What's gone wrong defensively?

[aRdja]

10 hours ago, Barrington Womble said:

he was supposed to be able to do all of those things you are saying he can't. Personally I think it's not a question of a good fit, i think he just doesn't have the quality to play at the level we need. 

I’m starting to come around your way of thinking there. He’s a decent footballer but probably not for our team, or the current vintage at least.

[Barrington Womble]

2 hours ago, aRdja said:

I’m starting to come around your way of thinking there. He’s a decent footballer but probably not for our team, or the current vintage at least.

He doesn't do anything better than most of our midfielders. About the only thing he has is a dribble, but he's not devastating with that. He looks to me like someone of he played for palace or Southampton and you saw him on motd a couple of times you might think he's useful, but once you watch him properly, you can just see he's very ordinary. Personally I would put Gini, fabinho, Henderson and thiago as I leading 4 midfielders, then I'd have keita behind Jones , with him, milner and chamberlain vying for 6th midfielder. 

[skend04]

So the right sided defenders can't defend, our back up keeper can't kick, we've made more individual defensive errors in the last few games than the whole of the previous 2 seasons and we've suddenly started to try and play offside like we were George Graham's Gunners but it's all down to one midfielder and if we change that one person all the other faults will go away.

 

This is pretty mental even for this place. Almost as mental as taking the player off and bringing on an attacking midfielder to shore up the defence.

[Numero Veinticinco]

On 04/10/2020 at 23:40, Stront19m Dog™ said:

Right, but it's not really working, is it.

It didn’t work in our last match. When you look at a wider set of games... 

[VladimirIlyich]

Its a dramatic drop off to go from beating Chelsea away,to nil,and Arsenal at home conceding only one to losing 7-2 against a relegation dodging side. Having said that,how do you legislate for three deflected goals in one game and none of which would have gone in! The alarming part to me was how we reacted tactically by seeming to play an even higher line and not press the ball as much in midfield. Seemed strange.

[Barrington Womble]

I'm not sure 52m has anything to do with it. But it seems keita just thinks these are training games. 

 

[VladimirIlyich]

4 minutes ago, Barrington Womble said:

I'm not sure 52m has anything to do with it. But it seems keita just thinks these are training games. 

 

Unfair to blame one player as I thought the whole midfield were shite,Fabinho in particular. Hendo is massive to this team.

[Barrington Womble]

23 minutes ago, VladimirIlyich said:

Unfair to blame one player as I thought the whole midfield were shite,Fabinho in particular. Hendo is massive to this team.

It's not blaming one player for Sunday, it's just more evidence of he's not very good in general. 

[LFC 6 Times]

Do you reckon they all have Covid? That’s 4 confirmed cases now and I’m sorry that performance was completely out of step from what we’ve seen from us in past 4 years.

[Scott_M]

10 minutes ago, LFC 6 Times said:

Do you reckon they all have Covid? That’s 4 confirmed cases now and I’m sorry that performance was completely out of step from what we’ve seen from us in past 4 years.

I’ve thought this. Maybe not COVID19 but for so many players to be completely off their game on Sunday, I do wonder if something is doing the rounds at Melwood. 

[Aventus]

6 minutes ago, LFC 6 Times said:

Do you reckon they all have Covid? That’s 4 confirmed cases now and I’m sorry that performance was completely out of step from what we’ve seen from us in past 4 years.

I reckon that they all had to self isolate for a few days while they did all the testing.

I don't think you can test positive immediately there needs to be a bit of incubation before it will show up on a test, so they were playing it safe. 

 

Because of this they probably had little to no training sessions in the days prior to the villa game. 

[Barrington Womble]

4 minutes ago, Aventus said:

I reckon that they all had to self isolate for a few days while they did all the testing.

I don't think you can test positive immediately there needs to be a bit of incubation before it will show up on a test, so they were playing it safe. 

 

Because of this they probably had little to no training sessions in the days prior to the villa game. 

aren't they supposed to operate in little bubbles of 4 or 5 within the squad to prevent that? the idea being you have contact with 4 or 5, if one of them gets it there's a fair chance that group does, but it doesn't spread through the whole squad and the rest can carry one as normal?

[Scott_M]

Answer to question - no read any of the other posts apart from last page...

 

1) Lack of press from the front. There were a few instances v Leeds & Arsenal (although our pressing v Arsenal was generally excellent) where teams have got away.
 

The press was poor v Villa. Firmino, Keita, Wijnaldum... you can’t have half the team pressing and the other half not. It leaves huge gaps to get picked off in, which is what happened.

 

2) Individual mistakes. Robbo, VVD, Adrian. I’ve confidence 2 of them will sort themselves out.

 

3) Gomez. Despite a good display v Arsenal, he’s been a long way off top form for a while now. No coincidence that our best defensive display of the season was at Chelsea where he didn’t play. Fabinho needs a run in the side.

 

4) I don’t want to say attitude or mentality or something along those lines because I think that’s unfair, but the 2 games we should have had minimal problems in we struggled in and the 2 games we should have struggled in, we were absolutely dominant. 
 

We won the league by such a distance last season because every player showed up in every game before lockdown. Since then, it’s been obvious we were going to win it by a huge margin and we’ve seen even our most unflappable players in VVD, Alisson and Fabinho making basic mistakes. 
 

We can’t pick and chose when we want or feel the need to turn it on. Our high line etc is high risk and high reward and only works if every player 100% commits to it each week. We need to show the intensity we showed the majority of last season, otherwise we’ll be getting picked off more often. 

[stringvest]

1 hour ago, Scott_M said:

I’ve thought this. Maybe not COVID19 but for so many players to be completely off their game on Sunday, I do wonder if something is doing the rounds at Melwood. 

Substantially increased levels of onanism.  

[Megadrive Man]

1 hour ago, LFC 6 Times said:

Do you reckon they all have Covid? That’s 4 confirmed cases now and I’m sorry that performance was completely out of step from what we’ve seen from us in past 4 years.

Gomez played against Leeds, then was left out vs Chelsea. TAA was mysteriously missing in pre season.  

[Creator Supreme]

We're just fucking shite!

[3 Stacks]

20 minutes ago, Creator Supreme said:

We're just fucking shite!

You know what, you may be right. This season, only Fulham, Newcastle and West Brom have allowed more shots on target than we have. Granted a lot of those were against just Villa.