Report by
Dave Usher
There was so much wrong with this performance it’s difficult to even know where to start. With the notable exception of Joel Matip (and the keeper who had virtually nothing to do) it was just varying degrees of shite. Some, such as Emre Can, were only a little bit shite, while others, like Wijnaldum, Salah and Mane, stunk the place out.
Usually I’d have been half expecting something like this, because losing to the worst teams in the league has been a speciality of ours over the last decade. Doing it a week after beating the best team in the league just makes it all the more typical. It shouldn’t have been a shock but it was. We were on an 18 game unbeaten run and I thought we’d put this kind of performance behind us. Sadly not.
I think part of the problem was that the game seemed too easy in the opening stages and that threw some of the players off their game and bad habits crept in and they lost focus. Swansea just fucking turtled up on us and seemed too scared to even come out of their own half. That meant we had virtually all of the possession and it felt like only a matter of time before we made it count. We had a few half chances and it was all going fine, but then we just seemed to lose our sense of purpose after about 25 minutes and the game began to drift.
Swansea had one little spell of about five minutes where they were able to spend a bit of time in our half, and in that period they scored with the only chance they had. It’s easy to over analyse the goal and point fingers, but it was just one of those things. They got the bounce of the ball and we didn't.
Van Dijk was right to try and head the ball away, and the other players we had in the vicinity couldn’t exactly just move out of the way, but that caused big Virgil a problem getting a clean head on it. That was a little unfortunate, but more unfortunate was that his header hit one Swansea player and then fell perfectly at the feet of another, who was able to find the bottom corner.
Maybe there were things we could have done slightly differently but sometimes a goal is just a goal and it’s not really anybody’s fault. That’s how I feel about this one, and rather than focus on that we should be more concerned at how toothless we were at the other end.
Conceding like that was annoying, not least when the goalscorer sounds more like a fucking East End chimney sweep from the 1800s than a professional footballer, but there was so much time for us to get back into it so there was no need to be too concerned at that stage. Worryingly though, the players showed a total lack of composure in attacking situations in the second half.
Panic seemed to set in a bit as they began shooting from outside the box, and they seemed to get edgy and hesitant in possession too, with the exception of Firmino, who was nowhere near his best but was at least brave enough to try and take some risks and play his normal game.
Too many of the others were overthinking it and not playing the early pass when it was on. There was far too much sideways and backwards passing and a general lack of ideas throughout the team. The front three were way below par but all of them had chances to score that they failed to take. If one of those had gone in we’d probably have ran out comfortable winners, but it was just one of those wretched nights you sometimes get.
Salah volleyed over after a lovely ball from Van Dijk had picked him out. Mané volleyed wide on the stretch and we had a few other openings in the first half too but didn’t test the goalkeeper anywhere near enough. The second half was more of the same to my untrained eye. Klopp felt the second half was better than the first but I didn’t see too much difference to be honest. He’s looking for different, specific tactical things though whereas I’m judging it on end product and overall performance.
Wijnaldum said the same thing. "We didn't do what we were supposed to in the first half". It can't be just me that thinks the second half was even worse, because that was the time when we needed to show more urgency, but instead it was either too ponderous and predictable, or too panicky and rushed.
People will naturally ask the question ‘how can the same players who performed so well to beat Man City go and lose to the league’s bottom team?’. It’s simple really. One team let us do what we’re good at, the other stopped us doing that and challenged us to come up with a different solution, which we failed to do.
The players didn’t do themselves any justice and Klopp’s comments afterwards suggested he was unhappy that they didn’t play to the instructions he gave them. He kept talking about them not holding their positions in their attacking movements and not using the half spaces and various other stuff that is basically a coach’s way of saying ‘that was shite’.
Klopp also takes his share of the blame for me though, not least because of his poor in game substitutions. It’s the one, perhaps only, major flaw he has. When the game isn’t going our way he very rarely does anything to successfully turn the tide. Plan A not working? Ok, let’s try Plan A again. And again. And again. Still not working? Let’s try Plan A again then.
He took far too long to bring on Lallana (who actually made a significant difference when he did get on) and for the life of me I cannot understand how Joe Gomez stayed on for 90 minutes when he was offering nothing at all in the final third.
That’s not really a knock on Gomez, it’s more a gripe about Klopp’s use of him. We know that Joe isn’t the most natural going forward and most of the time that’s fine. When everyone else is on song he doesn’t need to be. In games like this though, it’s like playing with ten men. Nine when Wijnaldum is on the field too.
I probably wouldn’t have even started Gomez, but that’s beside the point. On a similar note I thought leaving Lallana out was odd too, considering we knew exactly how Swansea were going to approach the game and that ‘Invisible Gini’ was going to do fuck all because it’s an away game against shite opposition, and we know that’s like Kryptonite to him.
Despite those misgivings I had with the starting eleven, Klopp keeping faith with ten of the team that beat City (Van Dijk for the unwell Lovren being the only change) was completely understandable and the team he put out should have been enough to fucking batter Swansea. At half time though it was clear how the game was going and it baffles me that Lallana was not introduced there and then.
Not only that, but we just kept doing the same fucking thing over and over and over. They packed the middle and left loads of space out wide. So what did we do? Tried to go through the middle of course, even though there was no space and we had no cutting edge to do it. It was like trying to jam a marshmallow into a slot machine.
