RBM

Oliver Holtvis completely deranged when it comes to is isn’t he. Desperately wants us to return to our 1990’s period. Wasn’t he also a Hodgson advocate? Been massively behind Chrome Dome recently excusing everything he’s done and blaming everyone else. Probably even reckons his s*** smells like a fresh baked cinnamon roll.

Good morning all it’s 2019 and we’re smashing all comers in Europe, we’re the most feared team on the continent…. Then I woke up… enjoy some fascinating insides from our leader.

No shots on target

What are tonight’s mitigating circumstances then? when is enough enough?

Fulham at the weekend is going to be hostile

You just know if the bald fraud is manager on the final game of the season he won’t pick Salah out of spite.

Must be, he’s only concerned with himself, not Liverpool.

Bringing on Gakpo who’s f***ing s***e and Isaak who hasn’t played since breaking his leg instead of the the player with the third highest goal scoring record in our history. Weird k****ead he’s is. Arne Slot is a Blert!

Does a 1-0 defeat keep him in a job? Actually he could probably lose 10-0 without any repercussions

What is it we’re trying to do?

What system is this? It’s like school yard all play where you want

Sideways sideways sideways. Thumbs in the belt loop, turn, pivot

Liverpool FC 1* Did not enjoy, would not recommend

I would, but I’d also want him to f*** off as well

Pearce in the Athletic Arne Slot’s Liverpool future was never reliant on the FA Cup, but his reign is in danger of unravelling The setting was a plush executive box at Fenway Park, home of baseball’s Boston Red Sox, in July 2012. Liverpool’s principal owner John W Henry took a seat, having granted a rare interview to those of us from the Merseyside media who were covering the club’s pre-season tour of North America. Two months earlier, Liverpool’s Fenway Sports Group (FSG) ownership had sacked a club icon in manager Kenny Dalglish and subsequently appointed Brendan Rodgers as his replacement. In that 2011-12 campaign, Liverpool had won the League Cup and narrowly lost the FA Cup final to Chelsea but trailed home a disappointing eighth in the Premier League. “The FA Cup would not have made any difference had he won it,” Henry said bluntly. “I think it was obvious to every Liverpool fan that something was wrong and something needed to be done.” FSG’s attitude towards the domestic cups has not changed in the near 14 years since. Now more than ever, qualifying for the Champions League is viewed as far more important, given the revenue doing so generates. Winning the FA Cup would not have saved Arne Slot’s job this summer, in the same way as bowing out of the competition at the quarter-final stage on Saturday will not seriously influence how this troubled season is viewed by his bosses at FSG. However, it is the manner of the humiliating 4-0 quarter-final defeat to Manchester City at the Etihad Stadium that should set alarm bells ringing on both sides of the Atlantic. After a bright start, Liverpool capitulated, conceding four times in the space of 20 minutes either side of half-time. The fact that no further embarrassment was inflicted owed more to City easing off than any discernible improvement from the visitors. Slot’s Liverpool look so brittle, so broken. Rather than dig deep when faced with adversity, they wilt. The “mentality monsters” the Dutchman’s predecessor Jurgen Klopp used to talk about now resemble mentality minnows. The body language is so poor — too many players feeling sorry for themselves rather than taking responsibility. Dominik Szoboszlai bemoaned the lack of “fighting spirit” afterwards, and what was most galling about that damaging spell in the match when Liverpool fell to pieces was the inability to do even the basics. “If you tell me that from 15 runs City made, we didn’t follow them 15 times, then I don’t agree with you,” Slot said. “But if you simply look at the goals, I see runs not being followed, I see crosses not being blocked, I see duels not being won. Every single time we forget to block a cross or follow a runner, then it was a goal. No one will remember it, but in the first 35 minutes, there was a lot to like from my team.” The rot set in after Virgil van Dijk’s rash challenge on Nico O’Reilly allowed Erling Haaland to break the deadlock from the penalty spot. Florian Wirtz failed to track Antoine Semenyo in the build-up to the second goal, with Ibrahima Konate beaten far too easily in the air by Haaland. The third was even worse, with Joe Gomez inexplicably gifting the ball to Marc Guehi from a Liverpool throw-in. Two passes later, Semenyo was running in behind Van Dijk to score. The fourth saw Slot’s side plumb greater depths with O’Reilly allowed to waltz through and tee up Haaland to complete his hat-trick. What a nightmare start to a season-defining run of fixtures. A sense of trepidation will accompany Wednesday’s Champions League quarter-final first leg against holders Paris Saint-Germain at the Parc des Princes. Ousmane Dembele, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and Desire Doue will be licking their lips at the sight of such glaring frailties. The buck stops with Slot. The ease with which opponents are able to play through Liverpool points to glaring tactical issues. He’s been unable to find solutions to the problems that have dogged his soon-to-be-deposed Premier League champions all season and excuses are wearing thin. “Again, we faced a team that was outperforming their xG (expected goals) by a mile, and that’s happened constantly. We are always under ours,” he said on Saturday. “It would be nice if we could score a goal once in a while from the chances we create.” Yes, Mohamed Salah and Hugo Ekitike were guilty of missing big opportunities when it was 0-0, with the former’s miserable afternoon summed up by his failure to convert a second-half penalty. But City, who created an xG of 2.5 versus 1.4 for the visitors, were slicker, quicker, showed greater hunger and were more ruthless in all departments. Given how Liverpool have gone toe-to-toe with City throughout much of the Pep Guardiola era, the chasm that has opened up between the sides this season is alarming. Liverpool have lost the three meetings by a combined score of nine goals to one. That’s some fall from grace having done the double over City en route to the title a year ago. The most damning indictment of what they served up at the Etihad on Saturday afternoon was the sight of away supporters heading for the exits before the hour mark, after City went four up. You could hardly blame them, given how badly they had been let down. “We don’t want them to leave early. We have to perform better,” Slot said. “It is up to us to react for them and for ourselves.” This was Liverpool’s 15th defeat of the campaign in all competitions — their most since 2014-15, when the wheels came off Rodgers’ reign. That was the season that began with Luis Suarez’s sale to Barcelona, when they made a hash of replacing him with the signings of Mario Balotelli and Rickie Lambert. Saturday was the heaviest loss of Slot’s near two-season reign, but the fifth time in 2025-26 that Liverpool have been beaten by three goals or more. The mitigating factors have been well documented, but the manager continues to haemorrhage support among the fanbase. Some pointedly chanted the name of Xabi Alonso, the former Liverpool midfielder turned coach who is available after being fired by Real Madrid in January, as they made their way out of the Etihad. FSG wants to give the Dutchman the chance to put things right next season, but that position will be untenable if the campaign completely unravels in the coming weeks. That period straight after half-time here was the most worrying. Whatever Slot said in the dressing room during the break clearly didn’t hit home as Liverpool got worse rather than better. He was also too slow to make substitutions. Now it’s Champions League or bust. Bringing a seventh European Cup to Anfield in May seems fanciful. Securing the top-five finish his team need to play in UEFA’s blue-riband club competition again next season looks daunting enough with the fixtures they have left — the seven matches include trips to Everton (currently three points behind them in eighth), Manchester United (third) and Aston Villa (fourth), plus home games with Chelsea (sixth) and Brentford (seventh). Can Slot summon a response from the wreckage of such an abject surrender? Liverpool’s illustrious European history is littered with heroic tales. Given their current plight, they will need another miracle to get past PSG.

