This is a really well-produced video on the early days of his loan spell at Stuttgart. Phillips is an interesting case – clearly Klopp saw something in him when we got him as a free agent from Bolton in summer 2016 and made him part of the training camp. In a world of increasingly fast and superbly athletic defenders Phillips seems like a hopeless outlier and had it not been for LFC's interest, he would probably not even been a professional player now. But there is something about him that Klopp likes enough to keep him around the training camps and Jurgen also used his connection with Stuttgart to arrange a bespoke loan opportunity at his boyhood club.
The season prior to that Stuttgart were relegated to the 2nd tier, sold highly-rated defenders Pavard and Ozan Kabak but kept most of their other star players such as Mario Gomez, Gonzalo Castro and Daniel Didavi and got easily promoted back to the Bundesliga. Looking at Phillips's stats, he has started 16 games in the 2nd Bundesliga, came on as a sub 3 times and was an unused sub in 10 – basically he was part of a 3-man rotation with former Germany U21 player Marc-Oliver Kempf and the aging Holger Badstuber. He was part of 6 clean sheets and a glance at the stats seems to indicate that Stuttgart generally conceded less in games where he was playing. He seems to belong to the same breed as the much younger Van der Berg – a tall, cultured, relatively slow centre-back whose lack of agility would make most scouts dismiss him outright, but Klopp apparently has time for such players. Subotic and Hyypia offer the model of success here – if this kind of player achieves excellence in all other aspects of the game, their natural limitations can be compensated for by tactics.
Can Phillips actually make it? He got his first big break in 2016 when injuries to our other CBs created a space for him in LFC's training camp, where he has impressed the coaches enough to keep him. Now with Lovren gone and money for new signings limited by the pandemic it seems like he could get served another huge slice of luck. It's been clear from Klopp's selections in the 2 friendly games that Phillip's is currently our 4th-choice CB, despite the promise of the youngsters Koumetio, Hoever and Van der Berg. Can he somehow grab this chance?
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