Observations as Liverpool hit five with Premier League season just a week away

Liverpool surged past Napoli in a convincing 5-0 win on their penultimate game of pre-season, sparking fresh optimism for the season ahead. The Premier League kicks off in a weeks time and the Reds look fired up for it, delivering a high intensity, high energy game that saw James Milner, Gini Wijnaldum, Mo Salah Daniel...

Liverpool 5-0 Napoli: Player Ratings as Liverpool humble Napoli

Liverpool laid down a marker with the new season on the immediate horizon as they thrashed Napoli 5-0 at the Aviva Stadium. James Milner, Georginio Wijnaldum, Mohamed Salah, Daniel Sturridge and Alberto Moreno were all on target for the rampant Reds in their penultimate pre-season friendly. Jurgen Klopp's side flew out of the blocks and built...

Sturridge Steals The Show – Liverpool 5-0 Napoli

Liverpool’s pre-season continued in fine fettle as the Reds put Napoli to the sword in Dublin for their penultimate match. The 5-0 rout featured five different scorers, as Milner, Wijnaldum, Salah, Sturridge and Moreno piled the pain on the Italian side. Liverpool started as they meant to go on, 2-0 up inside ten minutes with...

Why Virgil van Dijk Is Liverpool’s Most Important Player

Such is the level of quality within Liverpool's newly-built squad, there are various players that could lay claim to being the Reds' most important individual heading into 2018/19. Mo Salah is the obvious name that immediately springs to mind, considering the Egyptian's 44 goals last season catapulted him to superstar status. Without his devastating impact in...

Liverpool Aim For Hot August

Believe it or not, we are now less than nine days away from the start of Liverpool’s 2018/19 season. The close of the transfer window is a week away. August 4th is expected to be the last warm-up for the starters as the Reds face Napoli in Dublin. They then face Torino on the...

The Good and the Bad of Liverpool’s Pre-Season

This summer was an important one for many Liverpool players vying for their futures at the club; Divock Origi had returned from a sub-par loan at Wolfsburg while Dominic Solanke's tally of one goal left him in a precarious position. Then there's the perennially injured Adam Lallana whose gone from guaranteed starter to a...

How a number 10 will get the best out of Solanke and Origi

One of the major talking points for some while has been Liverpool's lack of depth across their forward line. Following the sale of Philippe Coutinho, the Reds haven't had suitable backups to either of their wide forwards and Solanke and Ings failed to impress when filling in for Roberto Firmino last season. With Bobby...

Can Klopp finally land the League Title?

Prior to the World Cup, Liverpool could conceivably have delivered the most spectacular summer for many a decade (in midfield alone). The midfield roster was oh-so-close to being Fabinho, Keita and Fekir. An upgrade of epic proportions and the kind of statement of intent that has been rare in the Anfield Premier League era. Midfield...

Finding Faux-kir | The Search for Fekir Alternatives

It was either him or us. Someone was going to get hurt here. Fekir or us Liverpool fans. Either his knee would collapse, or the deal to sign him would. He had already been interviewed for the site, done the photo shoot, sold his house in France, told his ex-colleagues what he really thought...

The Rejuvenated Role of Daniel Sturridge

‘It’s only pre-season. It’s only pre-season.’ That’s what the two Manchester City and Manchester United were left clamouring about, desperately trying to save face after Liverpool brushed them aside with 2-1 and 4-1 wins respectively. Indeed, the US tour has been a success, with one of the keys to the promising form being a player perceived...

Why Christian Pulisic would be Liverpool’s Ultimate Investment

With football’s ever-growing obsession with the word “potential”, it’s not often one gets to make statements of absolution. Indeed, football is obsessed with making resolute, consummate statements within a game that is transient and is cursed with never really knowing what is real and what is just, essentially, an educated guess. Football clubs have the...

Liverpool and the Meaningless Friendlies

Many years ago in the days when he was a footballer rather than a TV host and the online taunter of phone hackers, Gary Lineker belittled the idea of a glorious pre-season goal. His view was that, given a finite number of goals in any striker’s career, you want your thirty yard volley to be...

Allez, Allez, Allez! At Ann Arbor

On Saturday, Liverpool capped off their USA tour with a matchup against the hated Manchester United in front of over 100,000 fans at the Big House in Ann Arbor, Michigan. While it may have just been a preseason friendly between two teams missing several first-team players, it was more than a meaningless game. For...

Should Klopp Out-Crazy Mourinho After Unhinged Presser?

Jose Mourinho’s comments immediately after Liverpool’s 4-1 victory against United in Ann Arbor were an absolute disgrace to his club and were he any other manager he would have been left to walk home from Michigan. But aside from signalling his classic third-year implosion and clearing a path for Liverpool to take a run...

