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Lovren & Sakho

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Individuals don't bother me as much as organisation. When we concede a corner now it almost makes me as anxious as it did during Roy Evans' era. I have no idea what the defenders are doing. You can take out Lovren and put in Skrtel. You can switch the right and left backs. You can alter the personnel how the hell you like. You'll still have an almighty mess there at set pieces. The instructions seem to be: 'One CB should stand next to their number 9 and hold him tightly around the waist. The other CB should stand next to his own partner and hold HIM tightly around the waist. The right back should stand inbetween two other attackers, pushing one or the other whilst looking anxious. The left back should stand close to their number 10, or just ignore him. Meanwhile, Gerrard should look after all of the zones'. It's no good obsessing over individual CBs whilst all of that madness continues.
 
You would expect better after paying £40M for the pair of them. Hopefully we'll begin to see an improvement with time, but some of their errors so far have been very basic and that's disappointing.
 
hmmmmm1 said:
Sakho is the guy on the 5 side pitch who you want the ball to go, so you can chase him down as you know a fcuk is always round the corner......

His poor control gave away the corner in the villa match and almost cost a goal yesterday.....
Click to expand...


100% of his completed passes found a teammate though so there's no doubt he's good with the ball.

Punk.
 
We have been leveling the same, round in circles, criticism of our defense for over two seasons now and the majority seem to think that the solution involves getting different/better players.
Except that the five players at the back we are now criticizing are different to the five that kopped our ire two seasons ago.
Which makes me think that the players are not the problem, or at least not the main one.
 
the count said:
We have been leveling the same, round in circles, criticism of our defense for over two seasons now and the majority seem to think that the solution involves getting different/better players.
Except that the five players at the back we are now criticizing are different to the five that kopped our ire two seasons ago.
Which makes me think that the players are not the problem, or at least not the main one.
Click to expand...


To some extent I agree, but not as much as if we'd actually replaced them with much better players.

We've never had good keeper or DM, I don't care what people say: they're not shit because of the system or the coaching. And most of the goals we've conceded have come from individual errors by one or both of the centre halves, too.

We should have spent £20m+ on the best keeper we could find this summer, that was a priority position. And personally I think Lovren was a bad use of £20m for the CB problem, too.
 
the count said:
We have been leveling the same, round in circles, criticism of our defense for over two seasons now and the majority seem to think that the solution involves getting different/better players.
Except that the five players at the back we are now criticizing are different to the five that kopped our ire two seasons ago.
Which makes me think that the players are not the problem, or at least not the main one.
Click to expand...

Yep. I was about to post the same. It's more than likely that a lot of this comes down to coaching (I'm sure Achterberg has more than a bit part, he should go back to Tranmere, about his level it seems).
 
the count said:
We have been leveling the same, round in circles, criticism of our defense for over two seasons now and the majority seem to think that the solution involves getting different/better players.
Except that the five players at the back we are now criticizing are different to the five that kopped our ire two seasons ago.
Which makes me think that the players are not the problem, or at least not the main one.
Click to expand...

Is it easier to teach players to attack rather than defend? Positioning is apparently hard to get into peoples heads
 
ILD said:
Isn't Fonte a natural left footer no?
Click to expand...

I've no idea, but Transfermarkt and Soccerway both list him as a right footer. FIFA 14 and Pro Evo soccer too for what it's worth. 😀

From the same football lineup site, you can see that he's also started on the right in their four league games this season.
 
I'm not quite feeling the love for Lovren.

I'm yet to see a spell in a game from him, where i thought he was impressive. I have had that feeling a lot with Carra, Agger, Skittles.....but not with Lovren and Sakho. Can we just give a call to Rafa and ask who to buy when we are considering a centreback? Even his failure (the Argie caveman) has turned out to be a world beater in Italy.

It has to be skittles + one of Lovren and Sakho for me. Lovren has got done for pace more often than I liked, and mostly because he has been slow to react to a danger. He needs to be a step ahead....not a step behind. His philosophy about defending seems to be "lets all push up" for any given situation. He needs to start using his brain a bit......that's crucial for someone who wants to lead the line at the back.
 
Lovren is ace and will be excellent for us. Was the 2nd best CB in the league last season.
Just give him more than 4-5 games before labelling him shite.

Its the one thing on this forum that bugs me crazy. Markovic, Lallana and Lovren. All labelled shite in September.
Its laughable.
 
Let's remember our club legend, Carra.

Shafted around the back four for YEARS before he made the CB position his own. Dubbed a 'utility man' by the media, he also infamously scored numerous own goals. Including a brace against our arch enemies, the scums.

Most people would wanna dig a hole and just die.

Carra just got back up, and became better. Ad infinitum.
 
