Emery to replace Slot as Liverpool’s most ‘baffling’ issue identified; two priority signings to fix mess | OneFootball

Could Unai Emery replace Arne Slot at Liverpool? The Mailbox reckons the Dutchman needs to fix his side’s most ‘baffling’ problem to save himself…

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Liverpool and Arne Slot ‘will be fine’

Hi. That’s all I can take and I can’t take any more! Liverpool and Arne Slot will be fine, mark my words.

First there is the grief aspect. Nobody outside of my club knows what’s happening in that dressing room currently, but believe me, the sadness attached to it is more likely to start firing them up in the coming weeks, so beware.

Second, far too much has changed over the summer for it to be a seamless integration; a lot of mainstays left and other new faces came in as apparent automatic matchday starters. This is not the usual Liverpool way of doing things. Do we look more closely at the board for answers here?

Third, how the hell can the board sack a man who won the league last season? I don’t care about Klopp’s team blah blah blah – He took that team to the top of the league and on an excellent run in the Champions league – not to mention Carabao cup Finalists.

Furthermore to my last point, if the board do part ways with him they must be firmly aware that if the incorrect choice in replacement is made and it fails; which I suspect it would, the fans would turn fully against them. The trues red supporters are far from stupid and blind

And lastly there is light at the end of the tunnel! Mo Salah can take his tired legs off to Afcon and a rejig of the team can be done on the right hand side. Konate can spend some time on the bench and see the errors of his ways and absence of interest from Real Madrid. The right backs can start to fight over their places productively and the team will find its balance because thats all this is balance and belief!

One last point for Mr Slot, when it’s pissing down with rain will you please put a hat on its annoying more than Konate is.

As i said mark me words – Liverpool FC are going to be fine, we are just walking through a storm, and you all know we don’t do that alone. Philster LFC

Most ‘baffling’ Liverpool problem…

After the performance at the weekend, it took a few days to marshal my thoughts about the woes surrounding Liverpool.

But at this point, the one thing that baffles me above all else is how we have completely forgotten how to defend and/or press and it’s looking increasingly likely that Slot is not sure how to fix this.

His insistence on starting certain players, even when they have been poor and almost detrimental to our play is frustrating. How demotivating it must be for those on the bench to see such dismal performance and the gaffer continuing to pick them regardless.

I don’t want Slot out. I still hope he can turn it around, but he needs to take some tough decisions or the mounting pressure with such heavy losses might just sound his death knell. Abhinav, Mumbai (YNWA)

This week we saw an impressive team display by a team from Merseyside where they showed a clear collective desire to fight for the good of the team, working tirelessly in that regard whilst having a clear incisive plan about how to attack the opposition – it’s just a shame to me that the team in question wore blue ( .. a genuine congratulations to the toffees for a performance that they can be rightly proud of against Man Utd).

Which leads me to the crux of this mail – where is the collective fight to overcome adversity within this Liverpool team that we are watching this season?

I have always felt across my many decades of supporting Liverpool that the collective spirit/battling qualities are part of our DNA and therefore a given. Recent viewings appear to be bringing this into question.

That is not to say that if we solve that particular aspect that everything else will just fall into place – it feels to me that there are many layers to our current malaise (layers may be the wrong term here … perhaps a tangled ball of wool is more apt).

Let me briefly comment on one or two (but not all !) of those key aspects as I see it:

From a squad balance perspective there appears to have been a questionable prioritisation of transfer funds across the summer that has led to a situation where we are too thin in defensive areas. I can’t complain about the purchase of Wirtz as he looks to be an incredibly gifted footballer, but one who is struggling to adapt to the pace and physicality of the premier league as things stand (still feel he’ll likely come good though). What would also help is him having a clearer role in the team in terms of where he plays – I am not saying we have to build the team around him, but it does feel like the opposite has happened with Slot’s decisions to shunt him around to different positions.

You won’t get many Liverpool fans complaining about Ekitike, but the manner in which the Isak saga played out after his signing just feels that we got suckered into a ‘whose got the biggest d*ck’ contest with Newcastle and ended up spending top dollar for an ingredient that we may not have explicitly needed – as others have pointed out, there appears to have been no winners as things stand from that soap opera of a signing.

So that’s £125m that could perhaps have been repointed to other key areas, namely defensive spine, and I include the No6 position in that.

