''There is a trend for passing without penetration,'' he says. ''City were guilty of it at times last season, Spain were guilty of it in their first three games of the Euros and I saw Liverpool do it many times last season. They keep the ball at the back but they didn't know how to get forward. The truth is that British players are hopeless at it - they know they should do it but don't know how. They don't know how to create space upfront, or how to bring the back players in to flood the midfield. But they think they should try it and they're told to, so they do'' True, but don't want to dwell on it too much as I am looking forward to the new season and a new start were I believe we will have a lot of penetration.
Our problem last season was not one of PENETRATION (just look at the stats for opportunities created). Our problem was one of EXECUTION
Took the words right out of my mouth. Hit the woodwork more than anyone else, plenty of missed shots, and even penalties. Our penetration was great (That's what she said!)
simply put some teams score one then pass it about (spain) it s not the case they don't know how... As of TODAY lfc have the personnel to have a couple of options and game plans... the REALITY of LFC's plight is not this penetration made up blah blah press rubbish. It all boils down to ego and work rate in the end. you have to work as hard or harder than the opposition to give your talents a chance to make the difference. Last year LFC turn up thinking they were it and got handed their heads. we played for 20mins then fell apart. if we didnt score first in that 20mins we were not winning the games. the hard workers like wigan and swansea hammered us really. We MUST stop the egos and work damned hard on the pitch for players to justify wages. i think if we work for 90mins not 20 and have the balls to take gerrard off at 70mins cos he's tired then i think we can win at least 12-14 games at home and THAT plaftorm will put us in the mix. NOW HANG ON..... watching us so far i see two wide men and suarez and frankly suarez hangs round on the wings so i am thinking we are going to need someone getting in that box (gerrard) a lot to look like we are effective. I'm not so sure against prem sides having nobone i nthe box is going to yield goals... thats the concern i have.
True but to an extent it wasn't execution, either. If we were getting a high rate of off-target attempts then yes but hitting the woodwork, while going down officially as off-target, is as close as it gets. Were we trying too hard to hit a postage stamp? I don't think so because there were many MotM performances from keepers at Anfield last season who were saving balls right in front of them. So let's take a look at that law of averages because it's a tricky thing and it never stays the same. What's the average number of woodwork hits for a PL team per season? 5-10 seems agreeable to anybody I ask. Let's go conservative and say 10. We had over 30 wookwork hits so conservatively round that down to 30. That's 20 woodwork hits which wouldn't normally occur. Let's not assume they all went in. Split it so 10 go wide and 10 go in. That's 10 goals more in the season just from the law of averages at a conservative estimate. Split that over a bunch of games and it's a conservative 15 points more, turning draws into wins and losses into draws. That puts us 5th, 2 points behind Spurs just with the law of averages averaging out. Clearly Kenny had to go.
Also, on average...how many more home games do we normally win? things just didn't go our way at Anfield.
On average we win between 10-12 home-games. We were well below average with 6. Therefore the it was more to do with the tactics not being right that it was to do with pure bad luck.
