Daniel’s Debrief: Everton 2-0 Liverpool

There is always a moment.

With Brendan Rodgers it was the FA Cup semi against Villa. For Kenny Dalglish, it was the Suarez/Evra situation. For Roy Hodgson, it was Northampton. For Rafael Benitez, it was taking Torres off at Birmingham.

For Jurgen Klopp, it’s tonight. And more specifically, it’s being 2-0 down, needing three goals in ten minutes and using his final two subs to bring on Kostas Tsimikas and Joe Gomez.

Who, in a combined 307 appearances for Liverpool, have scored a grand total of zero goals.

Zero.

This is the moment that my mind becomes made up that he doesn’t want this any more, he wants to be out of here and his head has gone.

Nine years of brilliance obviously shouldn’t be erased by a month of stupidity but from Old Trafford onwards, the manager has had an absolute car crash.

He’s managed in a way that if he hadn’t already been going, he’d have been sacked.

Words can’t really do justice to the insanity of this decision. To bring on two players who have no goal threat whatsoever to offer in a position as dire as this one is astonishing.

It’s the moment.

He has Jayden Danns on the bench. A player he’s trusted at other points in the season. He has Ryan Gravenberch, who literally scored a goal IN OUR LAST FUCKING GAME.

Why is a player as sub-standard as Tsimikas still getting charity minutes?

Whether he’s a better manager than Pep Guardiola or not, Klopp is nowhere near as ruthless and that’s arguably cost him a few extra trophies at Liverpool.

The fact is, it’s become more and more obvious that he made the correct decision to step away from management. It seemed surprising at the time but he will have known it was the right one.

The sad thing is, after everything he’s done for us, I don’t think any Liverpool fans would want him to reverse his decision and stay now.

Because we all know he’s come to the end of the road.

We’ve seen it. There’s always a moment.

It’s not just managers.

Players have their moments too, where you just know.

Gerrard gets sent off after 38 seconds against United. Carragher’s backpass against Zenit. Torres after the 2010 World Cup.

More recently, we’ve seen it with the likes of Henderson, Milner, Firmino, Origi, Lovren, Lallana and Wijnaldum, all of whom were very good servants to the club, but there came a point when it became obvious that the game was up.

I’m worried that we’re getting to that point with two Liverpool legends.

Mohamed Salah’s moment might be tonight. It might be Gary Neville remarking in the first half that he’s never seen Salah so quiet in a big game before.

It might be the three chances he not just misses, but doesn’t get any decent connection or purchase on at all.

What was always so special about Salah was that even when he had missed chance after chance, you always backed him to score the next one.

But for none of his chances do I fancy him tonight and I’m not sure he does himself either. 

His game has moved away from pure goalscoring in the last few seasons but so much of that is drying up too. It’s actually his pathetic loss of possession that leads to the set-piece for the first goal.

Salah is up there with Gerrard, Rush, Barnes, Dalglish, Suarez, Torres, Fowler, Owen, McDermott and Souness as one of Liverpool’s greatest ever and to some he may be the greatest.

But there’s a difficult conversation that needs to be had here. He’s got a year left on his deal, so Liverpool either need to sell in the summer, keep him for another year and let him go for nothing, or extend his contract.

The admittedly small - but ever-growing - sample size of post-injury Salah isn’t pretty.

He’s having pretty much no positive influence on games and arguably is having a negative one.

Andy Robertson. Nearly 300 appearances for this club and like Salah, has won everything there is to win and like Salah, has been a big part of that.

But fuck me, have his days been and gone.

I don’t enjoy having to write these things but he’s an absolute liability defensively. The number of times attacks originate down that left-hand side because he’s unsuccessfully tried to charge down a loose ball, and left vacant space.

No better going forward, either. Every cross he puts in hits the first man, there’s such little curve or technique on them. He misses - literally misses - a good chance when Trent Alexander-Arnold’s cross is something he manages to evade.

The decision to start this version of Robertson over Joe Gomez, in the form of his career, is a mad one.

We’ve got to be brutal and we’ve got to be ruthless. I don’t care how popular a statement this is, but if Klopp had Guardiola’s ruthlessness, we’d have at least an extra Premier League and Champions League to boast for this era.

If Salah and Robertson aren’t up to it any more, then decisions have to be made.

Ruthlessness isn’t just about the market though, it’s about killing games. I talked about this in the United and the Palace debriefs, because there’s so many examples of results against sides that we should’ve been beating that have ended up being so costly.

When you’re a goal in front, get that next goal. Don’t give encouragement. City have spent 588 minutes leading by two or more goals this season. Arsenal 668.

Liverpool, it’s just 380.

