One of the recurring gripes watching Liverpool is how often we end up playing the game we don’t want to play. The ball goes back, it goes wide, and then we end up hitting something hopeful into a channel or firing a diagonal that feels like a 50-50 at best. When you’ve got forwards who live for that scrap, fine. When you haven’t, you’re basically giving the ball away and asking to defend a transition.
That’s why I keep coming back to the idea of someone like Semenyo. Not as a shiny-name answer to everything, but as a very specific fix for a very specific problem. Direct. Aggressive. Happy to take the first contact and still make it Liverpool’s ball.
A winger who makes defenders step out
The thing with direct wide forwards is they force decisions. A defender can’t just sit in a nice tidy line and wait for help. If you’ve got someone who commits people one-v-one, suddenly the full-back has to engage, the centre-half starts edging across, and the space opens somewhere else. That’s when your triangles get easier, your underlaps look smarter, and your cutbacks arrive with a bit of panic around them.
Liverpool at our best have always had players who make opponents move before the pass is even played. Not everything has to be perfect. Sometimes you just need someone to take a touch and go at his man, even if it’s scruffy, because it tilts the whole block.
Turning long balls into a plan, not a gamble
There’s also the less glamorous side: winning the first contact. Flick-ons, knock-downs, little ricochets that keep you up the pitch. It’s not pretty, but it’s how you stop those long forward passes becoming instant counters the other way.
If your wide options rarely win that aerial or physical duel, then every contested diagonal becomes a coin toss, and you feel it in the stadium and on the telly. You can see the rhythm break: attack ends, reset, opposition gets a breather. Over and over.
That’s where the “best football” doesn’t matter. You need functional football too. Someone who can make a long ball stick gives you territory and, more importantly, gives you time to swarm for second balls.
Work-rate, bite, and selection
There’s another point here that Liverpool fans clock instantly: intensity out wide. When the wide forwards do the dirty work, the whole press looks sharper and the midfield don’t get stretched as easily. When they don’t, you’re left watching gaps open up and asking why it feels like we’re a yard short.
The big question, of course, is whether Arne Slot would actually use that profile properly. It’s all well and good talking about what a player could add, but it needs minutes and a role. If you’re buying directness, you can’t coach it out of him the first time he loses the ball trying to beat a man.
If Liverpool want more variety, more threat in the rough-and-tumble moments, and a winger who changes the feel of a match without needing everything on the floor, this is the sort of thinking that makes sense.
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