Mails: Mane? This Liverpool side is just knackered

Mails: Mane? This Liverpool side is just knackered

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Mane? Liverpool are just knackered
I’m a bit unnerved by the assumption that Sadio Mane coming back into the Liverpool team will suddenly make everything okay again. Yes, he’s a good player, and yes, he’s important to the way Liverpool attack. However, it would be remiss of me not to mention that in the few games before he left for Gabon, he was pretty average. The Everton game was a case in point, where he played poorly before sneaking a winner at the death.

Liverpool look devoid of ideas in attack, and this is down to more than simply missing a couple of players. I hate to notionally side with the Weird Fitness Egg, but this Liverpool team looks jaded. That probably shouldn’t be a surprise; seven games in 23 days would take its toll on any team. The issue is that Liverpool, perhaps more than any other team, rely on high-energy levels to win games. Their main weapon has been bludgeoned out of them by a tough winter schedule.

There is even precedent. Between 2 January and 9 February last season, Liverpool won just three of 12 games. 5-4 away at Norwich, 3-0 at home to Exeter (after a replay) and 1-0 at Stoke in the League Cup. Sound familiar? I guess the good news is they picked up after that, losing just two league games during the remainder of the season.

Whether they will pick up again remains to be seen of course. Momentum and the fear factor has been lost, and Everton, United and Southampton have laid the blueprint for how to frustrate this Liverpool team by staying tight to them in the early part of games. It’ll be interesting to see how they respond now the schedule gets lighter again; a much more important factor than the return of one player. Doesn’t bode well for a season that includes European football though.
Andy, London

…I’m not so sure the absence of Mane is the primary reason for the recent slump in form for the red half of Merseyside.

Granted that we will know for sure in a few games when he returns, but on current evidence, the tactics of Klopp has left his players all looking shattered.

Based on the stats seen this season on the players ground covered during games, I’ve suspected we might start to see them look jaded from March onwards, similar to what we seen of Spurs towards the end of last season. If this jaded scenario has kicked in already in January, it’s going to be a LONG end of season for Klopp’s boys.
Gary B (Shane Long’s on fire)

The lightest of heavy metal
Thanks January 2017. The month (26 days) where we witnessed Klopp’s brand of heavy metal football regress from Metallica to Kiss to its real identity…THIS IS SPINAL TAP!

Kind Regards,
Nigel McGee

Klopp out? Are you mental?
Having read through this morning’s rather predictable mailbox I couldn’t help but write in and give my two cents worth to the Klopp debate which is now happening.

Seriously, why do some football fans, of all teams by the way and not just Liverpool, completely lose their s*** after a few bad results? Why is Jürgen Klopp suddenly a fraud, a failure, a whatever, after a few bad games?

The hyperbolic nature of some football fandom is maddening, it really is. We went on a great run, and everyone was talking about Liverpool being possible champions come May. We are now on a poor run, and all of a sudden the whole world is coming to an end.

Jürgen Klopp went suddenly from being one the best five managers in world football, to being described as useless in the space of three weeks. There was even one bloke on 5 live last night calling for Klopp to be sacked!!

It is frankly exasperating. Stop being such INSERT SWEAR WORD petulant INSERT SWEAR WORD and get on with actually supporting your team.

Honestly, what fellow Liverpool fan, having been given the choice of being fourth in the league come the end of Jan, being only one point off third and two off second, as well as still being in the FA Cup, would not have taken that at the start of the season?

Furthermore, heaven forbid a football team should go through a period of bad form. I mean, how long have you been watching football exactly? It happens to some extent to every team every season. The job for Klopp and co now is to get out of this phase and start a new run of good results. He’s under a bit of pressure of that there is no doubt, but it will come, it always does.

Anyway my point is, moaning Liverpool fans, stop being dicks. You give us all a bloody bad name.
Sean (Freiburg), LFC

…Everyone complains about the short-term, knee-deep reactions in football these days – and yet everyone seems to participate in it.

Rather than bickering now about the relative quality of Liverpool/rivals, Sturridge/Kane, Klopp/Wenger, I’ve decided to simply bookmark today’s mailbox and get back to them towards the end of the season.
Oliver (…or if Liverpool beats Chelsea on Tuesday, because imagine the overblown reactions that will come from THAT.) Dziggel, Geneva Switzerland

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For Mailbox oldies
Seeing the name Gregory Whitehead made me smile and feel old at the same time. For those of you who are Mailbox Veterans, Gregory famously coined the moniker DimiFlop BerbaFlop for everyone’s favourite, hat-trick scoring-against-Liverpool languid Bulgarian…

Gregory, can we call him JurgFlop KloppFlop yet? Or just Jurgen Flop? Jurgen FLOP? Gregory? Eh? Amirite?!
Jonny, MUFC (they’ll be fine when Mane gets back)

Of sharks and sheep
A couple of weeks ago one of the sages on this site sneered and described the current LFC team as sharks compared to the sheep that made up the Spurs side.

