sangria

Ode to Roy.

We had that gameplan before we signed Henderson. Kuyt, Maxi and Meireles at the back end of the 10-11 season. Lucas gets it to Suarez as quickly as possible, then the other three pile into the penalty area waiting for a pass or ricochet. Kuyt scored a hat trick from a total of 10 yards from doing that.

Perhaps he should do a Hashim Amla then. The player I keep thinking of is Agger. We could have got 25m from Man City for him a few years ago. But we hung on to his class despite knowing about his injury issues, and ended up letting him go for 2m, after not many games between the 25m offer and the 2m exit. If Henderson's injury is chronic, and if someone offers us good money despite that, then I'd let go.

He didn't look too bad when playing in a 2 alongside Lucas.

I'd imagine that Geoffrey Boycott wouldn't want to play under anyone who wasn't Geoffrey Boycott. It would also be interesting to have seen Klopp deal with the old school 80s/90s German and Dutch national teams, with their multiple supersized egos. The shenanigans of the Dutch squads were always marvellous entertainment, but Matthaus and co were no slouches.

Did anyone else rate Gary Mabbutt? Lucas' qualities remind me of him.

Also note that, wherever he plays, any younger players that play alongside him tend to look calmer as well. Remember Rossiter against Middlesbrough last year. Or Spearing a few years ago for that matter.

I wish we could find a Maxi. Free transfer, not a top earner, and scored 15 in 57 league games during his time here.

There will always be bigger giants abroad if you're not Madrid or Barcelona. However, there aren't any massively bigger giants in English football than Liverpool. If our players leave, for the most part they won't be strengthening our direct rivals. If we get the success that Klopp got at Dortmund, it's a near certainty that our departing players, if they leave in their prime, won't be going to our direct rivals. There won't be the equivalent of Lewandowski leaving Dortmund to join Bayern. I wonder if Lewandowski was the last straw that made Klopp look abroad for another project.

According to that article, his sons became interested in Liverpool as a result of the Sahin connection, and got to know everything about the club. Klopp was interested enough at the start of the 14-15 season to know that touching the TIA sign was a traditional thing for Liverpool people. Perhaps the 13-14 season got Klopp interested. But from the article, it's more likely his sons' interest, deriving from Sahin's time here, that got him interested in us. Also, many people have pointed out that Liverpool are the equivalent of Germany's Dortmund, but minus one massive disadvantage; there aren't any significantly bigger clubs here that can regularly draw away our best players. If he achieves success here, as he did at Dortmund, any players that leave in their prime will be to foreign leagues, not to direct rivals. That may have been a significant factor, given his statement about making this a club that players won't want to leave.

Rodgers didn't have enough experience with any of the systems to judge whether a failure was a fundamental flaw or just a blip that needed some adjustment. There wasn't a single basic system with variants depending on game situation and opposition, but we had lots of different systems and styles that were vastly different and mutually exclusive. There didn't seem to be anything that Rodgers believed in, but it was clear what he didn't believe in, such as DMs, and defensive organisation in general. The best coaches, while conversant enough with other systems to know what to do, tend to stick with one basic system which they thoroughly know the ins and outs of. The connection was via former Dortmund player Nuri Sahin. http://www.squawka.com/news/klopp-my-sons-came-to-watch-nuri-sahin-at-anfield/486255

Didn't the same happen to Steve McMahon?

It's probably more draining to do the same running when you're in two minds about whether or not it'll work.

Because it ends before the lucrative EPL season does?

Put through by Benayoun IIRC. Also got a resounding crack in the nuts from a misplaced opposition FK, yet somehow managed to limp up field to keep the offside line as Torres scored on the counter at the other end.

Torus drive.

Italics have never succeeded at Liverpool. Hispanics and Germanics have a better record.

He's OTP (on the pitch).

