So we’re better away from home now then. Not sure how that’s happened but Anfield isn’t a fortress at the moment and we’ve dropped six points at home already. It could have been worse as Brighton probably deserved to win this. It wasn’t smash and grab, they were the better side.
Graham Potter is like fucking Kryptonite to Klopp. Ever since he went there Brighton have given us real problems. If Potter had better players you wonder just what he could achieve. That said, Brighton’s squad is getting better year after year and their recruitment seems to be pretty good. There won’t be many teams who play better than them at Anfield this season.
And yet we couldn’t have wished for a better start. Not just because of the early goal either. We just looked right at it from the off, obviously buoyed by the win at Old Trafford last week. We were moving the ball quickly, everyone looked sharp and when we didn’t have it we were swarming all over them to win the ball back.
The weird thing was that as well as we were playing, and as much as Brighton seemed to be on the verge of being steamrollered, they still managed to carve out two really good openings. Alisson made a a really good save to deny March and then Bissouma hit the post.
Looking back on it now, them creating those chances doesn’t concern me anywhere near as much as how they completely outplayed us afterwards. Giving up the odd chance when we’re well on top isn’t anything to worry about. It’s a true off you can accept. Getting schooled for the best part of an hour definitely is a concern though.
I don’t think anyone saw that coming. Not even me and I’m as big an admirer of Brighton as you’ll find. I thought this would be a tough game but I didn’t think they’d outplay us the way they did. At 2-0 I was mocking myself for thinking it was going to be tough. At that stage it was looking like a comfortable four or five goal victory and I’d have looked daft for predicting that it was going to be so tough.
We took the lead early with a lovely strike by Hendo. Virgil’s raking ball out to Mo put Brighton in trouble as once Mo collected the pass and drove into the box it almost felt inevitable that something was going to happen. I half expected him to cut back onto his left and bend in a shot himself, but this year he seems to be thinking pass first and only when that’s not on is he going himself. He saw Hendo in space, rolled it into his path and the skipper did the rest.
Some of our football was sublime in the early exchanges and Keita had been involved in most of it. And then just like that he was off. I’m genuinely pissed off about this. What’s the point of him? Seriously, what’s the point? On the rare occasions he does something useful that hints at him finally establishing himself in the team, it’s always followed by THIS.
My initial thought when he went down was that he’d been kicked on the shin that was damaged by Pogba last week. Had that been the case I’d have been fine with it. He was obviously playing through some pain as a badly bruised shin doesn’t heal completely in six days, it will still have been sore. So a bang on the tender part of the shin would have hurt like fuck and if that’s what had forced him off then you can’t hold that against him.
But to then find out that he’s got a hamstring? Fucking hell, he’s just no use to us whatsoever. I’m done. We can’t rely on him because he’s basically another Sturridge or Lallana. Just constant muscle injuries. It’s been like that for his entire time here so there’s nothing to suggest it’s bad luck anymore. It’s just who he is.
It will never not irritate the fuck out of me that we allowed Gini to walk while keeping Keita (and to a lesser extent Ox) on the books. Had it been my call I’d have sold Keita for whatever we could get and I’d have added his salary onto whatever Gini was already making, and then gave him a bit more on top of that. Maybe it still wouldn’t have been enough to keep him but I’ll never be ok with a decision to not seriously try to extend a player who was available for pretty much every single fucking game for the five years he was at the club. Especially when every other senior midfielder we have also seem to be susceptible to injuries.
Fabinho misses a chunk of games every year, as does Hendo. Ox has had problems and don’t get me started on Thiago. Even Milner has sneakily become prone to picking up hamstring injuries over the past year. Of course that’s because Klopp refuses to learn the lesson that he can’t play three games in a week, but the point stands. All of our midfielders pick up injuries yet the one exception to that, the one constant, Mr Dependable, was seemed expendable.
And here were are, running out of bodies and probably having to face Atletico Madrid with a midfield of Hendo (who must be close to being in the red zone having played loads of games), Ox and Curtis.
This isn’t about not replacing Gini. I was fine with that as we have eight midfielders for three spots (nine if you include Minamino). It’s about letting Gini go while keeping players who don’t contribute much, either due to injuries, inconsistency or both.
It pains me seeing Ox struggle because I have so much time for him and I really root for him. Naby going off gave him an unexpected opportunity to stake a claim and he looked right up for the challenge when he first came on. He was really positive and direct and within minutes he’d created the second goal with a driving run and brilliant ball in that Sadio headed home.
