Team Liverpool is facing some tough time and it is evident through their performance and Jurgen Klopp is certainly not a happy man. It must be clear to most Reds fans by now that Jurgen Klopp isn’t the master of the tactical game plan. In his early days, Jurgen told us that he wasn’t going to put his players under pressure to get a result, just to perform. I remember how good that made me feel – a team playing without pressure – confident, talented, and outrageously exciting. That did mean succumbing to the “randomness” of football (ie anything could happen), but no matter, with Jurgen building the confidence in the team, those wins would just take care of themselves. Randomness means the lesser team can win – as Jurgen said, it means anyone can beat anyone. Even if you’re not the best team on the pitch, you can still win – all you need is motivation. Fantastic! That’s all we need to see us climbing back up the league, beating those teams everyone thought were better than us. And to be fair, that’s what we’ve done under Klopp, up until the defeat at Manchester City, and even then, we looked capable of winning right up to Mane’s sending-off.
Unfortunately, there is always another side to this type of theory – you can fail to beat the teams that you are better than. And to be fair, that’s also what we’ve done – well almost. Just look at the talent in the forward players now wearing the red shirt, capable of ripping the best defences to shreds, but too often failing to register a win. You only need to look as far back as August to find proof of randomness. After making Bayern Munich look ordinary on their own ground, and following stunning wins against Arsenal and Hoffenheim, there then came Seville, Burnley and Leicester when we outplayed the opposition so comprehensively, but only managed two draws and a defeat. Then, just when you thought that frustration couldn’t get any worse, the draw against Spartak Moscow.
They were a team totally lacking in confidence following a poor start to their domestic campaign and with no real intent on doing better than drawing this game. With our top attacking talent finally available to play together, this result should have been a formality. As you would expect, we took them apart in almost every area of the pitch, and the quality of some of our approach play deserved to earn a comfortable win. But, time after time, and after some superb build-ups, a poor decision, a weak cross, or a criminal miss in front of goal, we failed to capitalise. Not just that, we managed to concede a goal to a team that’s barely had a kick in our half of the pitch.
So, is there a flaw in our approach to winning games, or are we just unlucky? Jurgen’s approach leaves results in the hands of fate, so should we adopt a more win-at-all-costs tactic? There’s players out there that could do that for us – remember that theatrical dive that resulted in Joel Matip’s booking and Leicester getting back into the game last week? We will crack this problem with results, and we’ll do it playing great football – it’ll just take a bit longer.