It's guesswork like any other, although in his case it's educated guesswork (as he's in the same line of work as Rodgers), but this exchange with PhaseofPlay at RAWK suggests Lucas might be more valuable to us than previously suggested, or at least for as long as Rodgers is manager. PoP said: "The formation is acceptable. Rodgers, though, is an attacking coach, and he tends to use the 4-2-3-1 when he wants to defend. But he isn't seemingly comfortable sending players out to defend first. So it's not so much the formation he can't make work, but the way in which he employs it. As varied and flexible as he is with choice of formation, the one thing he would be better off taking from this season is that he should always send a team out to attack, home or away, hell or high water. Anything other than that and he exposes his weakness as a coach." I said: "Isn't defence a basic requirement for any coach, as you've said previously? I can see how, if this is so, a coach might have an attacking approach that might expose the team more than a more defensively minded coach might. However, if ability to coach defence is a basic requirement, why would Rodgers be exposed by trying to play that game?" PoP said: "I'm as genuinely flummoxed as you are. But what is interesting is that sometimes on coaching courses, the instructors will ask who would prefer to get an attacking topic for their assessment, and who would prefer a defensive topic for the assessment, and there is always an interesting split between who is comfortable coaching defending topics and who is comfortable coaching attacking ones. It seems to me that Rodgers is infinitely more comfortable coaching attacking football than defending football. Possibly because coaching defending requires more rote learning and repetitive drills of the same coaching point, whereas coaching attacking is more varied and exciting and is more fun for the players to learn. It's probably a matter of preference. Being a defender himself, it's possible that he expects defenders to automatically know what to do like he did, and he probably became more attached to coaching attack as it was different to what he experienced. A lot of ex-defenders are like that as coaches - Wenger was a sweeper, George Graham was a centre forward, for example. One is famed for coaching attacks, but with defensive weaknesses, while the other was famed for the stinginess of his defences, while his attacks left a lot to be desired." I said: "If this is the case, would someone like Lucas be even more indispensable to a coach like Rodgers, as someone who knows his job so the coach doesn't have to take care of it, as he seemingly isn't very good at it? If this is the case, how do you see us going forward in the summer if he (Lucas) does go off after all? Do we get someone else in who is effectively a self-contained defensive unit? Or do we get in (shock horror) a defence coach who will take care of the areas Rodgers doesn't seem to be very good at? Right now, if we have a manager who isn't very good at coaching defence as you say, but we are letting go of someone who's been very good at patching the areas he's weak in, and we don't get in someone else who is practically autonomous in this area (as we've not looked like doing during Rodgers' reign), the prospects look troublesome. I know that some say that attack is the best defence, but I'm not a fan of taking that to extremes." PoP said:"I've actually changed my opinion on the defence coach thing since I was last here. It's just mildly embarrassing to watch us make the same mistakes week after week, knowing that Rodgers has done defensive sessions for his badges, and knowing that Rodgers was also a defender. I can accept the trade-off between an attacking game and an open defence. That's a fair trade to me, because we are brilliant in attack when we're on our game. What I can't accept, though, is the same mistakes happening when we're camped outside our own box, and nobody is getting marked. My suspicion is that he doesn't coach the midfield enough in their defensive tasks - and in that case, Lucas is probably the most important player we have, and to lose him without replacement would be madness. He does actually work with the back four, but I don't think the midfield gets the defensive work in combination with the defence that every team needs. It's too separated, and it means we get situations like we frequently get, where the back four or three are defending a crossed ball on the 6 yard line, but so are the midfield, and nobody is picking up the late running player because we are defending as a flat line of 7 or 8, with no depth in front of the defensive line. He's a lot like Bielsa in that sense, where every unit gets its own tactical coaching focus, but it's never all tied together." So, if the above is the case, any holding mid we have will have to do their job effectively on their own initiative, based on their understanding of the role. Physical attributes come a distant second to the mental aspects. If Lucas goes, a replacement will have to work on that basis.

Someone did a comparison between Lucas and the most lauded DMs in the league, plus Gerrard and Henderson as a further comparison within the squad. http://i.imgur.com/pNxTm9m.png Defensively, Lucas tops the list in every category (both in total and as successful actions) except fouls committed, where Schneiderlin commits 0.3 more fouls per 90 minutes than Lucas. When all the contested actions are put together as "defensive actions", Matic and Schneiderlin average 16.5-17 "defensive actions" per 90 minutes. Lucas averages 22. The guy who posted the stats (before last night's game) concluded that Lucas must be a nightmare to play against.

That was why Lovren was such a puzzling signing. Our CBs at the start of the summer. Skrtel (RCB) Toure (RCB) Agger (LCB) Sakho (LCB) Coates (LCB) Ilori (LCB) With Lovren also being an LCB.

Surely Kieron Gibbs is the closest replacement for Oxlade Chamberlain.

La Scousia.

Team stats with our CBs and CB partnerships. Individually, Agger heads the list with 87% of games won (next best was Skrtel with 67%), 0.87 goals conceded per game (next best was Toure with 1.36), and 0.53 clean sheets per game (next best was Skrtel with 0.22). In terms of games played, Skrtel heads the list with 36, while Toure, Agger and Sakho are all around the 15 mark. My conclusion: need more Agger.

For all the goals we scored, that was my favourite moment of the game.