Sturridge is absolutely a bigger goal threat than Origi, no question about it.
Dortmund - Liverpool pre match thread
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Sturridge is absolutely a bigger goal threat than Origi, no question about it.
Yeah, but in fairness to Origi, ordinary as he is, our biggest actual goal threat based on goals scored is Coutinho, given he's our top scorer with 10 goals in all competitions.
Yes, that's right. It's April, we've played 49 games, and our top scorer has 10 goals.
We're gonna batter Dortmund...........2-1.
Pretty shite that. It would be a good contribution from Coutinho in a squad that was challenging, from his position. He should be like the
3rd/4th highest scorer in the team. That shows how shite we've been offensively and how much Benteke has failed (we've failed him too) and how much Sturridge has struggled.
With Hendo struggling for most of the season, we've missed his handful of goals too.
So who are our stop scorers? Coutinho, Firmino then in some order - Milner/Lallana/Benteke/Sturridge?
We lack goals though in general. I'm impressed that Coutinho has scored that many, to be honest, but we really need the same sort of total from Firmino and Lallana on an annual basis, as well as Milner, Henderson and Can chipping in with a few each. That's before we even look at the strikers.
EDIT: I realise Firmino has scored nine.
Coutinho - 10
Firmino - 9
Benteke - 8
Then two stuck on 7: Sturridge, Milner.
Then the rest, with 5 or less. Admittedly, Henderson, Sturridge and Ings would have scored more if they hadn't been injured so much, but still.
Utter, utter shite.
Our defense has barely contributed this season either. We definitely need more of a threat throughout the team, but we could do with adding two players capable of scoring regularly.
That's not a bad return from Milner, it kinda highlights heavily our shortcomings in attack, because the support players have done ok, but they've ended up being the main source of goals, which is nowhere near enough.
Yeah, Milner's provided a decent amount of goals and assists from a variety of midfield positions. But he has played almost every game, as far as I can recall.
Yeah, I think him, Ings and Henderson get a reprieve because they would have scored quite a few more had they been available all season and fully fit. A fully fit Sturridge would have got at least 15, Henderson say 6-8 and Ings possibly 10 (maybe a bit more or less).
As it is, though, only Milner and Coutinho are contributing enough. The rest should be ashamed.
Not if he can't be fagged to raise a gallop, he isn't. Talent-wise he's a bigger goal threat than practically anybody, but he's not been making it count.
Jesus
If Skully actually made music, then that's exactly what I would expect it to sound like. Obviously he'd have to call himself something different.
"Genital Wounding" or something.
"Mausoleum Soundtracks"
"The Suffering of Ill Children"
"Genital Wounding" or something.
"Mausoleum Soundtracks"
"The Suffering of Ill Children"
"Lock Up Your Dogs".
I remember times when we expected wins or draws when we went and played away against the likes of Real, Barca, Juve etc.
But yeah, a 2-1 loss wouldn't be bad but I'm hoping for a better result because I'm not sure we can beat them at home. So maybe something like 1-1 or 2-2, while managing a 0-0 draw at home.
I hope we win.
It's 11/4 for Dortmund to win and both teams to score.
That's a direct recording of the inside of Skully's head.
Interesting article on Tuchel, the next LFC manager. 😉
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http://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/apr/07/thomas-tuchel-borussia-dortmund-jurgen-klopp
Thomas Tuchel: the brilliance of Klopp’s shape-shifting successor at Dortmund | Raphael Honigstein
Raphael Honigstein
A little over three years ago, Thomas Tuchel decided that he would go out at the top. Literally. The then 39-year-old had just hiked 3,200 feet up a Swiss mountain with his Mainz 05 team to look at the sunrise as part of his pre-season preparation when it dawned on him that he couldn’t take his men any higher.
Tuchel had been promoted from youth to head coach two days before the start of the 2009-10 season without any prior experience at Bundesliga level. The former defender’s active career had seen him play only eight Bundesliga 2 games for Stuttgarter Kickers before a spell in the third division at Ulm under the maverick manager Ralf Rangnick – who opened his eyes to the novel concept of zonal marking and later encouraged him to start coaching – had been cruelly cut short by a debilitating knee injury in 1998. “I envied my Ulm team-mates for getting promoted soon after, I couldn’t take it,” he recalled.
That disappointment soon turned out to be the making of him, however. At newly-promoted Mainz, minnows with an annual budget of €15m, Tuchel succeeded by ignoring all football adages. You can only win with a settled team, versed in a specific system, they said. But Tuchel, an economics graduate – “I studied it to make my mum sleep better” – shuffled his side constantly, according to every game’s needs, and believed that Mainz could only survive in the league if they could play in a variety of styles, nigh impossible to predict for opponents.
“We didn’t want to break rules for the sake of it,” he said in a talk for a German thinktank. “We had to come up with ideas because we knew were inferior as a team.” Doing things differently included cutting corners: Tuchel forced his team to make diagonal runs towards goal, not play down the line, by changing the training pitch to a diamond shape. “If I tell them what I don’t want them to do, I’m a critic,” he said. “But my role is that of a service provider: I’m here to help and support the player.”
