Watching Liverpool at the minute, the most worrying part isn’t one bad moment or one off day. It’s the feeling that we’ve got no extra gear. The football looks measured, sometimes even cautious, and when the game calls for a spell of real intensity, it just doesn’t arrive.
For me, that points back to Arne Slot and the way his side wants to play. Slow and methodical can be fine. Plenty of good sides control games that way. The problem is that it becomes a trap if you’ve got no way to suddenly change the picture, either with a killer pass or by cranking the press and pinning teams in.
Tempo is a choice, but it needs a switch
The style feels like it’s built around patience. Work the ball, keep shape, don’t get stretched. All logical. But football matches don’t stay logical for long, do they?
When we’re on top, you want to see us turn the screw. A five minute spell where we win second balls, squeeze the pitch, and make the opposition feel like they can’t breathe. Instead it often looks like we score, then drift. Get in front and sit back a bit. Not always dramatically, just enough to take the edge off us.
That might be part of the plan, but it’s also where the lack of intensity becomes a proper issue. If you’re not going to go full throttle for long spells, you need something else that reliably breaks teams open.
No obvious one-pass fix
The other part of this, as I see it, is we don’t have that same easy transition from defence to attack. Trent’s passing used to change matches in a single moment. One ball over the top, one fizzed pass through a line, and the whole stadium feels it.
Without that, the build-up becomes heavier. The opposition gets organised. We end up circling rather than striking. And once the game turns into a set defence versus our slower possession, you can see why we start to look short of ideas.
Fitness and confidence: a bad mix
I keep coming back to fitness. If the legs aren’t there, you can’t press with any conviction, you can’t sustain attacks, and you definitely can’t rescue games with a late surge. Add in the knock to confidence from that rough run in October and November, and it starts to look like a team waiting for something to happen rather than forcing it.
And that’s where the manager has to wear it. Pre-season work matters. Conditioning matters. Because once the games are coming thick and fast, it’s hard to rebuild that base on the fly. You can tweak a shape mid-season, you can change personnel, but you can’t suddenly manufacture sharpness if it’s not there. Truth is, it may take the summer to properly fix.
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