Saint Domingo
Player Valuation: £90m
Southampton had a very similar style to what Liverpool are trying to do. So did Tottenham. That's the difference with the premier league to the Bundesliga. There aren't loads of possession based teams that build from the back. I'd say there's probably only City, United, Arsenal, us and Swansea (and three of those teams do it too well to press against). Then you have teams who just look to press: Spurs, Southampton, maybe Bournemouth. Your counter attacking teams: Palace, Leicester, West Ham. Then your good old Sunday league long ball merchants to varying degrees of effectiveness Sunderland, Newcastle, West Brom, Villa, Watford Stoke etc. This super intense pressing only really works against teams that are poor at building it up from the back. Quite a few German teams play this way, similar in Spain and Italy, but in England not so much.
To be honest I really don't think this is a great step change for Liverpool, for most of the prem era they've played variations on this same style of ceding possession to the opposition, trying to hound them off it and capitalising on mistakes with Gerrard playing long passes to forward players. Rodgers tried to change it to 433 possession football but frankly they didn't have the players to make it work so he gave up and switched it back in every single season. Gerrard Henderson Lucas etc. all just love hitting long passes on the break then tearing after them. They've never done patient build up because its harder to do. Even Rafael with such players as Alonso still put 10 behind the ball, Torres upfront and would stay solid waiting for the opposition to make a mistake then try and play Gerrard to Torres as quickly as possible. It's an easier way to play for instant results, but as their years in the league have shown, you cannot win the title in the premier league doing it this way. You have to have that quality to break down the super stubborn teams that will not budge and ultimately that's what did for them in 13/14. Mourinho just set out his stall as a team with no interest in making the play and when the onus fell on Liverpool they had no idea what to do with it. Sturridge, Sterling, Coutinho, Gerrard, Henderson, absolutely clueless how to mount an attack from square one. It boiled down to Suarez trying to go through an 11 man Chelsea bus himself. That whole season they'd just picked off dross premier league sides who thought they'd 'play it on the deck' at Anfield (like us)which just amounted to suicide. As soon as teams stopped trying to attack Liverpool and just went back to sitting in the whole game plan fell apart which is why they all moaned hysterically at Mourinho, he'd just given everyone else the blueprint (one that Martinez has followed ever since)
Ultimately if you base your game plan on waiting for an opposition mistake and not having the ball, there will always be a time you come up against a team who is too good. That's what Klopp found in the champions league final v Bayern. When the opposition are that good you can press all you want, they can absorb it and play round it, then you are left with absolutely nothing. If Klopp's Dortmund played Guardiola's Barcelona the outcome of the game would only ever depend upon whether Barcelona showed up or not. If they did Dortmund would be absolutely powerless against such control of the ball, no matter how well Dortmund played. It is a proactive approach versus a reactive one.
At least Martinez is trying to install a proactive approach at Everton, to get on the ball and make the play. Whether we do it well or not is still very much in the balance and klopp's Liverpool will probably do what many other Liverpool teams have done and just bully us out of games forcing us into mistakes. But as we saw in 13/14 home derby, when we were absolutely red hot on form in that second half, that Liverpool team (even with their title challenging line up) literally had no answer to our waves of attack, we were too good for their press.