Joyce in the Times “Arne Slot’s latest problem: players picking and choosing moments to perform Capitulation against Manchester City shows extent of mental fragility and how far standards have slipped — response against PSG may decide head coach’s future” “Few are willing to give Arne Slot any credit right now, certainly not from within the ranks of an increasingly disillusioned supporter base, but perhaps he is more perceptive than it seems at present. A couple of days before Liverpool were due to receive the Premier League trophy at Anfield last May, the head coach used his press conference to effectively ask his players a question. “We have a challenge because it would not be the first time in history that we have seen a team win something and they change in attitude,” Slot said. “To be fair to these players, a few of them have already shown that if they win something, next season they are at it again. But there are a few who still have to prove this, because for a few this is the first big trophy they win.” Slot added he would know from the start of pre-season whether Liverpool could be serial winners. Of course, before the squad reconvened, the death of Diogo Jota was a tragedy that resulted in grief counsellors visiting the training ground when other clubs were playing friendlies. There is no clever metric to point to how much that” “Last season, Liverpool fell behind in 19 games in all competitions and went on to win six and draw seven. The loss percentage stood at 31.6 per cent. This season, they have conceded the first goal on 18 occasions in all competitions, recovering to win twice and draw twice. That results in a loss percentage of 77.8 per cent. Slot must find a way out of this mess to ease the pressure, but the chances of straightening everything out are far more complicated when his squad effectively confesses it picks and chooses when to perform. Jürgen Klopp occasionally had to rant at his Liverpool squad and, when he did so, he carried a fear factor that left no one in any doubt about the direction of travel. With a Champions League trip to Paris Saint-Germain looming on Wednesday, we perhaps know how their head coach Luis Enrique would deal with the notion of players taking shortcuts. After all, there is the clip from a documentary of him delivering a mesmerising speech to Kylian Mbappé, when he was still at the French club, asking the forward to work harder for the team and channel his talent more effectively. Skipping the basics? Not on his watch, and it doesn’t matter how big the ego is. Mbappé left, Ousmane Dembélé listened and became a Ballon d’Or winner. Slot is a different character, less prone to tub-thumping speeches it seems, but somehow he must rouse a dressing room that is not only lacking confidence but, according to Van Dijk, also “togetherness” due to the comings and goings of the past year. ” “The centre back had a day to forget at the Etihad — suddenly unsure of himself when authority was always his hallmark — and has come to dread the drill that has followed more matches than he would care to remember this term. It begins with a trudge down a corridor to a waiting media pack before he then attempts to make sense of another defeat on behalf of his team-mates. Van Dijk confessed he had become sick of that routine and said it felt like it had been happening for “almost 75 per cent of the season”. That, in turn, raised the question of whether the players are good enough, but that was batted away. “Their quality is there,” he said. “I’ve been lucky enough to play for Liverpool for so many years and the main thing always was the togetherness. ““Now, obviously, we are in a little bit of a transition so we have to find it. It’s still difficult to then perform each and every three or four days if we don’t have togetherness on the pitch for 90-plus minutes.” The Champions League has provided some respite for Liverpool this term, but the Parc des Princes has the potential to become a theatre of nightmares if there is any repeat of the period immediately before and after the interval, when Erling Haaland made hay. A perfect performance is required when everything about this team is imperfect. Should they return to Merseyside with everything still to play for, then what would that really prove other than it was all about the attitude all along.” .

Worst since Kenny rescued us from the Hodgson debacle, or Jurgen from Rodgers

By hanging on and on and on they’ve completely destroyed a league winning managers relationship and perception with the fans. He’ll be filed alongside Hodgson and Rodgers instead of Rafa and Houllier. Can’t stand him.

I’m not going to talk about one player then go and do exactly that sort of thing.. talks about 2 instead, shameless, blameless b*****d.

Waffle

Thought I could sit this out for a while and ignore it if he was staying, nope, I’m furious. He needs hounding out

Bet it isnt

You’d think an absolute embarrassment of 6 or 7 would be better now but won’t make a difference he’s Teflon