool , then you need to have the x-ray machine turned up to full radiation next time you get scanned at the airport.
Lee 

MORE ON LIVERPOOL’S STRUGGLES FROM F365
👉 The truth behind Liverpool and their £400m spend: one ‘downgrade’ and what Wirtz needs ‘more’ of
👉 Ekitike ‘breaks silence’ as Liverpool ‘cracks’ deepen for crisis-riddled table-toppers

In support of Manchester United

Dear Editor,

Having lived through the Glory, Glory Man United days and seen their incredible fall from grace, it got me thinking that maybe, this is exactly what Man U needed and the ownership wanted.

My theory is that while Man U were successful, the media and the public tired of success and therefore tuned out to a degree.

Thus, while they became popular on the back of their success, they didn’t capitalize as much as they probably should have.

But, once the decline started to happen, the fans, media and public became more and more interested in the car crash and with it, a lot of new eyeballs fell on the brand.

Therefore, I feel Man U fans should be thanking ETH, Amorim, Sancho, Rashford et al., for their contribution to seeing Man U revenues grow by 34% or from £494m in 2021 to £666m in 2025.

Man U fans should be counting their lucky stars that their managers, players and owners have overseen an incredible success story off the pitch and invested it on the pitch.

Long may this story continue.
Colm Ryan

Chelsea fatigue

I have a pretty different take on the Chelsea fatigue.  The players are fatigued with Maresca’s turgid, high risk – low reward football.

He is a micro-manager obsessed with ‘control’ and is exhausting the players.

In our own half, we play high risk, passing out from the back football, where one small mistake is basically a chance on goal. Cucurella and James (on the rare occasion he plays at RB) can do this. Our CB’s are not good enough passers to do this.

Our GK is a horrific joke.

In the opponents half we play slow, predictable sideways football that doesn’t let our players off the leash. Palmer (& probably Estevao) are the only players who can create a moment and break through the monotony.  Palmers comments after the Conference league final said it all.

Maresca’s historically shit substitutions in the last 2 league games were all about ‘control’.  He’s a bald plum.

The sooner he is fired the better, but knowing the owners, this will only happen when the season is a complete write off, probably in February.
Ben, London

Foul play

It’s odd that while I disagreed with Joe, AFC, East Sussex’s assessments – i.e., that both Pope’s foul and Gabriel’s handball should have been given – I agree with all of his premises and observations.

Pope got the ball before he got the man – Joe is correct that it was blind-ass luck – and he minimized his contact with Gyokeres. It wasn’t a penalty, and in fact might have been called a foul by VG (I wouldn’t have agreed).

The Gabriel handball was clearly intentional, but was correctly not given under the current handball rule as i understand it. That just means the rule is bad. A defender’s intentional handball in the box should always be a penalty. Gabriel, like Pope, got a piece of luck, albeit one that he manufactured.

I guess Joe and I are disagreeing to agree, as it were. But Gabriel should never have been on the pitch to score. He deserved a red card for his assault on Nick Woltemade, and I thought he was begging for a yellow with his dive in giving up the goal. Especially as he went after the referee to convince him he’d been fouled. Admittedly, though, both Burn and Joelinton were walking very fine lines and might have been sent off, too.
Chris C, Toon Army DC