Everything was going perfectly at this stage but then it started to unravel when we had a goal ruled out by VAR. At 3-0 it would have been game over but I didn’t even celebrate that one as I saw it hit Sadio’s arm. There is no leeway for officials in that scenario so it was always getting disallowed. Of course the rule is shit and needs looking at, and of course it’s unfair that a defender can do the same thing and avoid conceding a penalty. I don’t like the rule, but knowing how it works I never had any doubt that it wouldn’t count.
Whether it was that incident that changed the game or Brighton pulling a goal back I don’t know. Maybe both. But we went from being well on top and playing some wonderful football to basically just getting our arses handed to us. Brighton’s first goal was a fluke and you’ll never convince me the lad wasn’t just playing a ball into the back post area. Doesn’t matter though, I can’t begrudge them that goal because as I said, they’d created two excellent openings before that and deserved their luck.
From that moment on though, they bossed it. Don’t ask me why as I’m not tactically astute enough to know what they did. But this wasn’t simply a case of us just playing shit. They made us look shit and you only had to look at the body language of our players and how devoid of ideas they seemed as the game wore on to know that. Arguing among themselves, indecision in possession… shit, we were passing it around on the halfway line deep into stoppage time because we were scared to go forward in case we lost the ball. We basically settled for the point by the end.
Brighton shut us down and they also figured out how to play through us. We’ll occasionally come up against teams who can do one or the other, but very few can do both. Our players didn’t have the answers and you could see it rattled them. They aren’t used to this.
Usually if things aren’t going well it’s due to silly mistakes or just not playing well. You can fix that by just executing Plan A better. This wasn’t that. Well it was partly that, as clearly we weren’t playing well, but it was more than that. This was Potter having our number and his players having total belief in what they were doing.
Brighton were brave and positive in everything they did. They took chances playing through our press and when they beat that first line it opened up for them. They were finding space between our midfield and defence seemingly at will, while Trossard up front gave us the fucking runaround.
I’m not specifically blaming Konate for that, but most of Brighton’s dangerous moves came in the space between him and Trent. Would that have been any different had Matip played? Maybe, I don’t know. I do know that when I saw the team I was pissed off that Joel seems to lost his place for no apparent reason. He’s actually been better than Virgil this season. I’m not saying Virgil should have been left out, I’m just saying that I don’t like the message it sends if Matip is now behind Konate in the pecking order.
I fully expect Joel to be back in against Atletico and I might be reading too much into it. It could simply be that Klopp wants to manage the amount of games Joel plays and it could also be that he’s decided he’s going to do a fair bit of rotating to ensure everyone gets games. If it’s that, sound. If he’s wanting to go with Konate and Virg as his number one pair moving forward, that’s not sound. Nothing against Konate, but you should have to earn that and he hasn’t. Not yet.
But anyway, we’d lost our way after the Brighton goal and half time arrived at a good moment for us. I always feel confident that whatever has gone wrong in a first half will be fixed during the interval and Klopp and his staff are brilliant at that. They’ll point out what’s gone wrong and explain how to fix it. We’re usually a very good second half team and there was no reason for me to think we wouldn’t go out and immediately pick up where we’d left off before Brighton had scored.
It never really happened although things might have been different if Mo hadn’t been just offside when he collected a pass from Sadio and scored. I did celebrate that one as from where I was sat there’s no way I could tell if it was off or not. The one thing about VAR this season is that so far we haven’t had any of those ridiculous offside rulings where they basically decide what they want to give and then manipulate the lines accordingly. Now, if it’s given offside then it’s almost certainly offside, and vice versa.
That was a rare moment of quality in what was a pretty desperate half from us. Brighton had more composure. More shape. More organisation. More structure. They were just better than us in every aspect of the game after half time. Our best hope was that Salah might just produce something from nothing and that our individual quality would see us through, because in terms of team play and cohesion we were clearly second best.
That never happened because Mo was well shackled and we couldn’t really get him the ball as we never had the platform to play from. Brighton equalised with a really well worked goal. It wasn’t a surprise as they were putting moves like that together for much of the second half. They worked the ball through nicely and then Lallana rolled a pass through to Trossard who turned Robbo inside out before beating Alisson.
I can’t stand Trossard because he looks like a young Nigel Farage. I feel bad for him as that’s not his fault and nobody wants to look like that fucking cunt. He’s a good player but I just can’t see past the Farage thing, which I know is unfair but it is what it is. He did run rings around us though, I can’t deny that.