By the time he took a year off from football – just like his role model Pep Guardiola had done – a few months after his epiphany on the Swiss mountain, Tuchel had sensationally improved on Mainz’s seven largely successful years under Jürgen Klopp (2001-2008) by amassing more points than any team apart from the big hitters Bayern, Dortmund, Leverkusen and Schalke in five seasons, by taking them to the Europa League twice and setting a new Bundesliga record of seven successive league wins at the start of the 2010-11 season. “I couldn’t see how we could reinvent ourselves once more the coming summer,” he said of his decision to quit Mainz in April 2014.
During his sabbatical, he looked at other team sports, visited the Brentford owner Matthew Benham to understand the role of mathematics and stats in football and versed himself further in the teachings of Professor Wolfgang Schöllhorn. The sport scientist’s theory of “differential learning” contends that players do not learn by repetition and perfecting drills but by adapting their technique, intuitively, to a never-ending stream of problems. At the turn of the century, Schöllhorn’s ideas were adopted by the Barcelona youth coach Paco Seirullo, who later became Guardiola’s mentor.
Tuchel, who puts out every cone himself, has his players practising on slippery, extremely narrow or extremely wide pitches, makes them control the ball with their knees before passes and instructs defenders to hold on to tennis balls to stop them pulling the shirts of opponents. The aim is to make training so complex and mentally demanding that the game feels relaxing by contrast. “At first, we wondered what these things had to do with football but we realised quickly that they worked,” said Neven Subotic. “Some exercises last two and a half hours. But because they always change, it doesn’t feel like that”.
“Tuchel is not trying to reinvent football,” insisted the BVB sporting director Michael Zorc while the man himself professed modestly that he was only there to build on the “fantastic foundations” that Klopp had left behind. But the new training regime, coupled with a strict dietary regime (no more pasta from Dortmund’s best Italian restaurant at the training ground, only wholemeal products) and a stronger focus on possession football have already transformed beyond all recognition the unsettled, injury-ravaged team that had limped to seventh last season. Borussia have scored 116 goals this season, are unbeaten since the winter break and continue to breathe down Bayern’s necks, five points behind them, to turn the Bundesliga title race into the closest contest of all the big leagues.
“It’s a gift to coach this team,” Tuchel said after the 3-2 win over Werder Bremen on Saturday. The feeling is mutual. Important players such as the captain Mats Hummels, Marco Reus and Ilkay Gündogan, who all struggled in 2014-15, have refound their form as part of a functioning collective that can change tack and shift shape when Tuchel snaps his fingers on the touchline.
Dortmund were initially worried that the hardcore supporters might not warm to Klopp’s more introvert, far less vocal successor. At his last game at the Signal Iduna Park, the Swabian warned fans against making comparisons between himself and the new boss, for fear of “damaging the fantastic memories and hampering the fantastic future”. On Thursday night, however, the comparison might well turn out to be unflattering for the returning hero. If Tuchel can repeat the pattern he set at Mainz after succeeding and eventually bettering Klopp – who was in charge at Dortmund for seven years, just as he was at Mainz – at a second club, his reign at Westphalia promises some trophy haul, perhaps starting with a triumph in the Europa League. But Liverpool fans might one day enjoy Tuchel’s pioneering work too. “I’m so happy that Kloppo has finally made up his mind,” the Bavarian joked when Klopp’s Anfield appointment was announced in October. “Now I know where I’ll be going next as a coach.”
----
http://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/apr/07/thomas-tuchel-borussia-dortmund-jurgen-klopp
Thomas Tuchel: the brilliance of Klopp’s shape-shifting successor at Dortmund | Raphael Honigstein
Raphael Honigstein
A little over three years ago, Thomas Tuchel decided that he would go out at the top. Literally. The then 39-year-old had just hiked 3,200 feet up a Swiss mountain with his Mainz 05 team to look at the sunrise as part of his pre-season preparation when it dawned on him that he couldn’t take his men any higher.
Tuchel had been promoted from youth to head coach two days before the start of the 2009-10 season without any prior experience at Bundesliga level. The former defender’s active career had seen him play only eight Bundesliga 2 games for Stuttgarter Kickers before a spell in the third division at Ulm under the maverick manager Ralf Rangnick – who opened his eyes to the novel concept of zonal marking and later encouraged him to start coaching – had been cruelly cut short by a debilitating knee injury in 1998. “I envied my Ulm team-mates for getting promoted soon after, I couldn’t take it,” he recalled.
That disappointment soon turned out to be the making of him, however. At newly-promoted Mainz, minnows with an annual budget of €15m, Tuchel succeeded by ignoring all football adages. You can only win with a settled team, versed in a specific system, they said. But Tuchel, an economics graduate – “I studied it to make my mum sleep better” – shuffled his side constantly, according to every game’s needs, and believed that Mainz could only survive in the league if they could play in a variety of styles, nigh impossible to predict for opponents.