Swansea’s manager compared our team to a Formula One car but made the point that if you put it in traffic it’s basically just another car. Spot on that, we thrive on space but had no room whatsoever to run into because they were so deep. That nullified the pace of Salah and Mané but it shouldn’t have nullified their threat altogether. They largely did that themselves, although they weren’t helped by the way those around them played or that their manager played right into Swansea’s hands.
We looked dangerous on the two or three times we got Robertson in behind and he was able to drill the ball across the face of the goal, and that’s the best way to break down teams like this. Man City do this shit continually when they come up against this kind of opposition. Slinging in high crosses into a packed penalty isn’t going to work unless you’ve got some big bastards attacking it, but getting to the byline and drilling it across the six yard box will get you results if you do it often enough.
Robertson did it, but nowhere near as often as he should have done. He was disappointing for me, he played far too safe at times and didn’t drive into the space that was there. Other times he was forced to go back to Van Dijk because he had no-one close enough to him as Mané had gone so far inside. Maybe that’s partly what Klopp was referring to about people not holding their positions long enough. Whatever the reason, Robbo didn’t give us enough but he wasn’t alone in that.
Klopp can’t legislate for Robertson’s lack of production, but having Gomez out there was utterly pointless and that is definitely on the manager. Gomez had virtually no defending to do so you would have thought that his primary job was to attack, certainly in the second half anyway. Klopp mentioned that Mo was supposed to play on the wing to leave space in the inside right channel for Ox, so that being the case, it wasn’t down to Gomez to provide width at that point.
In the second half though? That’s where all the space was and so we should have exploited that. What we were doing wasn’t working so do something different. We needed someone capable of getting in behind and whipping the ball across the six yard box. That’s not Gomez. Maybe on a very good day he can give us what we need, but more often than not in those situations he’s not going to be effective enough.
Yet we’ve got Trent sitting there on the bench, and bombing down the line and whipping in crosses is what he’s good at. Hell, Milner was there too, he could have given us exactly what we needed out there. Another option (and the change I’d have made with first) would have been to play Ox there and get Lallana on in the middle. Swansea didn’t try to attack at all in the second half so there’s no reason Ox couldn’t have played as an attacking right back.
Admittedly this is partly hindsight talking, but it’s also because I’ve seen this movie before and know how it usually ends. I wanted Lallana on at half time and I’d have brought Gomez off with at least half an hour to go as to me they seemed to be obvious decisions. And when Swansea just set up camp between the width of their 18 yard box and challenged us to put crosses in, why not through Van Dijk up front for the last ten minutes and given them something different to deal with? We shouldn’t be too proud to do that.
All of that said, we were incredibly unlucky to lose the game and there’s certainly no need for any over reaction. We were on an 18 game unbeaten run prior to this so we’re in good shape as long as we don’t allow this to be the start of a slump like we had this time last year. It’s irritating as fuck to lose such a record to the worst team in the league though. It shouldn’t happen, but as badly as we played we can still consider ourselves unfortunate to have lost.
The performance was terrible, there's no getting away from that, but when the opposition score from the one chance they have it’s tough to take, especially when we missed several good chances of our own. Nothing went our way and the night was summed up when the in the very last seconds Firmino hits the post with a header and Lallana’s follow up was deflected over after a miraculous block by Mawson. Sometimes it’s just not your night, but that doesn’t excuse just how fucking shite we were.
We’ve always got a performance like this in us, and it always seems to be against the worst teams. Granted, we’d only lost twice before this and those defeats were against good sides, but how many shitty draws have we had against these park the bus deadbeats? It’s a problem we still haven’t solved. The worst thing is the cunts usually only need one chance to score against us.
Statistically our goalkeepers are dreadful but I just can’t put any stock in that ‘goals to saves’ ratio thing. Karius had absolutely no chance of keeping out Swansea’s goal. He then had a routine stop in the second half, which (unless there’s one I’ve forgotten about) gives him a 50% save ratio on the night. Would he be a better keeper if Swansea had managed another three or four efforts that gave him easy saves? Statistically he would, but in reality it wouldn’t change a thing.
The opposition scored with their only real chance and it was un-saveable, so that’s not on Karius (as so often it wasn’t on Mignolet either). I don’t know what it is, we don’t give up many chances but most of the ones we do allow end up in the net. It’s so frustrating.
But we move on, this one is gone now and the important thing is how we react to it. The sole point of emphasis in training this week should be on how to deal with these type of opponents, especially because we’ve got West Brom next and you know they’ll do exactly the same thing, not least because it helped them to a 0-0 at Anfield the other week.
We had Coutinho playing in that one by the way, just in case anyone wants to blame this loss on him not being here. Of course the odds on us winning would have been shortened if Coutinho had been playing, but he’s not fucking here any more and the players that are here should have been good enough to get the job done.
It’s somewhat disconcerting that they weren’t good enough to get the job done but lessons need to be learned from it because we’ll face far more teams like Swansea between now and May than we will teams like Man City.
Star man is Matip, who didn’t have to do much defending but who was purposeful in his passing into the forward players and made some excellent forays forward into the box. Lallana was good when he belatedly got on, and Ings was lively too. Aside from them, must do better.
Team: Karius; Gomez, Matip, Van Dijk, Robertson; Can, Wijnaldum (Ings), Oxlade-Chamberlain (Lallana); Salah, Firmino, Mane:
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