gkmacca

The whole coaching staff seem to have dozed off in recent weeks. Pep normally leaps around and chats to Jurgen - most of the time now he's just sitting back (daydreaming about his new job?). Even Achterberg, half-coach, half-mascot, looks like someone's drugged his 7-up. When the players need to be shaken out of their sleepiness, a dozy dugout isn't a good look.

Disgraceful. And delusional. The club should be clamping down on this, but I guess it's too distracted with its own briefing about Klopp and Nunez. It's hard enough to keep all the players under control when they know the manager is leaving, but when the new manager is already chatting away in public about the club it makes Klopp look like Banquo's fecking ghost. Salah's always been a bit of self-obsessed little tit, which has been easy to tolerate when he's been scoring masses of goals, but to play the way he's played this year, and to behave like this - he needs a public rebuke.

I'm not sure why I'm bothering, but: do you honestly think that kind of faux misunderstanding was worth it?

Yes, that's why I didn't regard that as at all likely. Like most fans, I'm trying to make sense of what the club is doing, with minimal guidance from the club.

It's a fair enough point, and an encouraging one. But that's in the Dutch league. He'll have to shorten the pitch a heck of a lot more to cope with the added pressure here.

From the outside, he comes from quite a weak league (even Klopp took a while to get used to just how intense it is here, against smaller clubs and in the cup against lower league teams), and he has done far less than Klopp in Europe, who arrived having been in a final. So it would be irrational for fans not to be concerned. On the positive side, it sounds like he plays good football, although the greater pace and intensity here will probably lead to him either adjusting over time or, like Klopp, contend with a squad struggling with exhaustion and injury on a chronic basis. I guess it hinges on how trusting we are of the club doing its due diligence. He could be a place holder for Alonso, but that begs so many questions that it seems way too much of a gamble, so one can only hope that they really do think he has the right potential to succeed, and suceed pretty quickly, here.

Yes. Which was partly my point when he returned to the club in a more powerful position. It was okay before for him to embrace all of that shadowy 'man of mystery' aura. It isn't now. That's not how LFC works. He's one of those at the club who have a responsibility to front up and support the manager and players and engage with the fans. Before he could pretty much decide for himself how semi-detached he would be, allowing the credit to come his way, deservedly or not, while leaving Klopp to take any flak if anything went wrong. Now he's there to be shot at, just like his manager, and whether it's him or someone else enaging in the dark arts, he has to see that it stops.

Well, that was a decent person giving credit to his colleagues. Whereas this leak is quite different. It's nice when you lurk in the shadows - you can choose when to step forward into the spotlight and when to stay back and hide.

The most thought he's invested in the past year has concerned the length of his socks.

Not really that much like too much different from any half, in any of these games, at any of these grounds, in any of these past decades. But let's not let that dilute the wailing and whining as if this is some kind of weird and entirely unexpected scenario.

A typed laugh of exasperation? Fucking hell. Grow the fuck up.

Ha ha, idiotic manc-like rants, "ha ha" - really???

And that broadcast from the Masochism Channel is available for all from now...

Pretty definitive from you, then. Off to your stable, no need to repeat.

Disgraceful dive. And some commentators pretend they don't realise..

If Slot brings his assistant with him, that bloke's already worked with our Dutch contingent, and Virge seems to really rate him, so that will be a decent transition. That's all I have.

Quite. The thralldom to nerds has grown tiresome.

And vice versa.

It's his bespoke mini socks. Once players get obsessed with that kind of thing, it's a problem. Not an insurmountable one, but it needs a word or two. He's drifting into the Beckham-esque world of edited achievement. Blast multiple free kicks over the bar, but score the odd one - "genius". A triumph of PR over data. Huge talent, but it's worrying that, at this stage in his career, he's acting like he's some kind of cultural phenomenon.

Mental fatigue. That's it more than anything. There's no need for fatalism because of that - you CAN fight against it - but some of these players are pretty stoical, it seems. I thought we were okay for much of the half. Fulham fans booing Elliott, yet again, as if he's some Figo-like superstar who abandoned them - christ, how classless can they be? Much more pace required, second half. It's all about the end result - if you arse around at the back for three minutes and then give the ball away, that's three minutes wasted - show some fecking conviction.

Probably just one of his tenants.

Yup, the sheer brilliance of the side last week and on Thursday definitely meant that there would be mass incredulity at five changes being made today. That's absolutely clear.

It's also stupid and counter-productive unless it's done with confidence and pace. The number of times we pass it slowly around at the back, then leave it to the keeper to kick it forward into a congested midfield area and we lose possession - it does my head in. And in the past few games we've also taken to passing the ball right back to the keeper from deep in the opposition's half. So much of this nonsense is excused because it's 'tactical'. Bollocks. Most of it recently has mainly been down to a mixture of fear and fatigue.

Yes, I remember that one. Crazy. I'm afraid I'm getting increasingly cynical about the supposed tactical nous of players for dead ball situations. Do players really have a range of corner kicks to choose from? Robbo seems to put up his hands in the same gesture no matter where he puts the ball these days. Same with the intense hand-over-mouth chats over the ball before free kicks ('I think I'll try to whip it over the wall and straight down into the left-hand corner'. 'I was thinking of doing the same for the other corner'. 'Let's compromise - I'll blast it straight at the wall, then you blast the rebound over the bar').

Keita's attempt to swazz a shot into the goal against Madrid - the gold standard for idiocy. For me, Trent's ludicrous attempt in the last game to curl the ball into the goal, when all it needed was a straight hard shot, represented the next most stupid decision in recent years. But there are so many recently. Amazing that we can have multiple specialist coaching and brain scans and god knows what else but we can't get forwards to just sharpen the heck up.