Why the right side isn’t flowing anymore

Liverpool’s attack feels a touch stuck: Salah is getting it too wide and too late, while the central players meant to link things up are having to come searching for the ball.

For a good while, Liverpool’s most reliable attacking route felt obvious: get it to Salah quickly, get bodies near him, and let him do the damage. The point here isn’t that we should be “Salah-only” again, but it’s hard to ignore that the old right-sided rhythm doesn’t look like a viable default anymore.

The biggest tell is the speed of access. When the ball reaches Salah late, and when it arrives with him pinned to the touchline, you’re already asking for miracles. He can still create something out of nothing, but that starts to feel like a plan rather than a bonus. And if his level has dipped even slightly, those moments become harder to come by, which makes every cheap turnover feel louder.

Space around Salah has changed

A lot of this is about where the support is. When Szoboszlai was occupying that right half-space more consistently, you had a natural bounce pass, a runner, and another angle for combinations. That’s the kind of little structure that turns “Salah out wide” into “Salah one touch away from the box”. Without it, he’s receiving too wide and too isolated, and his risk-taking looks like sloppiness rather than ambition.

It’s also where the ball is coming from. If you lose some of that directness from the right side, you end up circulating and circulating, then playing into Salah when the defence is set. He’s always given the ball away at times, that’s part of his game, but when the chance creation is flowing you live with it. When it isn’t, it becomes a problem you can’t unsee.

Wirtz, the tempo, and the missing connector

Adding a proper #10 profile like Wirtz only raises the stakes on ball speed and timing. If the tempo is slow and there isn’t a consistent deep-lying organiser finding early passes, then the player you want between the lines ends up dropping deeper just to get involved. You can see why it happens, but it defeats the point.

And if that same player ends up out on the left for long spells, it can feel like a waste of what you’re buying into. You might prefer him there to other options in the squad, fair enough, but it still screams “we can’t quite get the structure right”.

Slot’s diamond: still a sensible idea

This is why the axial diamond made sense to me. Shorter distances, more angles, more natural combinations through midfield, and often a spare man in central areas. It’s not fancy for the sake of it; it’s a way of making the team play closer together.

The underrated bit is the defensive side. When you’re compact, you’re harder to play through and your counter-press has a chance. Truth is, Liverpool’s best attacking sides have usually been the ones with clear automatisms: quick access, set patterns, and enough support that individual brilliance is the finishing touch, not the entire idea.

Written by Svkick: 11 January 2026