At the time I disagreed but looking at recent results he’s right. They are a shark. An old tired shark moving forward without the ability to see behind them which is why right now they’re in the position to be hunted down by a Japanese fishing boat and their fin ending up in a soup bowl as a starter.

If Jurgen’s Flopps cannot handle the two games a week stint in January then they sure as hell (as recent seasons have shown) won’t be able to handle the prolonged league/Europe games which will see them back to their regular 6th/7th/8th final league place. It’s going to be a fun few months.
Israel, MUFC

Next year is when sh*t gets real
Mediawatch got me thinking about what the repercussions we might see from the title race this year, especially interesting is what happens to the two teams that finish fifth and sixth. What’s weird is that for the first time in ages I don’t think anyone would get the sack.

Liverpool – not making top four was probably a likely scenario at the start of the season, huge emotional investment in Klopp, very early in his tenure.
Man U – Mourinho’s first season, again huge emotional investment from club and fans.
Man City – ditto.
Chelsea – ditto (and it’s not going to happen.)
Spurs – in a similar position to Liverpool in that top four was probably aim rather expectation and they love their Poch.
Arsenal – You’d think Wenger would go wouldn’t you? I think you’d be wrong.

Sacking any of the managers (apart from Wenger not renewing) wouldn’t make a great deal of sense but failure to qualify for the CL would represent a massive underachievement for both Mourinho and Guardiola given pre-season expectations. What this all means is that this season is only really a precursor to the fireworks that will kick off next year when none of this seasons excuses will wash. I predict you’ll see two of those six managers in different jobs by summer 2018 but it could be any of them.

If Arsenal AND Liverpool don’t take four points off Chelsea in the next couple of weeks then the title race is as good as over and, even if the race for top four goes to the wire, this year is a bit of a bye for all the managers – next year sh*t gets real.
Matt, AFC (Plus if the two Manchester clubs end up in fifth and sixth they’ll be some very rich agents out there – £500m between the two of them?)

Wenger should go…
I don’t wish Wenger any ill – I don’t want to see him sacked but I really do want to see him go at the end of the season.

And quite frankly it’s because of this idea that he keeps us “near the top”.

Arsenal football club has won the league more times than any other London club. We’re third on the list of title winners – we have the biggest stadium in the world’s favourite city (going by tourist visits) – we should not be settling for being the near the top.

Chapman claimed he wanted to make Arsenal the greatest club in the world, while Graham got us winning titles and trophies with teams achieving way more than the sum of their parts. Arsenal were the last English champions to win the league only using British and Irish players in 1989. Our squad was awash with English players and yet none of them featured in the 1990 England World Cup squad.

Then you have Wenger, who has said he’s happy with second. His ambition for the club appears to be that it should be one of England’s greatest clubs and not the greatest and there’s the rub.

Oscar Wilde once said ‘we are all in the gutter but some of us are looking up at the stars’ or words to that effect. My problem with Wenger is he appears to be face down in the gutter and no longer looking up at the stars.

And you can call me spoilt and that I don’t know I’m born and there may be some truth in this but of the top six teams vying for the title, the only one I wouldn’t back in a million years is Arsenal and as an Arsenal fan that can’t be right – can it?
Graham Simons, Gooner, Norf London

Big-ups to Brendan
Often derided by these hallowed pages, last night Brendan Rodgers guided Celtic 22 points clear at the top of the Scottish Premiership having won 21 and drawn one of 22 league games this season. He has also equalled the Lisbon Lions’ domestic unbeaten run (now 26 games stretching back to last season). Blah, blah, blah, only Scotland, blah, blah, I could win the league there, blah. Celtic have played two games against Manchester City this season and got two draws and if it that easy why has no-one else done it?

This is the chap who took Liverpool to second in the Premier with 84 points and 101 goals (but they were a one-man team, they relied on Sturridge, no wait Sterling, no it was Gerrard, no Coutinho, no Suarez – that’s right the man banned from the first four games of the season and one in the middle of it, if you took his goals away they would have only scored 70 the boring chumps).

