Report by
Dave Usher
It’s almost as though the summer never even happened. Virtually the same team as last year - certainly the same strengths and weaknesses - and an unparalleled ability to both thrill and infuriate, often within minutes of each other. Klopp’s Reds; same old same old for better or worse.
But for the presence of Mo Salah you’d never have been able to tell this was a new season. We’re still a nervous wreck on set-pieces, we still look vulnerable to counter attacks, Sadio Mané is still electrifying and we’ll no doubt concede 45 goals while scoring somewhere close to double that this season. Where that takes us depends largely on what our rivals do.
While the pre-season form was very good, generally it’s been a bad summer with one setback after another. Salah aside, we haven’t signed the players Klopp wanted yet and the injuries have started to rack up before we even reached the season opener. Four players ruled out of this one, including Daniel 'best shape of his life yet couldn't even make it to the opening day' Sturridge. The idea we’ll be able to keep this team healthy while playing twice a week is pie in the sky. Still, we should have had more than enough to win this one.
I’ve got so many problems with what happened in this game I don’t know where to start, but sadly most of them can be directly attributed to Klopp in one way or another. The starting line up was fine, other than not having James Milner in it. Not sure what the thinking is there, but if he has fallen behind Alberto Moreno in the pecking order due to one pre-season game against Bayern then there’s something wrong there. For Moreno to even still be here is hard to comprehend but, that being said, he had a decent enough game.
Even when everyone else (other than Mané) was looking crap in the first half, Moreno was doing alright and he nearly scored a cracker in the second half. Going forward he was good, while defensively he wasn't exactly Paolo Maldini, but he wasn't terrible, and that's about as good as most of us can hope for. It's a low bar we set for Moreno, but all things considered I'd say he jumped over it with a bit to spare.
The first half was just appalling for the most part. After such a good pre-season I thought we’d come flying out of the traps but it was the opposite. Sloppy, disjointed, lacking intensity…. Watford caught us on an early counter and almost took the lead only for Lovren to just about get something on the shot to deflect it behind. No matter, a corner is often as good as a penalty against us, and so it proved again.
In terms of blame I don't know who to point the finger at, as the whole set up for that corner looked shambolic. Can we really blame Firmino for losing out in an aerial duel to a fucking tank? Surely the blame has to lie with the organisation and planning. It just didn’t look right, and not just because they scored either.
Firmino should not be dealing with a behemoth like Okaka but this is the risk you run when defending set-pieces the way we do. If the opposition have enough big lads - and Watford do - they can create mismatches. I don't know what the answer is, but then I'm not paid £6m a year to find it.
It wasn’t just the Firmino / Okaka thing though. Kaboul had shaken Matip and should have buried it before it even reached Okaka, while Amrabat was stood on his own right in front of Mignolet. And when you watch it again, Holobas comes running in on the back post and no-one stayed with him either. Too much ball watching, as usual.
Amrabat was just stood in the middle of goal with no-one around him, getting in the keeper's way. He was there before the kick was even taken, impeding the keeper, and he was there when Okaka headed it. He wasn't doing anything illegal, but he was in the way and made it difficult for the Mig to free himself and make a save.
Mignolet almost kept Okaka’s header out and perhaps if he hadn’t had to worry about Amrabat being in his way he would have done. Why was nobody there to keep him off Mignolet? You can't just allow the opposition to do that. The same thing happened on the third goal, but more on that later.
Bottom line is we’re like a boxer fighting with one hand tied behind his back. If you can’t defend set-pieces in England then you’re not going to win anything because so many teams are adept from them. Even allowing for it being the first game and players being a bit rusty, it’s massively disheartening to see that we’re still plagued by the same major issue we’ve had for years. Klopp hasn’t fixed it, there’s no escaping that fact.
That's worrying because, I mean, how hard can it be? Everyone concedes goals from set-pieces, but not many are as bad at it as we are.
It’s easier to accept that ineptitude at the back when it’s clicking at the other end, but it wasn’t working up front either in the first half. We looked terrible in possession and were not threatening at all until out of absolutely nowhere, Mané scored truly wonderful goal.
It was a nice move also involving Moreno and Can, and it ended with a stunning finish. Emphatic stuff; just bent it into the far corner with complete assurance, like he knew there was no way he could possibly miss. Can't wait until next summer when he follows the well worn path of Mascherano, Torres, Suarez, Sterling and Coutinho and realises he's too good for us.
That goal should have been the platform for us to take control of the game, but within two minutes we’d given away another shitty goal. Okaka was offside throughout the entire build up and the only moment he wasn’t actually offside was the split second the cross came into the box. That’s frustrating and somewhat unlucky, but it was also largely set inflicted.
Can gave away a cheap throw in, Moreno got too tight and dived in, Henderson didn’t follow his man, Wijnaldum didn't follow his either and Alexander-Arnold possibly could also have done better too, although it was more unlucky on his part than anything else, as his clearance hit Lovren and presented Doucoure with a tap in.
This team is just utterly infuriating and that first half was the stuff of nightmares. The second half was a different story. The football was much better and the front three came alive. It was no longer just Mané now, as Firmino and Salah both became more involved too, with the Egyptian overcoming a sluggish start to run Watford ragged.