Lallana was really good too, with and without the ball. He said afterwards that he basically man marked Hendo at 2-0 because he was dictating the game. Clearly that worked because one minute we were all over them and the next we looked lost.
It wasn’t just Lallana and Trossard though. Solly March gave us problems as well, especially in tandem with Cucurella the left back. The two midfield lads impressed as well, and somehow the two big lads at the back rarely got exposed despite having the mobility of a pair of 18 wheelers.
I keep going back to it but they’re just a brilliantly coached team who are vastly greater than than the sum of their parts. They’re the polar opposite of the ‘team’ we played a week ago.
As disappointing as it was to squander a two goal lead (becoming a worrying trend this season) and to drop two more points at home, I almost feel like this was a point gained because we could easily have lost this and could have had no complaints if we had.
For one awful moment it looked like we would when Trossard got in again and found the net. The linesman flagged but I was in line with that and it looked really close. My initial feeling was he was onside but as I’ve said countless times before, the linos are really good at their jobs and tend to get most things right. Shame they aren’t allowed to make decisions anymore.
VAR checked and confirmed the linesman’s assessment and the goal didn’t stand. Thank fuck. We were not coming back from that if it had counted as we’d long since ran out of ideas by that point.
There was not really anything on the bench to change things up either. Jota came on for Bobby but by that stage we’d lost all control of the game and didn’t have the dominance we’d usually have. I never felt like Jota would make a difference but I also felt that the change should have been made well before then anyway as Bobby was fucking shite and kept giving the ball away.
Midfield was the bigger problem but we just don’t have options to change it currently. Curtis did nothing at all in this game. It was basically the same performance we saw from him against Preston in the week. I don’t know what’s going on with him right now but he doesn’t look like himself. Very subdued.
Ox isn’t the kind of midfielder who helps you control the game. He’s more of a counter attacking player who is at his most comfortable when he’s running forward and trying to score and create. He’s not one for sitting in and passing it around like a Thiago or, dare I say it again, Gini.
So any criticism of him needs to be tempered a bit by that. Controlling games with Ox in there isn’t going to be easy and he’s not necessarily the best at filling in spaces defensively. Neither is Curtis. So Brighton had a field day in there and Hendo was often over ran.
I’m not sure what Klopp can even do to fix that until the injured players come back. Minamino is an option but he’s going to have the same weaknesses and won’t change much.
Ox ended up on the left wing when Klopp switched to 4-4-2 or 4-2-3-1. They’re basically the same system these days anyway as one forward will always drop off. Ox went left, Sadio went right, but nothing changed and Brighton were still comfortable.
The crowd got frustrated and Ox got the brunt of it. Understandable as he doesn’t have as much credit in the bank as most of the others, but he wasn’t really any worse than most of his team-mates. In fact, other than maybe Sadio (and Alisson), everyone was below par.
The good news is that City lost at home so we picked up a point on them. The bad news is Chelsea won and we’re now three behind them. I don’t think either of those things are important right now. This isn’t going to be a season where the winners end up with close to 100 points.
City have already shown they can be got at and worryingly so have we. Chelsea have been more consistent but they’ll drop points too. We don’t need to worry about them, we need to get our own house in order and then we’ll be fine.
We’re scoring loads of goals so that’s not an issue currently, but the defensive side of the game isn’t good and has been questionable for a lot of the season. We’ve given up two goal leads against Milan, Atletico and Brighton. We conceded three at Brentford. We led against City and couldn’t see the game out. There might even be more if I could be arsed checking.
It isn’t just on the defence, it’s a team thing and the constant changing of personnel in midfield probably isn’t helping. In fact it definitely isn’t. We’ll figure it out though because Klopp and the staff know what they’re doing. They figured it out last season when we had no centre backs so there’s no reason to think we can’t get through this mini midfield injury crisis, but the next couple of games look like they could be very tricky unless Fabinho and Thiago are ready to ride to the rescue.
Star man is Sadio even though he wasn’t even that good. I’m not looking forward to Atletico on Wednesday. I can see that being another frustrating night, but most of the hard work has already been done in the group so at least we have a bit of leeway. West Ham at the weekend is the big one for me this week as then there’s an international break which hopefully allows us to get some midfielders back fit again.
Team: Alisson; Alexander-Arnold, Konate, Van Dijk, Robertson; Henderson, Keita (Oxlade-Chamberlain), Jones (Minamino); Salah, Firmino (Jota), Mané:
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