Every single game has had to be a challenge and has had to be grafted for. That’s a big reason why we’re dead on our feet now.

And you’ve got to be ruthless in pressure situations. 

Under Klopp, we’ve got four wins at Old Trafford and Goodison. Four wins from nineteen visits to those grounds.

Handling the pressure is an issue from the first minute tonight.

Liverpool’s inability to win any physical battles is so damaging. I’m amazed by the lack of awareness of how to play a Sean Dyche team. 

Be physical. Compete. Win your battles. Win fouls.

But we don’t do any of that and it means that pretty much every player loses out their 1 v 1.

A special mention here for Ibrahima Konate, who Dominic Calvert-Lewin gives the absolute runaround. For a defender who’s so primed for physical battle usually, he is bullied all over the place by Calvert-Lewin.

It’s one of the most dumb performances I’ve ever seen from any Liverpool team. After the Atalanta game, I said that they’d be using ask the audience on the first question on Millionaire.

Well, tonight they’d be getting the 99% question wrong on One Percent Club.

They’re idiotic from the start, pretty much every single thing they do is wrong both in terms of approach and execution.

We HAVE to take the sting out of it in the first ten. We have to quieten that crowd and look to impose our football.

But oh no. We concede a penalty that VAR gets us off the hook with, we lose every battle in the middle. 

And if there’s one thing you know about Goodison on a derby night, it’s that you do not concede first. 

And we do. And there’d been warnings. 

But we concede probably the most obvious goal you’re ever going to concede to this Everton team.

It’s scrappy, it’s messy, it’s everywhere and Everton react first to every ball. 

Everyone involved should be pretty embarrassed of their efforts in this goal but it’s worth saying that had Caoimhin Kelleher allowed that goal in, he’d be getting pelters. It’s not good enough from Alisson Becker to let that in.

Not that it couldn’t have been stopped at source several occasions earlier. Virgil Van Dijk, Alexis Mac Allister, Ibrahima Konate, Trent Alexander-Arnold to name a few. Pathetically clutching at thin air.

How many times do I have to say it before people accept the fact that Klopp cannot organise a defensive system?

He has always relied upon individual quality at the back and when your defenders are playing well, that’s fine. But when they’re not, it’s a structure that’s so easy to beat.

We actually react quite well to the goal and 30-50 is our only even remotely acceptable period in the game.

There’s chances. After the aberration at Fulham, we’re back to the familiar woes in front of goal. Yet another game where we create more xG than the opposition but don’t produce.

Nunez couldn’t finish his dinner. I never feel confident with him in front of goal and it’s not just the misses, it’s the fact that they’re all so similar.

He goes for power every single time but sacrifices any direction or precision.

If Diogo Jota reminds me of Ruud Van Nistelrooy, then Nunez is more Alvaro Morata.

Jordan Pickford makes two saves from him but I’d argue they weren’t the most difficult saves he had to make because they’re right into him. As long as his body can be stronger than Alisson was for Jarrad Branthwaite’s goal, he’s fine.

He’s nearly finished two full seasons at Liverpool and whilst some aspects of his game have improved, this one hasn’t and he’s another one who the next manager has a big decision to make about.

I was actually fine with the lineup, but it’s the tactics that I have an issue with. Can anyone tell me how Liverpool planned to score a goal tonight?

It’s not all on the manager though when over half of the team play without any courage or commitment though.

You have to give enormous credit to Everton. They looked like the team fighting to keep a title charge alive, we looked like the one meandering towards safety.

I’d like to omit Luis Diaz from any of this criticism, by the way. He is absolutely brilliant on the night. He’s the only Liverpool player who can come off the pitch and say that he worked his arse off. 

Not only did he work extremely hard, most of what he did was good as well. A genuine 8/10 in amongst a sea of 4s and below.

It doesn’t get any better with the subs. I felt the game was crying out for Wataru Endo with Mac Allister further forward but then he comes on and looks like the cereal box winner from September again.

Then there’s the second goal, probably the most Dyche, Everton and Calvert-Lewin goal you could ever imagine.

If I told you to close your eyes and visualise a goal scored by Calvert-Lewin, for a Dyche team, this would be it.

It’s fucking criminal and unforgivable from Liverpool.

It’s telling to me that our only good performance in the last month is Sunday, where there’s wholesale changes. The likes of Gravenberch, Jarell Quansah, Jota, Cody Gakpo and Elliott all do well from the start.

Klopp picks his best eleven on paper here, but not his most in-form one.

I love this manager and I love most of these players. They’ve given me and you and everyone so many memories. It gives me no pleasure to be disparaging about them and it’s important to acknowledge and respect their immensely valuable contributions to this club and this era.

That doesn’t mean it’s not time for change though.

Daniel