Yes, 23rd time I believe. It's completely unsustainable. It hands the opposition encouragement and initiative every time. I'm convinced it's a big reason for the collapse. Opposition realized they could let us have 70%+ of the ball and we'd struggle to do anything with it. They also saw that we were incredibly lazy in first halves and vulnerable, so they went for it from the off, putting us on the back foot and having to chase. You can only do this constant chasing so many times before it saps you energy mentally and physically.
This is why I say the collapse is entirely on us. We've not been done over by better sides. We've gone out of our way to show our opponents how to beat us, so they've naturally obliged. Today, I was surprised it took West Ham as long as it did to go one up. I didn't even bother watching today. The script is the same, game after game now. We've surrendered the initiative, and once you do that you're in trouble.
The season is over for me now. It's just about giving Jürgen a great farewell, taking a break, then focusing on supporting us next season with a fresh slate.
I think when Klopp arrived he inherited a decent pressing team which had goals in it but was vulnerable defensively which he had to fix. He gradually improved us with some great signings and brought us that heavy metal football that we had all craved and no team would start matches faster or with as much intensity. However that came with a price and players appeared to become gassed towards the end of a game and indeed towards the end of a season. Klopp continued to evolve and adapt the system and introduced more control to our game and part of that was about the conservation of energy which is when you see lots of pointless passes between the back four but the improved endurance that came with that helped us to the title. We'd also moved from going all out attack from minute one to picking our moments based on our control of a game. We'd also improved massively both defending set pieces and scoring from them and were probably the best in the league at that time. For those couple of years the team looked invincible with all departments performing at a very high level and operating to a clearly defined system of play.
The evolution and tweaks to the system are essential to keep ahead of the field otherwise you become predictable and opposition sides will work out their own strategy to defeat it, we see it time and again whereby sides become a surprise package only to get worked out over time. Liverpool holding a very high line to catch the opposition off side on set pieces was a very bold innovation, aided by dare I say it the introduction of VAR but this can be defeated with clever late or unusual runs and a good free kick specialist. The very high line in normal play is also very brave and has never been without risk with a capable opposition team - that bravery and risk is part of the Klopp template and I think we've all been willing to embrace that given the exceptional football that we've witnessed with it. It can go spectacularly wrong when some of the jigsaw pieces are missing, think about the centre back crisis that we went through.
Sadly I think many of our jigsaw piece replacements are not of the same level and our best players are still from the class of 19/20, Nunez is such a strange signing for our system and Gakpo looks decent but not exceptional. We are predictable and I'm not sure whether the laziness that you mention is entirely down to us or the opposition setting up to stop us playing through them, nothing is on so we resort to the pointless passing between the back four, on the face of it it looks like we are in 'control' because we have long periods with the ball in useless areas of the pitch which the opposition is happy with. Even when we do start like a house on fire the opposition know that they only have to withstand the 10-15 minute burst, they know that they will get their own chances and they will invariably be high quality. Our risky system provides for those chances and they are usually high quality possibly because of a drop in quality of our personnel. Our chances on the other hand don't tend to be as high a quality due to blanket defending, having said that we miss far too many chances and that is down to the quality of the players.
I think since Klopp's announcement there has been what feels like an element of desperation from the fans, the players and the staff for us to win the league like as if it would be our last ever opportunity ever but guess what, Klopp leaving is not the end of the world for this club and life will go on, we play for the league title every year. That desperation is emotionally draining for the fans and must be affecting the players too, many look tight on taking chances. The flaws in the system are being exposed but those flaws have always been there and the team has just been better at managing them. From a personal point of view I rarely watch any game that doesn't involve Liverpool and its been that case for a while, I despise the cheating and refereeing that goes on in this league and there a few teams that I just dislike. I'd come to the conclusion that I might stop watching football all together after Klopp's departure but that has actually happened earlier than I expected. It was the City game that did it for me, I was left emotionally spent after that game and realised I just had too much invested in following the team and I haven't enjoyed watching us for a while - so why do it? I don't think that makes me fickle, I'll always be a fan and just need a break from the actual experience of watching us. I can always come back to it when I've recharged, I've had long breaks from it before post Hillsborough and things can change over time. The footballing authorities might eventually clean up this league.