My_Blood_Bleeds_Red said:
Let's remember our club legend, Carra.

Shafted around the back four for YEARS before he made the CB position his own. Dubbed a 'utility man' by the media, he also infamously scored numerous own goals. Including a brace against our arch enemies, the scums.

Most people would wanna dig a hole and just die.

Carra just got back up, and became better. Ad infinitum.
Click to expand...

But we didn't pay £20 million for Carragher.

These two may yet improve, you know, as Rodgers has a knack of bringing the best in players even the likes of Downing (he made Suarez a better player, too) but right now they are far from convincing. Last night, whenever the ball was passed to either of them, I expected the worst.
 
gkmacca said:
Individuals don't bother me as much as organisation. When we concede a corner now it almost makes me as anxious as it did during Roy Evans' era. I have no idea what the defenders are doing. You can take out Lovren and put in Skrtel. You can switch the right and left backs. You can alter the personnel how the hell you like. You'll still have an almighty mess there at set pieces. The instructions seem to be: 'One CB should stand next to their number 9 and hold him tightly around the waist. The other CB should stand next to his own partner and hold HIM tightly around the waist. The right back should stand inbetween two other attackers, pushing one or the other whilst looking anxious. The left back should stand close to their number 10, or just ignore him. Meanwhile, Gerrard should look after all of the zones'. It's no good obsessing over individual CBs whilst all of that madness continues.
Click to expand...

Are you basically saying our defensive problems are down to the coaching then?

Not having a go btw, you could well be on to something there...just wondering what you mean.
 
to be honest - I think we are making too much of all this and should give our defenders a little room to make these mistakes. If you look at the league - all around us I can see bad defending from the top teams to the bottom. I mean Chelsea did not cover themselves in glory with regards to their defending in the PL games they have played this season, and neither are Man City. there are two fundamental ways to play this game:-

1) you attack and be a bit loose with your compactness
2) you defend and wait for mistakes and then counter

Under GH, Rafa - we did point (2) - and in those days I actually believe that there were better defensive midfielders around. I think most teams have moved away from (2) now - unless they know they don't have the quality in which case they implement 2 with a double decker bus type defense. No I don't want our team to concede goals but I think we are going over the top (and a little arrogant too) to expect the opposition not to score goals when they have a good game against us. If for every goal we let in we have about 6 players defending at the time then yeah I would worry about the defensive shape about the team and its ability - but that ain't the case - we are an attacking team so we should expect to concede here and there.
 
moron said:
1) you attack and be a bit loose with your compactness
Click to expand...

That's a valid excuse if we were conceding more goals from counter attacks where our players are not in position, but that's not the case. Of the 6 goals we've conceded so far this season in the league and CL games, they break down as follows:
- 1 from a counter-attack (vs Ludogorets)
- 1 from a corner (Villa)
- 4 with our defenders and midfielders in position (3 vs City, 1 vs Southampton)

moron said:
... If for every goal we let in we have about 6 players defending at the time then yeah I would worry about the defensive shape about the team and its ability - but that ain't the case - we are an attacking team so we should expect to concede here and there.
Click to expand...

The last 5 goals out of those 6 have nothing to do with our attacking style but everything to do with us having unacceptable standards of defending. You can't stop every goal obviously, but we can do a better job stopping some of them or at least making things harder.
 
It's far too easy to blame the CBs for the majority of goals that we concede. The same could be said for every team from Real Madrid to Southport. I watched Bayern vs. City last night and virtually every CB made errors, Benatia, Kompany (3 or 4 times) or Demichelis (1-2) but because they got away with them there is not so much emphasis or hullabaloo - except maybe on their equivalent fan forums.

To expect a CB to be perfect for 95 mins is asking far too much. If they make 1-2 errors per match I would guess that would be closer to average for a top CB, and if their luck holds they will get away with most, or if they are capable of recovering their error (as often seems to be the case with e.g. Sakho) or the GK will save the day. Every now and again one of those errors will inevitably lead to a goal of course.

It is more important that the coaching re. positional sense, and how to defend different situations, is drilled into them .. and the rest of the team ... I'm far from certain this is not a major contributing factor to our above average (for a Top 4 team) goals conceded column. As I also stated above in post #67.
 
Where were all of the 'Oh, no, we've just signed Lovren, and he's shit' posts earlier in the summer? I must have missed them all.
 
While Sakho does look very awkward/clumsy at times, I think he's getting too much criticism thrown at him. I think he'll be a top CB for us. Lovern, on the other hand, I see as a bigger problem. He's slow. He's always ball watching. He doesn't anticipate anything. He was more at fault for the goal the other night than anyone else, even Mignolet.

I think a lot of the problem stems from mistakes in midfield, which is testing our CBs out a lot more than they should be.
 
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