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KEEP, SACK OR ARREST?

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We’re just going to dance Kakalika at the World Cup and come back home. 😭💔

@P2Monsieur @Eddzino You might as well join us now

@Eddzino @fre_flow It’s a bit early to prep for dirty December nah?

What are the ‘super eagles’ preparing for ?

⏱️ Full time at the Ernst Happel Stadium in Vienna. 🇦🇹 Austria 5️⃣-1️⃣ Ghana 🇬🇭 #BlackStars || #AUSGHA

@KenrickMiller10 @LenovoGuru @htomufc @DistanceCovered @MUFC_VoR @RaphTZ4

@LenovoGuru @htomufc @DistanceCovered @fre_flow don’t get rattled

DISCLAIMER. @htomufc is a superb presenter. I love the two-man steps he does with @DistanceCovered. I am analysing this not to be an asshole, but because it's dovetailed with an audit I've been doing of the season. Let's get this party started. It's a long one. The video is fine if simply from a symptom collection standpoint. But the underlying causation hasn’t been fully analysed, which is a core issue. It oversimplifies the problem and solution. Yes, the intensity output is poor. No arguments. But the numbers aren’t self explanatory. Running isn’t an identity metric by itself. It’s just an output metric. So he’s right in the disclaimer that even Chelsea have exhibited a similar trait. But if you dig deeper, so did Liverpool in 21/22. And they amassed 92 points. Running = / = success. Because you have to factor in possession share, coordination, control of the game. There’s a lot more to it. Another issue is the interpretation of the graphs. On the surface, they read like clean regression curves. Down. Down. Down. Down. It's dramatically impactful, doesn’t say more. Especially because the operating environments from season to season changes, the squad changes, the coach changes, the league changes. Too many inputs to say ‘down is clean’. This is a fundamental flaw when people time-series model but don't break the seasonality of the curve down properly. Recruitment is a problem. Slot is a problem. The players aren’t suited to intense football. This is too simple a set of reasoning. Because iff the players aren’t suited to the system, then tactical failure to implement an ‘intense’ style cannot apply. If recruitment has left the squad with square pegs in round holes or with a shortage of key profiles, then the tactical analysis has to be framed as ‘sub optimal design with sub optimal inputs’ and not ‘the coach is making Liverpool passive by choice’. That plane doesn’t quite land where it should. If we rewind to the running data, the issue is that it doesn’t separate volume from functionality. Liverpool can run less than opponents and still be okay if the distances are shorter. Same goes for time spent walking. Liverpool would not be okay if they ran more than their opponents but essentially just did track practice on the wings of the pitch. The most relevant question is whether the distance covered equates to purpose and function. Which leads me nicely into the next point around pressing, because pressing has annoyed me too. The pressing analysis is very strong. The Brighton part, the zonal diamond, the overloads on Macca, the free-man outside, the lack of jump-press from the CB, the distances between midfield and defence. It has all frustrated me too. If you don’t have elite physical coverage, you can’t maintain a zonal structure, and you will then get cut through. The +1 is also a pain in the ass. But it stops halfway. Because the tactical symptom doesn’t lead to a clear-cut inference. Is this a design problem? Is this a personnel problem? Is this a physical problem? Is this a coaching problem? Or is it all of it together? Because saying the system is too passive doesn’t really cut it. Zonal doesn’t mean passive. Zonal becomes passive when the players aren’t closing down spaces aggressively enough. This could be coaching. But it’s more likely in this season to be down to players not being athletically capable of completing the task. It’s part profiles missing, but moreso lack of physical base and tactical base from a disrupted pre season. And this is the bit that’s completely missing. Pre-season is your base layer. That’s where your physical conditioning, tactical automation and cohesion get built. If that gets disrupted — whether through schedule, injuries, or something more serious — everything downstream is affected. You’re not building capacity, you’re managing deficit. That shows up in intensity first, then in spacing, then in execution. So the drop in pressing, the poor distances, the “passivity” — those aren’t isolated tactical failures, they’re what happens when the base isn’t there. Layer onto that natural decline. Alisson Becker, Virgil van Dijk, Alexis Mac Allister, Mohamed Salah — these are elite players, but they’re either ageing, overplayed, or both. That affects duel success, recovery runs, reaction times, repeat sprint ability. You don’t fall off a cliff, but you drop 5–10%. At this level, that’s the difference between a press landing and being bypassed, between stepping out and holding shape, between control and chaos. That has nothing to do with coaching intent. It’s just lifecycle. I have seen some folk comment that Slot's 'coaching methods' are the reason for this fitness issue. Even if Slot was a completely incompetent slob, that wouldn't track. Because there has never been this kind of drop off in his teams across his career. Even in 2024/25, this was not an issue. So some folk have pivoted to, 'but he changed it in March and started giving players MORE time off'. That's not fully true or fully false. More rest was provided in March 2025 because the small squad was creaking under the strain of playing more minutes than they could. So rest was proportionately increased. That would not have been the baseline plan for 25/26. In fact, the rest for this season would have been proportionate to what most clubs do. Max intensity in pre season proportionate rest in-season. But if you don't have the max intensity pre season, the proportionate rest-in season is fundamentally doing very little either way. I always say it like this. If you have £1000 in your bank account, and you replenish it through the year without obscenely spending, you will be there or thereabouts. But if you have a £200 balance, unless you exponentially replenish it, it’s still low. The base matters. But simply saying, ‘this isn’t Liverpool’ isn’t an analysis. It’s just rhetoric for rhetoric’s sake. The overarching issue to the above point is also that you cannot simply overlay a block of preseason into a football season. You cannot also increase the intensity of in-season training to compensate for it, even if you stagger that intensity out over a season. Because you exponentially increase the risk of injuries. And in this situation, you exponentially increase it in a squad that is already dealing with multiple injuries as it is. Moving on. The goalkeeper sequence at Brighton away is another one where it’s observing what happened, but quickly segueing to ‘this is how it’s meant to be so there’. There is a big difference between a coach deliberately choosing a safer press and a coach implementing a safer press because their team cannot physically sustain a more aggressive one. One is a proactive choice without hindrance, the other is a reactive choice dealing with the constraints at play. If this had been positioned as, ‘are these the only viable choices that a coach can make’ there would be more arms and legs to the argument. Separation counts. On the Fulham & Spurs examples, the pattern is the same. The distances are right. The spacing is ugly. There is too much room between the lines. It doesn’t look good. But saying, ‘this isn’t Liverpool’ isn’t analysis nor a solution. It’s an emotion, not assessing causation. The booing piece is just second order narrative. It’s a psychological line that doesn’t