“We didn’t want to break rules for the sake of it,” he said in a talk for a German thinktank. “We had to come up with ideas because we knew were inferior as a team.” Doing things differently included cutting corners: Tuchel forced his team to make diagonal runs towards goal, not play down the line, by changing the training pitch to a diamond shape. “If I tell them what I don’t want them to do, I’m a critic,” he said. “But my role is that of a service provider: I’m here to help and support the player.”
By the time he took a year off from football – just like his role model Pep Guardiola had done – a few months after his epiphany on the Swiss mountain, Tuchel had sensationally improved on Mainz’s seven largely successful years under Jürgen Klopp (2001-2008) by amassing more points than any team apart from the big hitters Bayern, Dortmund, Leverkusen and Schalke in five seasons, by taking them to the Europa League twice and setting a new Bundesliga record of seven successive league wins at the start of the 2010-11 season. “I couldn’t see how we could reinvent ourselves once more the coming summer,” he said of his decision to quit Mainz in April 2014.
During his sabbatical, he looked at other team sports, visited the Brentford owner Matthew Benham to understand the role of mathematics and stats in football and versed himself further in the teachings of Professor Wolfgang Schöllhorn. The sport scientist’s theory of “differential learning” contends that players do not learn by repetition and perfecting drills but by adapting their technique, intuitively, to a never-ending stream of problems. At the turn of the century, Schöllhorn’s ideas were adopted by the Barcelona youth coach Paco Seirullo, who later became Guardiola’s mentor.
Tuchel, who puts out every cone himself, has his players practising on slippery, extremely narrow or extremely wide pitches, makes them control the ball with their knees before passes and instructs defenders to hold on to tennis balls to stop them pulling the shirts of opponents. The aim is to make training so complex and mentally demanding that the game feels relaxing by contrast. “At first, we wondered what these things had to do with football but we realised quickly that they worked,” said Neven Subotic. “Some exercises last two and a half hours. But because they always change, it doesn’t feel like that”.
“Tuchel is not trying to reinvent football,” insisted the BVB sporting director Michael Zorc while the man himself professed modestly that he was only there to build on the “fantastic foundations” that Klopp had left behind. But the new training regime, coupled with a strict dietary regime (no more pasta from Dortmund’s best Italian restaurant at the training ground, only wholemeal products) and a stronger focus on possession football have already transformed beyond all recognition the unsettled, injury-ravaged team that had limped to seventh last season. Borussia have scored 116 goals this season, are unbeaten since the winter break and continue to breathe down Bayern’s necks, five points behind them, to turn the Bundesliga title race into the closest contest of all the big leagues.
“It’s a gift to coach this team,” Tuchel said after the 3-2 win over Werder Bremen on Saturday. The feeling is mutual. Important players such as the captain Mats Hummels, Marco Reus and Ilkay Gündogan, who all struggled in 2014-15, have refound their form as part of a functioning collective that can change tack and shift shape when Tuchel snaps his fingers on the touchline.
Dortmund were initially worried that the hardcore supporters might not warm to Klopp’s more introvert, far less vocal successor. At his last game at the Signal Iduna Park, the Swabian warned fans against making comparisons between himself and the new boss, for fear of “damaging the fantastic memories and hampering the fantastic future”. On Thursday night, however, the comparison might well turn out to be unflattering for the returning hero. If Tuchel can repeat the pattern he set at Mainz after succeeding and eventually bettering Klopp – who was in charge at Dortmund for seven years, just as he was at Mainz – at a second club, his reign at Westphalia promises some trophy haul, perhaps starting with a triumph in the Europa League. But Liverpool fans might one day enjoy Tuchel’s pioneering work too. “I’m so happy that Kloppo has finally made up his mind,” the Bavarian joked when Klopp’s Anfield appointment was announced in October. “Now I know where I’ll be going next as a coach.”
"The sport scientist’s theory of “differential learning” contends that players do not learn by repetition and perfecting drills but by adapting their technique, intuitively, to a never-ending stream of problems."
This. One of the reasons I love soccer (yeah yeah) over American football, basketball, and baseball, is the radically non-Americanness of each player being able to decide what he will do, on his own, the entire game. Sure, there are methods and plays but the genius is in each player's head and body, not some coach high up in a box. The concept of success by adapting and solving an infinite number of possible problems on the fly is what makes even a 0-0 game exciting.
This. One of the reasons I love soccer (yeah yeah) over American football, basketball, and baseball, is the radically non-Americanness of each player being able to decide what he will do, on his own, the entire game. Sure, there are methods and plays but the genius is in each player's head and body, not some coach high up in a box. The concept of success by adapting and solving an infinite number of possible problems on the fly is what makes even a 0-0 game exciting.
Is it fair to say that Dortmund will be the best team we've faced this season by a distance? Or is the gap between them and the best teams in the Premier League not that big?
Yes, sir.
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