Liverpool is tired of itself – Newspaper Kommersant No. 166 (7367) of 09/09/2022
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The main event of the second game day of the Champions League was a devastating, with a score of 1:4, the defeat that last year’s finalist Liverpool suffered from Napoli. It is important that it continued and emphasized a trend that is very unpleasant for those who are worried about the English team. The new season of one of the most stable clubs in Europe in recent years started so badly that it provoked speculation about the first in a long time – almost since Jurgen Klopp took over in the middle of the last decade – really deep and maybe even a systemic crisis.
Chelsea’s defeat by Dinamo Zagreb and ensuing followed by the dismissal of Londoners mentor Thomas Tuchel, who found replacement in the person of Brighton coach Graham Potter, remained the uncontested central sports topic for British media resources for exactly one day. Now the status of the most acute and relevant with it is shared by a topic related to another giant – Liverpool.
He opened his Champions League Group A campaign with a match in Italy, compared to which Chelsea’s Zagreb misfire looks not like a disaster at all, but something like an achievement. It’s not even about the devastating score, but about the style of the game.
Napoli – of course, very strong, but still far from equal in terms of background, personnel opportunities to Liverpool club – tormented him mercilessly, like an outsider, and in fact should have won even bigger. But Victor Osimkhen did not convert a penalty and once hit the post, but Khvicha Kvaratskhelia’s shot, which dealt with someone else’s defense as easily as with the defense of opponents from the Russian Premier League (RPL) in those recent times when he played for Rubin, stopped on the “ribbon”. At the same time, neither the Liverpool players nor their coach Jurgen Klopp argued with the thesis about the beating, about the painfulness of the incident. And the absence of several players in the roster with health or tone problems – Thiago Alcantara, Naby Keita, Jordan Henderson, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain – did not occur to him to refer: the excuse would sound extremely false, given that that option too , who took the field in Naples, was insanely solid in terms of names.
And former English football celebrities – Jonathan Woodgate, Rio Ferdinand, Michael Owen, commenting on what happened for various television channels, invented simple cruel definitions for him: “destruction”, “shame”. There were no others to be found here. And following Klopp, they repeated that with such a careless attitude to the game, with so many stupid mistakes at a serious level, it is impossible to succeed.
But the most interesting thing is that they all had in mind not only a single match against Napoli. In fact, he continued a strange and unpleasant trend for those who are worried about Liverpool.
This club, shortly after the appearance of Jurgen Klopp in it in 2015, gained a reputation as almost the first in terms of stability among European giants. Every year – the hunt for the most valuable trophies, no obvious declines. In this sense, last season was absolutely revealing. Liverpool, along the way, was chasing all four prizes that were at stake for him. They managed to take two – the FA Cup and the English League Cup, but the Liverpool team reached the Champions League final, failing in it with “Real”, and in the championship of England they gave the gold to “Manchester City” “on the flag”, in the final minutes of the final round. And in the off-season with Liverpool, nothing happened that hinted at a fall. The summer campaign was calm against the backdrop of those carried out by, say, Chelsea or Manchester United, so the minimum of shuffling was more in favor of Liverpool: why go for them if everything is in perfect order with the depth and quality of the application?
However, Liverpool’s form so far does not at all correspond to ideas about its potential. But it suggests a deep crisis, signs of which appeared even before the collision with Napoli. In six rounds of the English Championship, Liverpool scored even a point less than Chelsea, who fired Tuchel – nine, having won only two victories in them: “hockey”, with a score of 9: 0, over Bournemouth and labor, 2: 1 , over Newcastle. The cost of both is low: the rivals are located in the bottom half of the table. In the rest of the matches, Liverpool had nothing to be proud of: they failed against Manchester United, broke the world with Fulham, Crystal Palace, Everton, teams in the “price category” below.
And describing the features of Liverpool at the junction of the summer and autumn of 2022, Sky Sports issued two infograms: the first illustrates the number of sharp counterattacks made by the opponents after their own losses, the second – the density in defense. In both cases, the subsidence in comparison with previous seasons is colossal.
And also Sky Sports cited the opinion of the well-known Liverpool defender in the past, Jamie Carragher, who was the only one who was ready to try to explain the salt of the club’s problems.
Carragher said that, perhaps, the whole point is just in the past exploits, which required the Liverpool team to keep the level of dedication, “physics” set at a gigantic height for months, almost without pause.
And now the margin of safety was exhausted, the cumulative effect worked, and the accumulated fatigue resulted in a collapse – into non-working pressure, into all these defensive mistakes.
A reliable recipe for how to get out of this situation, Jamie Carragher did not give. So did Jurgen Klopp, who, after the Italian collapse, limited himself to the phrase that made all the headlines that his club needed to “reinvent itself”. How – Klopp did not specify.
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