Football News: Liverpool v Tottenham Hotspur

Liverpool v Tottenham Hotspur

What an insane game. Liverpool found it so easy to create chances going forward that it could have been (maybe even should have been) a cricket score, but their defending was utterly abysmal. It certainly did Liverpool a favour that, by the time Postecoglou sorted things out with a triple substitution, they were 4-0 up. It was very nice to watch Liverpool go forward with width and attacking verve. There was good movement, good delivery into the box and Spurs could not cope with it at all. Spurs are very narrow with their inverted full-backs, which Liverpool took full advantage of going forward and really should have added more goals to their tally. The constant rotation of Diaz and Gakpo down the left unsettled the Londoners’ defence and Salah was able to get Emerson isolated time and time again. It was finally a sign of some good tactics at work, rather than trying to force an unsuited system on the Reds players and wondering why they struggle.

The only thing that ruined this performance was the ineptitude of the defending. It was truly dreadful and masked early on by just how bad Spurs were. Once they managed to get some passes strung together, they simply strolled through a non-existent defence. Partly helped by Liverpool taking their foot off the gas a little after the 4th goal, but there is no excuse for such poor quality defending. It is basic stuff that is not being done. No one gets close enough. Everyone in that defensive unit just sits off and lets the opposition do their thing. The reading of the game is poor as well, allowing Richarlison to run in behind at will. If the midfield and attack are not able to smother the opposition with a press, then there is a huge problem. It is basic coaching of the kind that can be done in days. When a coach like Hodgson or Allardyce arrives at a new club, they will drill that into their team first before they do anything else. While I do not want to see Liverpool play the kind of football either of them do, what they show is that it is simple and quick to drill those basics into players. I just wonder why it has evaporated at Liverpool in the last few years. If Lijnders is the world class coach he claims to be, why can he not organise a defensive unit to defend?

He can certainly coach, that I am not disagreeing with, but Lijnders needs to get his feet back on the ground, stop thinking he is a tactical genius and work on some basics before moving on to trying to innovate. The…