If you read ‘Living on the Volcano’ by Michael Calvin you will get some of the flavour of how Rodgers is viewed by his contemporaries. He is seen as a fantastic coach, innovative and forward looking. He is the first on the phone to offer support to new managers (being compared to Alex Ferguson in that respect).

Of course he says nuts things, of course he lost his way at Liverpool (remind you of anyone?) but don’t let that cloud the judgement that he is a quality manager. Gerrard said that if he had been Liverpool manager when Gerrard was 26 he would have won a lot more trophies. He has to have a future abroad, he is young enough and talented enough. When he was at Swansea they were compared with Barcelona. Barcelona have a vacancy coming up…
Micki Attridge

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Transfers I want to see no.427
Daniel Sturridge to Bournemouth (loan)

Bournemouth with Sturridge and Wilshere for the rest of the season would be a thing of beauty. Fragile, damaged, beauty.
Matt, AFC
A Hull of a story
We’ve got one of the great all-time transfer stories on our hands. Hull City, in very clear danger of relegation, will have sold both Robert Snodgrass (their best attacker) and Jake Livermore (their most consistent midfielder) in the January window. That means money for replacements, almost certainly hand-picked by Marco Silva. He says he wants four more players, and so far the two names they’ve been linked with are winger Leon Bailey and forward Nicolas Pepe, 19 and 21 years old respectively.

Add to that the purchase of Evandro, and the loan signings of Lazar Markovic, Oumar Niasse and Omar Elabdellaoui, and you have potentially half the starting XI changed in a flash, plus several new young players, with all the training groundwork this implies.

Talk about rolling the dice. If they stay up, this will be one for the ages. If they don’t, and don’t come back up quickly either, it’ll be a “what might have been” forever.
Peter G, Pennsylvania, USA

Some book recommendations
For those who enjoyed the wonderful Miracle of Castel di Sangro, I can recommend the similarly immersive A Season With Verona. Tim Parks spends the 2000-01 season following Hellas Verona, the city’s second club and frequent Serie A/B yo-yoers. A bit more detached than the earlier book, it takes a broader look at the rivalry with the larger Chievo Verona, the importance of the club to its hardcore fans and the issues with Italian football as a whole at that time.

As a Spurs fan, there’s a certain feeling of mixed enjoyment in reading Dream On (Alex Fynn/H. Davison). Following Spurs during the 1995/96 season, the book examines not just Spurs, but the Premier League and English football as a whole during a period where money was really beginning to change the game. While you have the typical 90s luminaries such as Harry Redknapp, Neil Ruddock and Eric Hall covered, I particularly remember the section on Ilie Dumitrescu and the issues he had settling at Spurs and moving to West Ham at a time when clubs were clearly still detached from the need to provide support for their multi-million pound investments.

Also, if you can find a copy, The Glory Game by Hunter Davies provides a remarkable warts-and-all insight into a season at Spurs in the early 1970s. The sort of access Davies got for this – in the dressing room, at the training ground, even on the bench for certain matches – simply wouldn’t ever be granted nowadays.
Michael C

…Am I missing something here? I’m reading through all the recommended footie books and not one person has mentioned the one book that stands head and shoulders over them all, the ‘Pride and Prejudice’ of football writing.

I’m talking, of course, about ‘Fever Pitch’ by Nick Hornby – if you are a football fan and for some bizarre reason you can only read one book then it has to be this one

I know it’s not not purely a football book – being as much about someone sorting their life issues out by means of watching Arsenal over many years. Perhaps on that basis you think that it’s for Gooners only – it really, really isn’t. Perhaps, as it is such a well known book which got turned into a somewhat soppy movie, all you hipsters think you’re too cool to admit to reading it. If so, don’t be such a bunch of dumb*sses. Any footie fan who hasn’t read this wonderful book is truly missing out.

The chapter on Gus Caeser alone is worth the purchase price – in my opinion it’s the finest passage of writing on football there has ever been.

As the book only really goes up to the early 90’s, I’ve always wanted Hornby to write a sequel to cover the Wenger years and reflect on the changes of identity the game and Arsenal in particular have gone through in that time and how it reflects in turn on society and us personally as fans. I’m sure, as all intelligent footie fans surely do, he reads this site – so how about it Nick?
Rob, Bristol Gooner (Come on Hull – laughing at Liverpool and Man. U fans simultaneously would be great!)

Oh Ant…
Sibbi the Icelandic Spur wants his team to look at buying Lemar. If There’s Any Justice he will get his wish, but It’s Not That Easy. Personally, I’m 50/50 as I think Lemar will need Time To Grow where he is, so maybe save it for Another Day.
Ant, CPFC (Sorry)