draw cleanly from passive tactical setup to passive crowd to passive team. Because Anfield has been quiet plenty times, even in the 19/20 and 24/25 seasons when Liverpool won the League. The crowd isn’t as conjoined to the performances on the pitch as people think. And if they do think this, there needs evidence and weighting to support this claim. Salah’s output is revealing in a very clear way. The output WAS absurd. He’s right, Arne Slot coached a superb season out of Salah. But he’s missed the point that the ENTIRE team was coached to platform their individual talents to reach a collective goal. Take one of the parts out, and the system starts to creak. Because it was an optimal solution in a sub optimal squad. And that should’ve leaned properly into a conclusion. The reality is Slot hasn’t changed the identity for shits and giggles, and he’s shown a track record of optimising. The attacking bit is where he’s closer to something useful. Third most crosses in the league, poor output from headers, poor output from cross-assisted goals, middling chance creation from those crosses. Fine. That is a real inefficiency. But again, it stops halfway. Is crossing the idea, or is crossing the fallback once central access is blocked? Because teams do not usually wake up one day and decide to spam bad crosses for fun. They do it because they can’t progress centrally, can’t keep presence on the last line, or don’t have the right profiles connecting midfield to attack. So yes, the crossing looks aimless. But even that is likely a symptom of wider dysfunction, not the root cause in itself. The recruitment bit is directionally right, but still too vague. “The players aren’t great” isn't a clear cut analysis. The sharper point is that the squad is poorly layered, too profile-dependent and not redundant enough in key roles. That’s what turns injuries from a nuisance into a systems failure. That’s the bit that matters. Not just quality in the abstract, but how the profiles interact. Or in this case, fail to. And that’s where the Alonso bit falls down as well. “Maybe he fixes it” is not a proper conclusion. Maybe he raises the floor out of possession. Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he hates half the profiles. Maybe the same structural issues remain. The point is, if the setup above the coach is still delivering an incoherent profile mix, then you’re just resetting the cycle and hoping aura solves it. And it's my fundamental issue with 'change the coach' that people often say. It's fantasy football. The biggest issue is weighting. There have been a lot of real symptoms. Bad running outputs. Poor spacing. Weak pressing. Ugly attacking data. Strange squad fit. Fine. But there's no decision on what matters most. There’s no hierarchy. No distinction between primary and secondary causes. No separation of what is controllable, what is contingent, what is structural, and what is simply downstream. So it ends up sounding persuasive because there’s a lot of detail, but the model underneath it is shaky. That’s why the conclusion feels too certain for the evidence presented. There is no value in saying Liverpool have moved away from their identity, the coach is not delivering, the squad is flawed, the crowd has changed, and the whole thing is rotting. Maybe some of that is true. But there needs to be clear proof and a clear causation-correlation chain on what drives what element, and what the weighting is on each driver. I will draw a conclusion based on my research and observations, both data led and eye test led. On the pitch and off the pitch. Because nothing exists in a vacuum. It is all woven together, irrevocably. Liverpool haven’t suddenly decided to abandon their identity. They’ve lost the conditions required to execute it. The intensity drop isn’t philosophical, it’s structural. A disrupted pre-season removed the physical and tactical base. That then cascades — poorer spacing, slower jumps, worse coordination, more conservative behaviours. Layer onto that an ageing core — Alisson, Virgil, Macca, Salah — all still wonderful footballers at their core, but no longer capable of sustaining peak intensity across a full season. So you get a drop-off in offensive / defensive duel success, recovery speed and efficiency. At the same time, the squad isn’t built to absorb that drop. It’s too profile-dependent, lacks redundancies (aka fallbacks when the core system fails), and once key pieces are missing or decline slightly, the whole system loses functionality rather than just quality. That’s why the press looks passive, the block looks stretched, and the attack defaults into low-value behaviours like crossing. So what you’re actually watching isn’t just a coach imposing the wrong idea. It’s a coach trying to stabilise a system that no longer has the physical, tactical or structural base to support its original one — while also not fully solving for that instability himself. So the actual conclusion here, once you weight it properly, looks something like this. Externalities sit at the top. Call it 35%. A disrupted pre-season wipes out your physical base, your tactical automation and your cohesion. Everything downstream degrades from there — intensity, spacing, timing, execution. You’re not building a system, you’re firefighting one. Structure comes next at 30%. The squad is too profile-dependent and not layered properly. There’s no redundancy in key roles, so when availability drops or levels dip, functionality drops with it. That’s why injuries don’t just hurt — they break things. This one is fully on recruitment. They hired a head coach by design, so that the clear chain of authority around recruitment was with them. If they break it, they own it. Simple as that. Then you’ve got the coach at 20%. Arne Slot hasn’t found a robust fallback to mitigate for the issues he's come up against, and that’s a clear criticism. But you have to price in where he is in his cycle. He’s a younger coach, early in his growth curve, and this is his first real stress season at this level. Every season before this has been broadly above 70 points and a trophy in each of his last three season. He hasn’t had the Klopp-style or Mourinho-style collapse years to build that scar tissue yet. So you’re effectively stress-testing an early-stage coach in what is close to a black swan situation, which is a low probability, high severity event that most coaches never have to design for. That’s the mitigant. The risk is that he hasn’t yet shown he can stabilise a system when the base breaks. So what you’re seeing is a mix of adaptation under constraint and inexperience under pressure. This is an accepted risk for young coaches. The structure above him should also mitigate. Players sit at 15%. And this is where the nuance matters. Even if you assume elite quality and leadership, they’re downstream of the first three. But there’s also natural decline of senior players layered in. That 5–10% drop matters at this level. It shows up in duels, recovery runs, pressing triggers, decision speed. You then have the younger players who have the legs and the talent, but the nous and grit of the older players. So the upside is counterweighted by the downside. Marginal losses compound. Results in an exponential impact. Put that together and the picture is clear. The intensity drop, the passive press, the stretched block, the aimless possession are not independent failures or philosophical choices. They’re all downstream of a broken base, structural and squad profiling fragility, meaningful player decline, with the coach trying, albeit not always successfully, to stabilise it. So you don’t have a team that’s changed identity. You’ve got a system that currently can’t physically or structurally sustain the identity people expect. But expectations = / = reality. And people don't like messy. But football is messy. Life is messy. FOOTBALL IS LIFE.