He’d snatched at a couple of chances in the first half and looked to be a little too eager to impress, but once he settled down he was brilliant. Having shown his road runner like speed to win a penalty, suddenly he loosened up and was a massive threat. Firmino converted the penalty with great assurance and then he too came into the game.
The third goal came from him peeling out to the left wing and then making a bending run off the back of Kaboul. Lovren found him with a fine ball over the top, Firmino killed it with a great touch and then attempted a chip that would probably have dropped just wide had the Road Runner not come flying in past the last defender to knock it over the line.
That really ought to have been the game, as for the next 10 or 15 minutes Watford were reeling and we were running all over them. The fourth goal that would have made it safe didn’t come, but it felt like it was only a matter of time as we were getting opportunities to break on them and only a poor final ball was stopping us tearing them apart again.
Still, I wasn’t worried at all at this stage as I was sure the fourth goal would arrive in due course. Then Klopp intervened with some ill advised changes. Personally I wouldn’t have changed anything, we were in total command of the game at that point so why risk it? That said, bringing on Milner for Wijnaldum was something I could have got on board with, as the Dutchman was having one of his trademark away from home performances and also seemed to be carrying a bit of a knock.
What I didn’t want to see was Divock fucking Origi. *sighs* Honestly, my heart sinks when he comes on in this type of situation, with us in front and looking to hit on the break. He’s about as useful as a fucking betamax video and more often than not he makes the team worse any time he steps foot on the field.
Sure enough, I think he touched the ball once in the 20 minutes or so he was on. Some will put that down to a lack of service, but that’s missing the point. Not scoring goals can be put down to a lack of service, but not touching the fucking ball? As usual, he was just loafing around, taking up poor positions, not picking up any clearances that were made out of defence, not winning any aerial duels and generally just doing fuck all.
Putting him on killed us as an attacking threat (as it so often does), but just to make sure, Klopp also took off Salah and put Milner on, moving Wijnaldum into the front three. Great job Jurgen, well done. *sarcastic applause*
I’ve never been one for defensive substitutions anyway, I’ve always been of the "he who dares wins” mindset, but that’s not even the point here. You can break this down very simply. We are a team that is great in attack and poor in defence. So, ideally you want to be attacking and not defending. Those substitutions ensured we would be doing the opposite. Another way of putting it is that he took away our biggest strength in order to (arguably) marginally bolster our biggest weakness.
Then came the final fuck up. Changing the back four when there was absolutely no need to do it. Gomez came on completely cold into a situation where we were on the back foot and having to defend. Within seconds he’d given away a needless free-kick that increased the pressure Watford were trying to build. He also failed to get enough on a header that fell to Holobas, who forced Mignolet to rather awkwardly push the ball away for a corner from which… well I think we all saw what was coming next didn’t we?
That third goal was just so depressing and so inevitable. I said to some mates in a whatsapp group with five minutes to go we’d give up a stoppage time equaliser and I could see it coming a mile off, not because I’ve got any kind of mystic powers, but because I’ve seen this movie before. Hell, I’ve seen this movie more times than I’ve seen Star Wars, and that’s a lot.
Firstly, Wijnaldum completely shit out of the header. He half arsed it because there were boots flying. That caused the initial problem, but after that everyone was stood around like statues, as they so often are when we concede from set plays.
Still, it shouldn’t have counted because the lad who eventually put the ball over the line was offside and he was impeding Mignolet. The linesman got that totally wrong and from that point of view we were a little unfortunate, but it’s hard to bemoan bad luck when in this same fixture last season they hit the bar with the last kick of the game. Had Prodl’s shot that night been an inch or two lower we wouldn’t have made the top four.
We probably didn’t deserve the three points in truth, but having twice come from behind to eventually lead well into stoppage time, this is definitely two points dropped. Worse than the points we've lost though is the manner of how it all went down.
How are we supposed to feel optimistic about the new season when all the same failings are clearly still there and haven’t been addressed? Salah is ace, I think we’re going to love him, but he alone isn’t going to be enough for us to even repeat what we did last year, let alone improve on it.
And so far I haven’t even mentioned the antics of that little Brazilian snake, who has done nothing to improve the mood around the club with his shithouse antics over the past 24 hours.
Signing Virgil Van Dyke would change the mood as, allied to the addition of Salah and presumably holding onto number ten, it would represent a good (but not great) transfer window, but Van Dyke would only be able to do so much. He’d help improve the defence, but there is not one defender to ever play the game that would be able to fix this mess on his own.
We are what we are, it’s almost certainly not going to change, and that means we’ll have at least another four or five days like this between now and May, possibly even more. When we’re good we’ll be incredible, when we’re bad we’ll be a laughing stock, and there will be times when we’re both within the same ninety minutes.
Star man is a toss up between Mané for the first half and Salah for the second. I’ll go with Salah as it was his first game. Emre Can was decent too, the touch to play in Mané for the goal was class but he went one better in the second half with that incredible piece of control on the run to collect a high ball in stride.
Ultimately though, too many didn't perform to the level expected or required. A big improvement is needed for Tuesday in Germany, otherwise an entire season's hard work could be undone just like that.
Team: Mignolet; Alexander-Arnold (Gomez), Matip, Lovren, Moreno; Henderson, Can, Wijnaldum; Salah (Milner), Firmino (Origi), Mané:
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