Job security - arne

[Momo ★]

that's not what I said and you know it. I asked you to name players you would have above him and you named a guy who has scored 1 pen all his life in a professional career spaning over 10yrs. Come on now...

I would happily have any of those step up and take a place if your god wasn’t there to take it. That is my point. I would even be happy to see Kelleher with his 100% conversion rate give it a go. Taking a pen isn’t just for Mo Salah.

 

[bluebell]

Salah is a distraction, the issue is Slot. If the Saudis come in with a £100m offer, we should sell but selling Salah won't fix the problems we have. Get rid of Arne and we might have a chance of saving the season

 

[rubans]

I would happily have any of those step up and take a place if your god wasn’t there to take it. That is my point. I would even be happy to see Kelleher with his 100% conversion rate give it a go. Taking a pen isn’t just for Mo Salah.

Not sure what you mean here, to promote our second choice keeper who plays 10 games a season above our primary spot kicker? Do you think Kelleher even wants that?

 

[Momo ★]

You are missing your own point. Why don’t pens matter in these stats? Because there are loads of players who can take them and put them in the net. They don’t have to do some magical movement to score it. They just need to run up and hit it.

 

[rubans]

The point is pens do matter and there aren't load of players whom can take them in a team. If you honestly think a player can just run up and hit it then we fundamentally disagree on what it takes to take a pen. Try watching any level of football such as youth level and you shall see how they feel at a penalty shoot out, not many put their hand up. Just because Diaz or Kelleher has taken one at somepoint in their footballing life and scored doesn't prove your hypothesis either way. If it was so easy how come the Nunez, who came to LFC with such a great Pen record has a shite record with us when it mattered?

 

[Momo ★]

We aren’t talking youth football here. These are international players who have played on the highest of stages. You didn’t pull me up on van Dijk, who in a cup final pointed to where he was going to hit it and then slot it there. At that level, these players can do exactly just that most of the time. Salah doesn’t have 100% conversion rate. I remember two absolute stinkers of pens since pre-season. So yes, a player can just hit it, may not score every time, but most of the time they do.

Pens pad stats.

 

[rubans]

If a player is going to just run and hit it, then fine but to take it he will need a decent pen record to own it.Not going to go through your list but only 2 I would back which is Macca and Trent and both were not always fit. Pens count same as a goal. That's a fact. It's not like they are worth half a goal. Would you like to to revise Rush's goals record and remove pents from it? I doubt it.

 

[Momo ★]

I don’t care about personal records. I would trust pretty much any premier league standard player to score one. It’s not something special at that level. Had Salah not been there then someone else would’ve stepped up and possibly scored. They may have even scored ones Salah missed.

 

[SummerOnions ★]

I do think most of our players are shit at pens though. I don't think any midfielder or attacker should have an excuse for being shit at pens but I'd fancy myself over someone like Jones

 

[rubans]

You have completely negated any level of skill or mentaility required to take a pen. It's possible but not very likely without technique etc. There is a reason why strikers take pens over defensive players, it's not just by chance.

 

[Gerry_A_Trick ★]

Salahs penalty record stands up with pretty much all top goal scorers of the last twenty years. He's a good penalty taker for the most part. It is undoubtedly easier to score a penalty than some other goals though.

It'd actually be useful to have some stat to try and work out how easy a chance was and use that to help understand if he's doing better ot worse than expected.

 

[Tinto ★]

How many cup finals did we win with penalty kicks recently? One milk cup and one FA cup?

We’re pretty good at them on the whole.

 

[rubans]

Depends who's around to take it and which keeper it's against, but definitely not just a random set of takers though unlike against PSG.

 

[Momo ★]

Salahs penalty record stands up with pretty much all top goal scorers of the last twenty years. He's a good penalty taker for the most part. It is undoubtedly easier to score a penalty than some other goals though.

It'd actually be useful to have some stat to try and work out how easy a chance was and use that to help understand if he's doing better ot worse than expected.

xG for a pen is 0.8 if you want to use that

 

[Gerry_A_Trick ★]

xG for a pen is 0.8 if you want to use that

Good idea. He scored 29 goals vs his xG of 25 in the league last year.

 

[Momo ★]

How about this?

 

[Halmeister ★]

I know a few people who want to give him until the end of the year, regardless of this season's outcome. Jota's death, doubts over his involvement with the main signings, and the title win are their main reasons. It's not a view I share, but I get it. Generally speaking, there's usually a bit more patience in the city than you see online, but I think even the most staunch of his supporters are in that silent, non-committal stage. You mostly get the 'it's in everyone's interests that we start winning football games" comments, rather than wading into why and how that looks pretty damn unlikely.

I'm in the city as well and I don't think I know anyone who doesn't think he's a big fat fraud. Though a lot are in that non-comittal stage as you say

 

[rurikbird]

There's all kinds of stories floating about out there at the moment but one thing I read, which made some sense, was the loss of Heitinga. The suggestion being that he was the guy who kept the players sweet and allowed Slot to be more removed. We had a wobble under Rafa when Pako Ayesteran left, and that was probably something similar as Rafa was a notoriously poor man manager.
I remembered reading something similar about Sven when he was in charge of England, and the suggestion was that Sammy Lee and Steve McClaren (good coaches, not good managers) basically acted as "middle management", absorbing all the whinging from both Sven and the players, filtering out anything that wasn't going to help. They were supposedly really popular with the players and allowed Sven to function without having to deal with the all the peripheral shit. They allowed the players to have their voices heard without Sven having to hear something he'd have then held against them.
So I wonder if there is something in that, as a lot of the problem at present seems to be a disjointedness between the players and the manager, which is probably putting more pressure on Virgil to act as the middle man, which in turn is affecting his form.
It's not an excuse for the current situation, but it may be a factor.

I quite like this theory. Every manager, even someone as personable as Klopp, needs a certain distance from players and a good “middle man” that has both his trust and trust of the players. A small change like loss of an assistant coach can have huge consequences because lack of effective feedback mechanism means you can veer way off course before you even realize it.

Watching us this season definitely felt like that - we started as a great team full of confidence and little-by-little, inch-by-inch started going off course when the right path was so tantalizingly close. Slot tried to keep things steady when course correction was needed and still possible and only when it became painfully clear to everyone that we’re way off he went for sudden drastic measures, which semi-arrested the slide, but blew up the harmony in the squad.

For this reason I don’t blame Salah too much BTW. He was always going to throw a fit when benched; it was the manager’s responsibility to take him out of the team gradually and thoughtfully as his physical abilities decline rather than indulging him all season to the detriment of the team and then suddenly freezing him out, as if he’s the culprit. Slot’s poor man-management created this situation.