Planning issues in the summer, coupled with injuries and fitness issues, have meant Liverpool have sacrificed style in their pursuit of games. Both the Slot and the club’s wider decision-making bear responsibility.
My view of the situation is that Liverpool’s plans for this summer are wrong or incomplete, with certain long-term goals brought forward simply because we had the chance to achieve them at the time. So we bought some good players but didn’t address the problem areas because those players were postponed until the next window when the rebuild was about to be completed. They thought we were good enough to compete at the top level and remain until next summer, but they made a serious misjudgment.
Planning and Priorities
Arne Slaughter was also part of this misjudgment, thinking we could camp in the opponent’s half and try to stretch the defense down low. Of course, the league is completely different this year, with Slaughter spending much of his time dealing with injuries and health issues that have left him desperately trying to get results.
It worked to some extent as he tried to stop the bleeding, but to the detriment of the offense-led football we all want to see. It certainly didn’t help that we conceded a plethora of very unlucky goals and two of our wide players were off a cliff in terms of productivity, meaning we were little threat on the counter-attack and our attack couldn’t paper over the cracks like it had for years.
Team management, injuries and compromising styles
Ongoing injuries due to over-playing of players (Slott must be held accountable for rather poor team management and not trusting the players at his disposal, choosing instead to play players) means the team is unable to continue to develop synergies and relationships, while he has been trying to keep players fit by turning games into lower level events in the hope that we will have enough quality to win games.
I can’t say for sure, but I’m pretty sure the lack of fitness of a small core group of players and having to play countless games on the blade also meant that Slott had to completely abandon cohesive front-foot pressing, which had the opposite effect of further tiring our midfielders and backline, all of whom had to cover large swathes of off-the-ball space.
January Decisions and Shared Responsibility
It certainly doesn’t help that the hierarchy refuse to budge on their long-term plans and bring in Geertruida to help us like they did in January, and the less said about Guehi and Semenyo the better, that’s just a disaster.
It could be argued that this was largely Slaughter’s doing, which is certainly fair from a certain point of view.
Fair Judgment Slots
My own thought is that he made a huge misjudgement of how this season was going to turn out, and while I think he did his best to adjust and stay pragmatic when we were at the lowest point of the season, at the end of the day he’s a young coach who has never faced serious adversity in the toughest league in the world.
We saw him struggle at different points in the season, but I do think he did the best he could until the end and he just made mistakes. While I think he’s smart and discerning enough to learn from it and improve, we at Liverpool Football Club can’t afford to have a young manager learn on the job.
I still maintain that the hierarchy did him a disservice by not sacking him at the start of the season when the team needed improvement, both in terms of quality (Gehy and Semenho) and in providing help in midfield and defense when our team was stretched thin after playing so many games (Gil Truida, who can play as a centre-back, central defender, defensive midfielder or right-back).
He is the object of fans’ wrath, and of course, he has not endeared himself to fans through his sometimes near-disastrous press conferences, but he is not the only one who should be the object of condemnation, and he definitely does not deserve to be scolded, laughed at, called the worst Liverpool Football Club manager ever (which he clearly is not) or dragged through the mud.
Hopefully we can all look forward and eventually view Slot’s contributions more kindly than we do now.
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