Alonso is the ‘disgraceful’ vibes candidate Liverpool cannot ignore as Slot flaps and flounders | OneFootball

One of the more inevitable aspects of Liverpool’s uncertain managerial future was obviously encapsulated within Arne Slot’s defence of his decision not to play Calvin Ramsay more often.

“In general if you don’t win a game,” he said back in February, “the players who aren’t playing become the best players in the squad. That’s the same everywhere in the world.”

It is a universal point that translates to the dugout too. In general if you don’t win a game, the managers who aren’t managing become the best managers for the squad. Especially so if their links to a club struggling to find its identity are already inextricable and alluring.

The shadow of Xabi Alonso only looms larger with each insipid Liverpool performance and every equally awkward, unconvincing Slot media answer. The Spaniard is becoming an itch the Reds might ultimately just have to scratch.

It would be, as former team-mate Stephen Warnock said before the defeat to Wolves, “more of a nostalgia thing where people want that romance”. There are legitimate points to be made over Alonso’s compatibility with the players he would inherit, and his suitability to a league whose teams he has faced five teams as a coach, winning just once – and “disgracefully” so at that.

But there is plenty to be said for a shot of sentimentality, not least in these moments and for a club in a funk as deeply embedded as Liverpool’s.

Slot just fundamentally does not feel or sound like a Liverpool manager anymore. He hasn’t for weeks, if not months, still referencing and ruminating over defeats to Paris Saint-Germain and Nottingham Forest last season, taking inadvertent potshots at Jurgen Klopp and bemoaning the general entertainment value of a Premier League he still technically reigns over as the champion coach.

Those comments provided an uncomfortable backing track to a Wolves defeat Slot’s own captain decried as “slow” and “predictable”. The first 70 minutes were “not a joy to watch” for anyone and the final 20 were a damning indictment on a team whose aimless, hesitant performances have essentially reduced any result to the outcome of a suitably unfathomable three-sided coin flip.

In 2026, Liverpool have won four, drawn four and lost three times in the Premier League. Six of those 11 matches have featured game-changing stoppage-time goals. Those are numbers associated with the sort of chaotic, fine-margin baiting unbefitting of a team of this stature.

Not including their six draws, Liverpool have had 15 of 29 games settled by a single goal either way: eight wins and seven defeats. Only Fulham (nine wins and seven defeats) have a higher proportion of one-goal swings, and those fine margins are baked into Marco Silva’s mid-table philosophy.

Alonso, whose in-built advantages were arguably entirely offset by the dressing-room nonsense he had to contend with, has won more league games by two goals or more (eight) than Slot (six), and more than twice as many by three or more (five to two), despite being sacked almost two months ago.

He might be a better Liverpool fit. He could even be worse, or land anywhere in the middle ground. But Alonso would really just be different and there is an overwhelming sense that the Reds need that right now: a new voice not only for the players but the fans to embrace.

Slot was the archetypal numbers appointment, a sensible choice based on process and tactical continuity. Alonso is a phenomenal coach in his own right, while providing the “nostalgia” and “romance” Liverpool should indulge in to rediscover themselves. Sometimes you just have to let the vibes lead you.