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ECHO Comment: "Fears of Witch-hunt Against Liverpool FC" part 3


He won’t want to be pushed out with the fans hating him. He’ll go at the end of the season citing exhaustion and will leave the car crash of.a squad for the next bloke. No way an ego maniac like him is going to take the heat for their decline. He’ll want all the fans being misty eyed for him, how it all got too much for him, how the injuries were terrible and FSG didn’t back him. He’s not going to stick around so that it’s blatant to everyone that he’s messed up and the squad is unbalanced and he has no plan B.
He could just blame Jordan "The Cat" Pickford, I'm sure the British media would back him up on that.
 
I'll be honest mate, but those numbers look way off, or they are certainly way off what was reported in the Athletic. I don't remember the exact numbers, but we were much closer, and Palace seems very low as well.

We just seem far too low there. Gbamin has missed 27, Delph has missed 20+, James 15+, Coleman 15+, just on those lads alone we are well above the number they've given to us. Thats before you even get to Allan, Richarlison, DCL, Kenny, Olsen, Pickford, Doucoure, Gomes, Digne, Holgate, Mina etc who've all missed 5-10+ games. Before you're even trying youre at 150 games there. It just feels massively too low.

Would be interesting to see if their data source includes games projected to be missed, so VVD will be all games until the end of the season, not just games played without him. There is no information on data sources at all, unless its a bespoke count.

It also doesn't include injuries from last year, so Delph and Gbamin wont be included from us, which would put us at 54 games missed just from them two
 

Would be interesting to see if their data source includes games projected to be missed, so VVD will be all games until the end of the season, not just games played without him. There is no information on data sources at all, unless its a bespoke count.

It also doesn't include injuries from last year, so Delph and Gbamin wont be included from us, which would put us at 54 games missed just from them two

Yes I mean it looks a very poor data set to me, and if it's excluding injured players, which it appears to be, it's just not valid.
 
Yes I mean it looks a very poor data set to me, and if it's excluding injured players, which it appears to be, it's just not valid.

The dataset does have to be clipped from somewhere, but carried injuries seems to be an odd point. Do recurrences count? A player returns to full training and then breaks down again, are they counted, or not included? Its mad how they just haven't put any source data, as it could quite easily then be verified.

Truth is though, none of it really matters. All teams have been competing with the same challenges, some have coped better than others. That's just football.
 
not going to go over old ground on injuries. Yes, their number might be similar to some others, but they have had almost double the "matches missed" or "days missed" to the league average, along with a highly unusal concentration of those injuries, while it's funny and all, it's there in black and white.

The rest, I agree with you on & but If I was managing that squad and had the option to play the "it was a freak, look at X, Y, Z, everything went against us card" I would. The big risk with that of course is its the final card, if they dont bounce back (which I suspect is the most likely outcome) they are backed into a corner with no get outs.
The more they believe the excuses, the longer it will take for them to address the fundamental issues. So, I hope they continue to delude themselves.

For me, it all boils down to breaking from what appeared to be a winning formula, I. E. Buy players just shy of their best years, pump them up on peds and sell them off one by one to continue the cycle.

I'm not sure it was ever sustainable though. How many continuous were there ever realistically going to be? For how long did they expect the recruitment to continue to fill the pipeline of big profit sales?

...and how long did they expect a squad that was only 14 deep was going to remain injury free? They had a massive run of very little to no injuries and that papered over the cracks in terms of squad depth.

I personally think they will delude themselves for quite some time even after Klopp leaves, probably until the next manager treading on thin ice.

They have very little in the form of saleable assets that they can get away with selling. I am optimistic they will be a long time coming back. The issues they are having are not down to the defense, which has not been as bad as I would have expected.
 

Frank Leboeuf saying (on BT Sports 2) that RS should beat Fulham because they have better players. Souness school of thinking.
Some other bloke saying that 3 of their youngsters aren’t better than Fulham players but not saying a lot about the other 8.
Steve Nicol blaming the lack of a crowd. RS being affected the most, of course. Will it ever stop?
 
I think they're just saying a player is injured for a few days here and there now so they top the 'Days Without A Player Through Injury' Chart that has only become a thing in the last fortnight.
 

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