Coming into this big game hope was renewed for Liverpool supporters after a thumping win at Maribor, with Spurs coming in heavy legged after a tough clash in Madrid in midweek. But within 5 minutes of kick-off, it felt like this was going to be another one of those days and so it proved.
To make things worse Spurs didn’t have to play that well to dismantle us as most of the damage was self-inflicted from totally innocuous situations. Once again too many players showed their poor in-game decision making and switched off at the wrong moments. The game turned into a canter for Spurs.
The chief culprit today, not for the first time, was clearly Lovren who was rightly hooked before halftime. When he reverts to type it makes Klopp’s decision to go into this campaign with Klavan and Gomez as backups look naive at best.
Only Klopp knows what really happened in the summer. But with each passing week, the dropped points due to sloppy defensive errors, compounded with our inability to kill off teams, is resulting in too many dropped points and making the summer defensive transfer (in)activity look negligent. Clearly, Klopp has to show faith in his players so cannot hang them out to dry, but rest assured he will be as livid as the fans right now.
What Klopp perhaps didn’t reckon with was that our players’ limitations are now so well known by the opposition and even the big teams know how to get around our game plan to expose our poor defensive structure, as we have seen against City and Spurs.
What is also becoming evident is that the form we showed between August and December of 2016-17 was not a true representation of this team’s level. It set an unrealistic expectation to soon and this is now hurting Klopp.
With weak links like Mignolet and Lovren in this team, a mistake is never too far away and when that happens it affects the whole team. We have too many players who make the wrong decision at the key moments and from Klopp’s perspective, I sense that the time for patience is over. No amount of coaching is going to improve certain members of this squad. It’s now about mitigating for their weaknesses.
Lovren, for example, was signed based on his form at Southampton which was so good virtue of the protection he received from two deep-lying midfielders in Wanyama and Schneiderlin. He simply cannot perform consistently in a fluid 433. Maybe the manager needs to modify the system as he did in last season’s run-in.
Whatever he does, I think Klopp has to now pull through as best he can until January and use the winter window to start bringing in the calibre of player he was looking for in the summer. He also needs to make this team more solid to stand a chance of attracting the future players to push us to that next level. Otherwise, he risks several existing key players casting their eyes to greener pastures.
For 2 seasons, every LFC fan knows where is our weak links, defense and the goalkeepers, and yet Klopp did almost nothing to address them properly.
Well we had this coming for a long time and this season it finally came. As a LFC fan for more than 3 decades barring the Hodgson era, i had never felt such sense of despair. Despair knowing the fact that with Klopp in charge, we would win absolutely ZERO titles, our highlight for any season maybe is to sneak in the CL but we would never win it unless all the teams are like Maribor. Lets get real, we are going no where with Klopp, last season we can’t defend but can score, this season we can’t do both and all Klopp had to do is to strengthen the defense. Instead he weakens them, by selling our best defender and no replacement!
I felt despair as Klopp is a German version of Rodgers, you know their “philosophies” is way more important than the well being of our club. LFC is in the business of winning titles but you can sense with Klopp that this is not really what he cares about. How in the world would he figured that he can turn Lovren into Hyppia? Just look at Lovren during the Spurs game, he literally makes me sick and Klopp refuses to add reinforcement, saying no one else could fix our defense.
I don’t think Klopp can or are capable of fixing this despite what he says yesterday. Think about it, would Mourinho, Pep or Conte tolerate a team like ours? Only Klopp would. Mourinho lost just one game and look at his reaction? How can we be winners when our Manag tolerates losing so damm well?
However i do not expect FSG to do anything to fix this either, they might had done well to back our team but just like Klopp they are not capable of reacting positively when things do no go well.
Another decade of mid table existence.
Klopp, we had such high hopes on him and this is what we got
Gary Neville identified the root of the problem for concession of the 3rd goal. Klopp highlighted the obvious issues that anybody could pick up. It suggests to me that a pundit knows more about defending than the full time manager of LFC. There is no defending incompetence. Klopp out.