With four losses in the last five games Liverpool fans will be tearing their hair out in frustration .Liverpool have missed a lot of chances this season and Dalglish seems to think Liverpool have played “lovely football” this season. “It’s amazing,” said the manager of the criticism of his team. “You can pick out our league form and then you can look at someone else who has been knocked out of three cups, yet they take that as a good season for them. It depends how you depict it. We are not saying we were at our best [against QPR and Wigan] but there were circumstances, with three games in six days [seven in fact].
“We have got a problem winning games in the league. We have to educate ourselves and maybe we have to not play the lovely football that we have been.” Asked whether that meant he was considering deploying a more direct style of play, he replied cryptically “maybe we have to change our philosophies a wee bit” and declined to elaborate.
Liverpool have created enough chances to have scored more goals than they have this season although the quality of them hasn’t been of that high a standard. Liverpool already play a fairly direct style, by this I don’t mean punting it forward but playing the ball to the forwards and the flanks quickly so when Dalglish says he wants to play a more direct style we can only he means putting in the air more for Andy Carroll. In the early Games of his Liverpool career, for example against Braga this proved Fruitless and did not suit the players around him.
Liverpool should really be looking to buy another quality striker to play alone up front or alongside Suarez as well as deep-lying Playmaker, maybe somebody like Basel’s Granit Xhaka who can control games from deep as Liverpool fail to keep the ball when they need to e.g. The final minutes against QPR and Cardiff, Charlie Adam was never this player even if the Sky Sports soccer Saturday panel said so. Liverpool also need a clever direct winger who can come inside and interchange with other players and also go outside of a full-back and put a quality cross in.
All of these players would probably have Liverpool score more goals rather than go for a “direct” approach which probably not be very productive for Liverpool. Dalglish should also utilise his quad more rather than blaming tiredness. “That was [Jamie Carragher’s] third game, Steven Gerrard’s third game, there were a few of them had their third game in seven days and that is a long run, especially when you have travel in between. Maybe that is the price you have to pay for success but for us, if we want to be successful, we have to be able to handle it.
The best way we can handle it is if we have more players to choose from but at the moment we are not blessed with that.” .The likes of Jonjo Shelvey, Maxi Rodriguez and Sebastian have hardly played this season so it’s hard to see where Kenny is coming from.
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