16 Conclusions from Liverpool 1-1 Chelsea: Slot sack, Cucurella, Ngumoha sub, ‘standards’, Anfield boos | OneFootball

Arne Slot chose to deliberately wind up Liverpool fans before admitting to being outcoached by a Chelsea novice without his badges.

It does feel like a controversial set of decisions at a time of great uncertainty as to whether he should be trusted with steering this Liverpool team into the future.

There remains no idea whatsoever who Chelsea will give their keys to, but they could harness the brilliance of Marc Cucurella, the Premier League’s best left-winger.

1) “I’m completely convinced that we have enough players next season – and, add to that, the ones that we will sign – to put the standards exactly into the place they are needed,” insisted Slot, batting away concerns Mo Salah aired recently about the culture of the club he is leaving behind.

“The standards are not only important in the gym. It’s also on the pitch. OK. You understand me? Without me saying anything?” he continued.

That display said more than enough. This is not a healthy, united Liverpool with everyone pulling in the same clear direction. It is one approaching outright mutiny, with the manager seemingly almost deliberately provoking the supporters, while the players openly clash over tactics as they drown in a wave of momentum created by an away team without either a manager or a win in their last six league games.

2) The most frustrating aspect to a draw with all the overwhelming vibes of a defeat is that it was set up to be a unifying performance.

Liverpool took the lead in the sixth minute, almost doubled it in the tenth and were on top for the opening 20 as Rio Ngumoha glittered on the left and the youngest team of Slot’s tenure dominated, roared on by a stadium desperate to see this side offer any evidence of a process worth investing in.

By the end those same fans were booing, not because they wanted to see more but because they had seen more than enough.

In the majority of games Liverpool have faltered in recently, they have gone behind, restored parity and still lost or drawn because of a mental fragility that renders them incapable of sustaining pressure or an advantage. That was the case at Old Trafford.

This was an infuriating repeat of the Spurs debacle, down to the embarrassing minutiae of letting an essentially managerless team on a dreadful run of six games without a win look like comfortably the better team at Anfield.

3) Chelsea are due plenty of credit for that. They could entirely feasibly have collapsed to a seventh straight Premier League defeat once some slack defending allowed Ryan Gravenberch to open the scoring, but their response offered a modicum of encouragement heading into the FA Cup final.

This was, by default, the best they had played in two months. Calum McFarlane acknowledged that “recent performances have been nowhere near the expected standard” and this, while still some way from those levels, was far closer than in previous months.

In this, the apparent Standards Derby, Chelsea recalibrated theirs while Liverpool allowed them to slip further.

4) On that note, hearing the “Ste Gerrard” chant sung quite audibly for a fair few seconds when parity had been restored to the scoreline summed things up.

The home supporters conjured up nothing in response; the players had given them precisely nothing to work with.

5) Perhaps the only bright spark emanated from Ngumoha, who was always going to dictate the narrative from the start against this particular opponent.

Only early on it seemed as though the story of this game would be a general damning of Chelsea, their approach to academy-developed players and the blocked first-team pathway which Ngumoha felt forced him to seek an alternative route leading to Liverpool.

Instead, his early assist for Gravenberch, the fact he completed as many dribbles as the rest of the team combined, the sheer volume of effort Chelsea exerted in trying to contain his threat, and him being the first Liverpool player to be substituted despite all those factors, fed into the ongoing battle between Slot and the fans.

“He was having problems with his muscles and when I asked him he said he was not sure he could continue,” Slot explained, the call to sacrifice Ngumoha for Alexander Isak having been loudly jeered. “I knew this would be the reaction because he is such a good player. So often in football, people don’t know everything. I am the manager and I need to make decisions.”

There is something to be admired in Slot sticking to his principles, but at a time when support and belief in his stewardship is manifestly dwindling, it does feel like making substitutions he knows will actively goad the crowd – especially when the players are this meek and prone to reacting poorly to such negativity – is sub-optimal.

6) It also doesn’t feel like Slot fully grasps quite why the Ngumoha substitution was received so poorly.

As a 17-year-old making his seventh career start, who has never completed a full 90 minutes, there will always be frustrated acceptance that he is being managed sensibly while still growing and developing, even if the instinct is to object at a perceived lack of ambition.

The problem was twofold: how predictable it was that Ngumoha would be the player coming off; and how foreseeable it was that Cody Gakpo would not.

It only fed into the accusations of favouritism and again, cultivated that deeply antagonistic, unhelpful atmosphere that Liverpool plainly struggle playing in or changing.

Slot “knew this would be the reaction” and did it anyway, instead of showing some flexibility with a double or triple substitution, or removing Gakpo – who was taken off ten minutes later – first.

7) Gakpo really ought to have gone long before then after a disasterclass in centre-forward play.

His first touch came in the 40th minute. He conceded the free-kick from which Chelsea equalised, having been bullied and pushed out of the way as the first line of defence to Enzo Fernandez’s delivery. He had no shots and was caught offside twice, including unnecessarily so in the build-up to the disallowed Curtis Jones goal.