Liverpool FC Squad Analysis: The Depth Chart

There are two weeks to go until the summer transfer window slams shut, locks and closes its shutters. Jurgen Klopp has apparently announced there will be no more signings with his comments last week - "We have everything we need for the next season because I don’t think we will do anything more, I’m...

Do Liverpool Need to Win a Trophy To Justify Their Spending?

Do Liverpool and Jurgen Klopp need to win a trophy this season? No. Do Liverpool need to justify their spending this summer by winning a trophy? No. I could honestly end the article there. To be blunt, even a cursory look at transfer spending over the last three to five years will tell you that the...

What must Liverpool do to win the Premier League?

If you've read past the title, you might be expecting an article on transfers. They're the flavour of the month and many, myself included, would argue that Liverpool need to do a couple more deals to really push Manchester City this season. However, I'm not going to look at that today, I'm going to look...

A Fast Start Essential In Liverpool’s Title Quest

Every time a new Premier League season arrives, those images of a Liverpool title win start entering our heads, teasing us about that most cherished of achievements. It's only natural, considering football fans should always be thinking big, but we all know such hopes and aims can sometimes be unreasonable. Let's face it, there have been...

Daniel Sturridge: Back from the Brink?

At the end of the 2017/18 season, Daniel Sturridge's departure seemed an inevitability. The club had considered selling him the summer before and during the first half of the campaign, they lost faith in his abilities, resulting in a January loan to West Bromwich Albion which sounded the death knell for his Liverpool career. The...

5 Takeaways From Liverpool’s Preseason So Far

Preseason is at the same time very exciting and mind-numbingly boring. Everyone is eager to see the players back in the shirt and on the pitch. No matter how the last season ended, there’s always the promise that THIS season will be EVEN better. And then the latest preseason match starts with 22 guys...

Injecting Forward Passing Into Liverpool’s Midfield

In his first ever press conference as Liverpool manager, Jurgen Klopp was asked about the style of play we should expect to see the team play during his tenure, ‘Umschaltspiel’, he replied. This is a German footballing term but it roughly translates to ‘shift game’, which essentially means ‘transition game’ in England. Two full...

The Strange Case of Liverpool Fans Enjoying the Summer

Jurgen Klopp has done it - he made us (most of us, including me) believers. For the first time in ages, I was able to enjoy my summer without worrying about Liverpool football club. And I have to admit it was strange. I didn't feel the need to read rumours, I didn't F5, didn't...

Alisson, Van Dijk & Keita: Liverpool’s New Game-Changing Spine

This time just over a year ago, imagine being told Liverpool would sign Alisson, Virgil van Dijk and Naby Keita in the 12 months that followed. It would have felt like the most beautiful of pipe dreams, even if Alisson wasn’t the world-renowned goalkeeper he speedily blossomed into at Roma. Great teams have great spines and...

How FSG Found Their Perfect Formula

May 2010: The Royal Bank of Scotland takes Hicks and Gillett to court in order to force the sale of Liverpool Football Club. October 2010, Fenway Sports Group purchase Liverpool Football Club for £300 million, after the club was perilously teetering above the jaws of administration. Nearly eight years later, mistakes have been made, Liverpool did...

Sturridge and Lallana – What Next?

A lot has been made in pre-season of the form of Daniel Sturridge, who has played very well and made a good impact. Once again, we’re in July and Sturridge is still, now at the age of 28, a Liverpool player, despite almost constant speculation about his future at the club for the last...

Is YNWA Just a Song? Karius Deserves More

Every fanbase is made up of a majority of good people, and a noisy few that should be sacrificed to the volcano god in order to ensure a bountiful harvest.  Liverpool are supposed to be different.  We have a slogan, “this means more,” part of a campaign meant to show that we operate on...

Don’t Let The Gini Go

Some footballers will dazzle you, some will amaze you, some will flatter to deceive. Then there’s the underappreciated footballer; the man who does the ugly side of the game with little recognition for his efforts. Gini Wijnaldum falls into the latter category, quietly going about his business during his two years at the club, showing...

Faith and Football: Liverpool’s Muslim Men

What do Mo Salah, Sadio Mané, Xherdan Shaqiri and Naby Keïta have in common? Besides their football club, of course. The answer I'm looking for though is their religion, Islam. It's very rare in my writing that I stray away from tactics, statistics or areas in which I feel well-versed in, indeed, identity and faith...

What to Expect From Xherdan Shaqiri – A Statistical Analysis

The dust is starting to settle again following Liverpool's signing of Shaqiri. The transfer came as somewhat of a surprise for many and thus it is not surprising that many questions still remain unanswered. What position will he play? What does he do? How will that work at Liverpool? What is so magical about...

What next for Loris Karius?

The signing of Alisson was a huge statement of intent from the club. Having reportedly singled him out as far back as January, it was clear that Jürgen Klopp was after a new goalkeeper, even before the closing stages of the 2017-18 season. Until the Champions League final though, Loris Karius was doing a pretty...