[Mikus LFC]

Mak, Ed was talking about moving Woodward back into his old job and that’s what I was responding to – that that would be demoting him which is never ideal. As I say, I suspect he’ll leave the club anyway.

As for Klopp, yes it’s a good point that he’s had significant help with signings, but as I say I don’t think Utd ever bought into Mourinho’s philosophy and both the recruitment team and manager have to some extent sing from the same hymn sheet. Instead they tried to hold onto their attacking identity by throwing big bucks at “exciting” players like Pogba and Sanchez and instructed Mourinho to buy into that rather than the other way around.

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[Mikus LFC]

Problem is Ed, you would effectively have to demote Woodward and that’s never ideal in a business environment and going back into your old job is never quite the same as it was. I suspect he’ll leave completely when it comes to it.

As for the future direction of the club, let’s be honest, whilst money will always play a key role, it’s still ultimately a top manager that gets a club moving because only he can give them that identity and make them feel special so the players can buy into the managers philosophy. Mourinho gets a lot of criticism but he arguably played a key role in setting up Chelsea to the stature they now have – take him out of Chelsea’s history and for all of Roman’s money, I just don’t think they’d be the same club as they are now and the players he bought in set the legacy of the club and made it easier for future managers. Much as Guardiola has done for City. Yet Ferguson didn’t leave Man Utd in a particularly good shape did he? But to be fair he rebuilt several generations of successful teams and 27 years is obviously incredible service so you can’t really have a go at him for the way Utd were left at the end of his reign. So Man Utd needed a new charismatic manager and identity to replace him when he left so that a new chapter could be set in motion. The best they’ve had since is Mourinho yet they didn’t seem to trust him because they were hellbent on keeping their historic identity instead of Mourinho’s identity. Well, that’s not got them far has it?

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[Mikus LFC]

Not to mention Adrian. Also played very well today.

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[Mikus LFC]

Liverpool still struggling to assert themselves in big away games. Where is the pressing? Where is the desire we see at home? Does Klopp just overcompensate in being a bit more cautious?

Also Salah has been awful today.

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[Mikus LFC]

Just looking somewhat leggy Mak. Opting for the lazy easy option of just wafting the ball up top.

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[Mikus LFC]

And there it is.

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[Mikus LFC]

Klopp not happy. So poor in possession.

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[Mikus LFC]

Don’t underestimate the negative effect that disallowed goal had on Chelsea which probably contributed to them conceding again.

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[Mikus LFC]

Ed, I half think the board didn’t better support Solksjaer a few months ago because they didn’t fully trust him so they just made more essential or younger, longer term signings and they were prepared to take a hit in the short term until they do find a manager they can really back.

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[Mikus LFC]

Must seem like an eternity ago for Solskjaer since that unbeaten run last season.

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[Mikus LFC]

Liverpool have to be bold and ruthless today. In years gone by drawing away at the top 6 clubs wasn’t a bad result. But the bar has been raised so much now that you just can’t afford to draw these games.

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[Mikus LFC]

Nine, if you are caught driving 61 mph in a 60 mph zone, the police won’t stop you if they’re doing checks there because there’s a degree of error in people speedometers and the real world isn’t quite perfect. You have to build in an error margin. Real life isn’t perfect, we should stop trying to enforce it in such a way – particularly on a football pitch where people’s arms and legs positions can rapidly change from one moment to the next. The offside law was ultimately brought in to stop goal hanging, it was later used by defenders to catch attackers offside as a secondary consequence. Now it’s being used in a tertiary way in a way that doesn’t account for reality.

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[Mikus LFC]

It’s somewhat ironic that the officials are using the term “clear and obvious” in a vague way in order to hide behind it and relieve them of having to make an actual decision/overruling. I would rather take longer delays whilst the on pitch referee checks the pitch side monitor than all this. This would prevent the fear of having to keep overruling the referee from the VAR truck which would weaken the referee’s integrity. As for the Spurs offside decision today, it was farcical, there’s no other word to describe it.

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[Mikus LFC]

Suffice to say City have got that Norwich game out their system.

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[Mikus LFC]

Regarding Zidane & Real Madrid. It’s funny – Lucky mentioned the point about the Watford boss being sacked just to paper over the faults with the team so that it looked like the board were “taking action”. And the same looks true for Madrid. They only sacked their last manager in March, then somewhat desperately thought that the aura of Zidane would magically lift things, and now it seems they’re back to square one again. Clubs really are just obsessed with the short term aren’t they? If these clubs were businesses in any other area of life, they’d be outrage over the sums of money being thrown around for failure. Money that in large part comes from the fans. Could you imagine the protests if they were bankers? But with football most just shrug their shoulders and laugh at it. Strange…

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[Mikus LFC]