It underlined the fundamental flaw in a setup which seems to actively ignore the striker at times. At one stage, as Gakpo ran a Ngumoha ball out of play to mercifully kill a vaguely promising counter-attack, one fan in the front row captured the sentiment by visibly exclaiming “what the f**k?”.

He both had and provided no service. That ‘any amount plus Gakpo’ swap does not feel particularly close; Bayern would probably rather just have the money.

8) Joao Pedro was not sensational at the other end but did at least fundamentally impact the game, having the most shots and the most dribbles. One glorious solo run almost won a penalty from Jeremie Frimpong.

Even on his off days, the Brazilian is a nuisance Chelsea should build their attack around, or at least with him as an essential cog.

9) The best, most effective attacking player on display being Cucurella felt right for the Premier League game with the second-fewest shots this season.

The Spaniard was, in fairness, really quite good as the left-winger in this system ahead of Jorrel Hato. Cucurella frequently found and exploited the space down Liverpool’s right, forcing a frank conversation between Jones, Ibrahima Konate and Jeremie Frimpong after a disallowed Chelsea goal early in the second half.

Chelsea’s journey back into this game was at least partly defined by those Cucurella runs, which stretched the hosts, forced Giorgio Mamardashvili’s first save and wrestled the initiative away.

10) But that does not explain Liverpool’s absurd passivity.

They had three shots in the first 11 minutes, then no more until the 48th when Chelsea had long since equalised. They made their first tackle in the 11th minute, with their second not coming until the 42nd.

Quite why they just decided to stop trying once Virgil van Dijk sent his effort over when completely unmarked at the back post from a corner is unknown.

11) The most of real dissension came after half an hour.

Ngumoha had done well to keep the ball under pressure, riding challenges to play it inside to Alexis Mac Allister so a slightly wobbling Liverpool could start again. The midfielder then shifted it on to Konate, and as he shaped to recycle possession to the keeper, the fans groaned and protested at the lack of intensity and tempo.

So Konate played it forward instead, back to Mac Allister. The ball eventually made its way back to the centre-half, who took the Mamardashvili option this time.

The keeper promptly hit a long kick out for a throw-in from which Chelsea won the free-kick they scored from, with everything stemming from that moment of nervousness and indecision when what happened in the stands was allowed to dictate what happened on the pitch.

12) Maybe it was fitting for it to come against Chelsea, whose most recent actual manager worthy of the title once pointed out that players probably shouldn’t veer from what they have been coached, just because supporters get a bit annoyed.

Konate visibly changing what he was going to do because of those complaints was a sign of the weakness which has come to define Liverpool.

13) As was their defending of the Fernandez free-kick: a straightforward low delivery which was allowed to bounce straight into Mamardashvili’s net by a static backline.

The little shove from Wesley Fofana on Gakpo as the cross was whipped in. The fact that no defender came close to the ball, while three Chelsea players were almost got a touch before it crossed the line regardless. The ridiculousness of Liverpool having ten men in the box while offering zero resistance. It was a fittingly atrocious way for Liverpool to concede a club record 18th set-piece goal in the Premier League this season.

14) Levi Colwill was really good and Chelsea have thoroughly missed him. Enzo Maresca was a bit silly sometimes but he might have been right on that one.

15) It was much, much better from Chelsea in general. But even then, it was a bad day to be several shades of financially f**ked without Champions League football.

Bournemouth and Brighton both winning later in the day means that gap to sixth place was actually extended to six points, with Everton able to drop them a place further into 10th if they beat a hilariously distracted Crystal Palace on Sunday.

They can still finish as low as 16th and it really should not be ruled out.

16) Slot ridiculed the suggestion that it was part of the gameplan for Liverpool to withdraw after such a strong start.

“Of course it’s not the idea for us to back off, we wanted to keep going,” he said. “But we played against a team that got more and more comfortable on the ball. They didn’t have any wingers available so they had a lot of midfielders, so they controlled the midfield and started to pass through us more and more and more.”

If only there was someone Liverpool could pay handsomely to address that.

The Dutchman added that Chelsea were “by far the dominant team” as a result. It is a preposterously damning thing, to admit to essentially being outcoached at home by someone overseeing his fifth game at this level. McFarlane’s prospects of retaining this position are remote, especially in comparison to Michael Carrick at Manchester United, but Slot has basically been shown up by two caretakers in successive weeks.

Liverpool have also dropped points to five sacked managers this season – Enzo Maresca, Ruben Amorim, Sean Dyche, Scott Parker and Igor Tudor – and the general sentiment at Anfield does seem to have shifted towards the idea that Slot should be among them; this is not anger contained within a social media bubble.

Chelsea had lost their last six league games and most recently been thrashed by Nottingham Forest’s reserves. To produce this performance and result after taking the lead against them at home is an abysmal indictment of whatever it is Liverpool are trying to do.