Roy Hodgson: The first man to manage both Ronaldo and Delano Burgzorg

@arieuminit @SeanDOlfc @Adz2055 Arieum lashing out 😭😭

@SeanDOlfc Talk about Isak you cretin.

People still trying to bring Nunez comparisons in because of that fckin season where he was facing sparta prague. Nunez would shit himself playing for France and having superstars side-eyeing him.

@Reggie_Rokon @supergremlin911 😭😭😭😭😭😭🤣🤣🤣🤣 @Eddzino

@supergremlin911 Nigeria were kwooning at Buckingham Palace your people have come to join them

@ABIZZLY Darmz or NBA book marked your tweet 😭😭😭😭

imagine never winning a champions league. must be a shit life as a supporter. magical trophy

@ABIZZLY Please name the 5 guys ?

You internet virgins are weirdos. Salah is my guy and I respect n appreciate everything he done but Liverpool ain’t no Mickey Mouse club. The other 5 guys ahead of him and SERIAL winners. Carragher is a Pussio tho n a hater for sure

@ChelseaDan5 Looooooooooooooooool

Former Chelsea manager Avram.Grant on Kilburn High Rd NW6 usually see him over West Hampstead👀👀⚽️⚽️🍻🍻

@mikemadeit_ @harvey77004265 This sully that was an Arsenal fan on spaces 😂? And then rebranded to be a yanited don

@harvey77004265 No sully isn’t a shit source

Kmt ffs

@MUFC_VoR T2c wanted to unlock Noonez .

UNLOCK LOOOOOOOOOOOOL

@AnfieldSector @KenrickMiller10 @Theconstokeke don’t get triggered

👇 great watch

@johngibbonsblog Fuck off 😂😂😂

My dad reckons Souness was the best he ever saw. Puts him ahead of even Kenny

The President of Senegal 🇸🇳 has two wives, a Christian and a Muslim

@arieuminit @AdilLFC_ @AnfieldSector @AdilLFC_ the Lloyd Kelly car park bar is shocking

@fre_flow @AdilLFC_ @AnfieldSector Is this meant to be prop? Richard gotta get new minions

[🟢] NEW: Bournemouth were #LFC’s competition when they signed Gomez, Robertson and Elliott. When he went for Lloyd Kelly, Hughes got there first. Brooks and Christie were others Edwards was considering when Bournemouth beat them. Hughes almost pulled off a deal for Mané. [@JNorthcroft]