I agree our terrible lack of fitness appears to be really hampering us.
We were promised amazing new training regimes and the players have reported we had an extremely gruelling preseason this year and it's not as though we've spent every minute of every game pressing.
Yet the players are plainly knackered in comparison to our opponents who seem to find a second wind with 25 minutes to go.
Is anyone able to explain in simple terms what has gone wrong?
Don't be so glib about it, if you can't understand it.
We messed up our periodization. Pure and simple. And we haven't been playing the possession game that would allow us to recover our intensity within the game.
On the other hand, after Christmas, all of those teams who are looking like thoroughbred racehorses now, will start to fade rapidly after the 60th minute in games. It's a trade-off between wanting to be 100% fit now, and hoping you can maintain it for a whole year of gruelling games - or surviving on 70-80% fitness now and building up to 100% fitness by mid-season and being able to better maintain that 100% intensity for the run-in.
In graphic terms, it's best explained this way:
Traditional English fitness training is designed to get players as fit as possible, as fast as possible. The drawbacks to this are, of course, the tapering off in the second half of the season, and the possibility of injuries early on
Periodized training involved a slow build-up towards peak fitness at the start of the most competitive part of the season - the last 19 games. The drawbacks of this, are the possibility of a slow start, and the possibility of fitter teams out-working your team. The benefits, though, are that you will be fresher in the run-in than most of your opponents.
As a comparison, Barcelona's training periodization involved two peaks, because they have a mid-winter break. So they always look fit going into the second half of a season because they essentially have two "pre-seasons". They also do almost all of their work with a ball and small sided games.
If you are to follow a traditional English plan, then it's best to have a large squad that you can rotate. Failure to do so leads to a lot of injuries especially in the second half of the season (O'Neill at Villa is a good example of how this can happen). If you are to follow the Periodized plan, you don't need so much of a big squad, but you have to follow the plan to the letter. My guess is that Rodgers fell between the two stools, and tried to make a compromise, and so far it's not working. However, we may still see the benefits of it later in the season when all players are at 100%