We have a scenario at the moment where our CB’s are not performing individually / collectively to the standards previously set, yet there appears to be no consequence to them for that – they effectively know that they are going to be starting the next game. Quite what Gomez has to do to get a start in the prem is beyond me – Slot says he is not match fit / sharp, yet fails to enlighten us as to how he can solve that whilst giving him no game time.

I very much hope that Marc Guehi ends up being a Liverpool player, the sooner the better.

Liverpool’s midfield have been off it this year – lacking aggression and togetherness – and providing a weakened shield to a more troubled defence (= goals against).

I have said it in previous mails that I would like Liverpool to get a decent No6 to improve our options and add a bit of needed steel (Ederson from Atalanta would be an ideal).

… but the summer money was spent elsewhere.

Lastly, thoughts about how the team is being led currently.

I’ve previously said that Slot has tried to integrate too many different new ingredients into the team stew whilst expecting the overall outcome to taste the same – previous experience both inside and outside the club should have told him that was perhaps a little naïve.

He appears to be quite stubborn in some of his continued selections of certain new players who appear to be struggling form wise (eg. Kerkez), when I feel an alternative blanket approach should have been adopted, namely that each new player should have come to the club on the broad understanding that they had to earn their place in the team. Robertson should have played ahead of Kerkez until form dictated otherwise. Bradley (when fit !) should start at RB.

The one new player who answered that form call in spades is Ekitike, and he finds himself marginalised in favour of a more expensive and currently less effective alternative (sigh).

MORE LIVERPOOL CRISIS COVERAGE ON F365… 👉 Liverpool: Romano reveals Reds ‘quite clear’ decision on sacking Slot after ‘very unusual’ development 👉 Liverpool have ‘every reason’ to sack Arne Slot as Dutch media unload on ‘desperate’ boss 👉 

Do I want Slot out ?

No, not at this stage, but what he has to start showing us is that he has the ability to unpick the ball of tangled wool.

As another mailboxer recently penned, the definition of stupid is to do the same thing over and over again and to expect different results.

He has to show the backbone to drop out of form players – Salah should be watching Chiesa run around on the pitch rather than the other way round (although Salah isn’t doing a great deal of running at the mo !). Drop Konate for Gomez in the short term.

To make an omelette, first you have to break some eggs.

Where is the youth pathway currently ? (Quansah and Elliott have been jettisoned .. Rio not getting hardly any minutes) – without the flow of talent up the line from the youth setup, future transfer windows become far more expensive.

If he can’t solve this, then it feels to me that Liverpool’s next full-time manager will be a Spanish bloke whose surname starts with a vowel.

If the club hierarchy cherish Alonso as they appeared to in the run up to Klopp departing, they may have the patience to wait to see how the current arrangement at Real Madrid plays out and see if there is a possibility at the end of the season (nothing immediate).

Iraola really interests me and clearly has something about him – there is plausible potential for that to happen mid-season, unlike Alonso, so if Liverpool decide to let Slot go mid-season it will be very telling if they seek a temporary manager until the end of the season (which will indicate favouring Alonso) or whether they go all out to get a permanent replacement in.

(…. so it will be Emery then !) Sparky, LFC

I want to reply to this comment from Micky P, ‘I don’t think the Jota situation has ever been seen anywhere in elite sport – a player in his prime dying suddenly.’ I would refer him to the 2020 season when Kobe Bryant died. While not all of the players and staff at the Lakers had played with Kobe and he wasn’t in his prime I’m sure the shadow of his loss stretched over the season. How did they respond? They won the championship. IF Liverpool were flying right now I am sure that would be the narrative. The ‘this means more’ drum would be beaten, the team would be speaking about it in the press. Instead it appears poor squad building as much as anything has disrupted their season. I’m not discounting the impact of grief. I am sure it plays a part in the situation but to write of the season seems a bit much for the ‘mentality monsters’ of LFC. HanKolo, Vietnam

Mikey P, Cardiff brings up good points about the impact of Diogo Jota’s death on the Liverpool team, and while he felt there weren’t any other case histories in elite sport where the untimely death of a beloved teammate has had a profound effect on performance of the team, I can share two from American major league baseball history.

So the Pittsburgh Pirates were a dominate team in the early 70s. They won their NL division three years consecutively with records of 89-73 (1970), 97-65 (1971) and 96-59 (1972), and won the 1971 World Series (I know…it’s called what it’s called).