Regarding Zidane and Real Madrid. It’s funny, Lucky mentioned the point about the Watford boss being sacked just to paper over the faults with the team so that it looked like the board were “taking action”. And the same looks true for Madrid. They only sacked their last manager in March then somewhat desperately thought that the aura of Zidane would magically lift things, and now it seems they’re back to square one again. Clubs really are just obsessed with the short term aren’t they? If these clubs were businesses in any other area of life, they’d be outrage over the sums of money being thrown around for failure. Money that in large part comes from the fans. Could you imagine the protests if they were bankers? But with football most just shrug their shoulders and laugh at it. Strange…

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[Mikus LFC]

Banjo, one wonders if Poch thinks he shouldn’t have signed such a long contract which would have freed him up more to move somewhere else – or it could well have put more pressure on Levy to cough up a bit more on transfers so he wouldn’t lose him if it was a shorter contract. That long contract has done neither side any favours it seems.

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[Mikus LFC]

Threeps, yes, we only finished one point behind City with a great points tally, but lest we forget there was an *8* point swing towards City between January and the end of the season between the clubs. Why? Because we weren’t ultimately *bold* enough in the big games and City were. (City’s period of significantly dropped points mainly coincided with injuries to big players over Christmas).

It’s the draws that cost us. You’re better off winning one and losing one than drawing two. It is exactly in this area that City won because they were bolder.

If we are to win the league with Klopp whilst Guardiola is here, we don’t necessarily have to change the staff in midfield, or our approach against the lesser sides, but we do *have* to be bolder in the bigger games.

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[Mikus LFC]

Threeps, I very much accept our plan A tends to work very well most of the time, and perhaps if we had not been competing with Guardiola’s City, one wouldn’t need to go through our team with a fine tooth comb. But we are, so we have to.

This is about making us as robust as possible. Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting we ought to have gone out and bought a luxury attacking midfielder, but I do think it’s not a lot to expect that at least a few of our hard working midfielders also have that goal scoring ability. Indeed we saw how crucial those Wijnaldum goals were vs Barcelona. But we just needed a bit more of that versatility and back up at times.

Now you might argue that had we instructed our midfield to be more aggressive, that might have cost us at the back. But interestingly I would argue this risk factor is exactly where we lost out to City last season. I think for a large part of last season Klopp was trying to find the balance between defence and attack, and we obviously operated in a less gung ho fashion than we had been. That for a large part was obviously a *good* thing. However, in the *big* games last season, particularly in the 6 pointer at the Etihad, we lost that attacking edge that saw us win there previously. So this is perhaps more of a big game problem where we’ve lost our edge. And look at our results in the bigger games last season – we lost every away game in the CL group stage, barely making it out the group. We gained just 1/6 points in the huge games vs City, and we dropped points against Everton & Man Utd, i.e. the biggest games in our calendar.

It might seem harsh, but we have to examine such things when the opposition is formidable. Whether Keita and Ox would have made a difference, well I think they would have, though thinking more about it, I think a lot of it was ultimately down to this balance of risk in the bigger games that Klopp was clearly grappling with last season. And just to link this back to the Wijnaldum point above – why did we deliver in that game? – because the “risk balance” was somewhat thrown out because we *had* to go for it. And what happened? We won and won big!

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[Mikus LFC]

Threeps, as I said on TT, I very much accept our plan A tends to work very well most of the time, and perhaps if we had not been competing with Guardiola’s City, one wouldn’t need to go through our team with a fine tooth comb. But we are, so we have to.

This is about making us as robust as possible. Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting we ought to have gone out and bought a luxury attacking midfielder, but I do think it’s not a lot to expect that at least a few of our hard working midfielders also have that goal scoring ability. Indeed we saw how crucial those Wijnaldum goals were vs Barcelona. But we just needed a bit more of that versatility and back up at times.

Now you might argue that had we instructed our midfield to be more aggressive, that might have cost us at the back. But interestingly I would argue this risk factor is exactly where we lost out to City last season. I think for a large part of last season Klopp was trying to find the balance between defence and attack, and we obviously operated in a less gung ho fashion than we had been. That for a large part was obviously a *good* thing. However, in the *big* games last season, particularly in the 6 pointer at the Etihad, we lost that attacking edge that saw us win there previously. So this is perhaps more of a big game problem where we’ve lost our edge. And look at our results in the bigger games last season – we lost every away game in the CL group stage, barely making it out the group. We gained just 1/6 points in the huge games vs City, and we dropped points against Everton & Man Utd, i.e. the biggest games in our calendar.

It might seem harsh, but we have to examine such things when the opposition is formidable. Whether Keita and Ox would have made a difference, well I think they would have, though thinking more about it, I think a lot of it was ultimately down to this balance of risk in the bigger games that Klopp was clearly grappling with last season. And just to link this back to the Wijnaldum point above – why did we deliver in that game? – because the “risk balance” was somewhat thrown out because we *had* to go for it. And what happened? We won and won big!

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