Then on Dec 31, 1972, Roberto Clemente, a true talisman for the Pirates who had been at the club for 18 years, died in a plane crash while on mercy mission to deliver aid and food to Nicaragua after a massive earthquake. He chartered the airplane himself and packed it with emergency supplies. I’ll let the good people at Wikipedia fill you in:

“Clemente visited Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, in late 1972, while managing the Puerto Rico national baseball team at the 1972 Amateur World Series. When Managua was affected by a massive earthquake three weeks later, on December 23, 1972, Clemente immediately set to work arranging emergency relief flights. He soon learned, however, that the aid packages on the first three flights had been diverted by corrupt officials of the Somoza government, never reaching victims of the quake. He decided to accompany the fourth relief flight, hoping that his presence would ensure that the aid would be delivered to the survivors.

The airplane which he chartered for the New Year’s Eve flight, a Douglas DC-7 cargo plane, had a history of mechanical problems and it also had an insufficient number of flight personnel (the flight was missing a flight engineer and a copilot), and it was also overloaded by 4,200 pounds (1,900 kg). It crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Isla Verde, Puerto Rico immediately after takeoff on December 31, 1972, due to engine failure.

It would be an understatement to say Clemente was baseball GOAT conversation material from an on-field performance perspective and a saint of a humanitarian.

What happened to the Pirates? Well the club and his adopted city of Pittsburgh were devastated. Many of Clemente’s teammates traveled to Puerto Rico to be with his family and his buddy Manny Sanguillén even personally went to the crash site and literally dove in the water to participate in recovery efforts.

And the aftermath: the Pirates tanked in 1973, going 80-82 and finishing 3rd in the NL East after winning the division 3 years in a row. In 1974 they returned to winning ways topping their division in 1974, 1975 and 1976, and capped off a productive decade by winning the World Series in 1979.

There is another baseball player, the New York Yankee’s Thurmon Munson, who also died in an airplane crash in August of 1979 – won’t share the whole story – but the Yankees had won their AL division and consecutive World Series in 1977 & 1978, but finished 1979 in 4th place in their division, way out of contention.

MLB baseball teams play 162 game seasons, so that’s a lot of datapoints to establish trends of causative and correlative relationships.

It’s no revelation that personal grief impacts humans in profound ways, but the sudden loss of a beloved teammate and “brother in arms” has happened before in elite sport and while it’s difficult to calculate/quantify the effect from a human perspective, you can see it on the pitch/baseball diamond, and it’s real.

There are fans in Pittsburgh and New York still alive and old enough to remember the trauma of losing Clemente and Munson…and they probably would assume YNWA is a rap band, but YNWA is felt in spirit by the many who love their sports teams and have been through a grieving process similar to yours. Hang in there Liverpool. Russell. Birmingham, Alabama

Arteta’s Pulis-ball

It does amuse me how Arsenal fans bitched and moaned about Pulis ball under Wenger and now they play the exact same tactics with just far better players and it’s the greatest thing ever. Luke

‘Misfiring’ players letting Slot and Amorim down?

In the past week, Manchester United lost while recording 23 shots on target to their opponents 2 and having over 70% possession. Liverpool lost having 24 shots to their opponents 9 and having 56% possession. Several mailboxers have commented how in both cases, these teams were outplayed, or even dominated. I get that the name of the game is to score goals, but a team with over 70% possession and a 21 shot edge on their opponents is not being outplayed, let alone dominated. They are missing their shots. (a similar thing happened to Man city as well).

It’s not Amorin’s or Slot’s fault that these players misfired so often. A coach with the quality at his disposal of these two teams should expect that they will win, nearly always, if the team dominates the stats that much.

These types of results if they are infrequent are just par for the course. It happens to all teams. If they are consistent, surely the players deserve a huge part of the blame? I mean, what are we proposing as a means to blame the coach. Is it that players on these teams never get practice shooting? Of course they do. Are Slot and Amorin running onto the field to play the role of extra defenders? Tripping their own players as they run by? Nathan, Newark

Just wanted to point out that I recall the British media absolutely putting David Beckham in the pillory each week for years, mostly not even for football reasons. I am sure a quick internet search will show miles of columns that were written about him back then. While I do think there is certainly a section of the press that is old white guys with an issue with black players, their issues being part of the greater ongoing national and international debates as a whole in relation to immigration etc. (looking at you talksport). I would slightly disagree with Ian Wright that it is solely racially motivated when black players are criticised. I think the UK press has, on the whole, an issue with people, black/white/ whatever, that they perceive as above their station, too big for their boots, especially where they think that station feels like it has not been fully earned (same papers will have no problem with the royals mind). It is something inherent in the British press’s mindset to tear those people down in my opinion and it is beyond racially motivated.