Great post POP, and as always the level of education (for myself) in your posts are much appreciated.
Welcome back.
If I can play a slight devil's advocate here.
We fail to win 2 out of ever 3 games where we have 65% of possession, yet that doesn't necessarily mean that we play worse when we have more possession?
I don't know if I (at least) said we played worse, but that we seem to be less effective when we have the ball. Our low scores bear that out. We're not failing to win BECAUSE we have so much possession, but because we don't have the players to do something with the huge amount of possession we have. Or rather, we don't have enough of them.
It may look like it, but looking at it another way, one could say that the longer that the opposition maintain a draw score or better (for them), the more likely they are to concede possession to us, and the vice versa if they're losing. It's not so much that we can't score when teams give us the ball, we're at the top end of the league when it comes to goals scored, it's that when we tend not to win more often than not when the opposition hasn't needed to attack us and have spent the game defending a 0-0 goal for the full 90 minutes. Every team bar the top 6-7 teams start off matches against us conceding possession to us and trying to play off dead ball situations and/or mistakes that crop up.
Absolutely. But the onus is then on us to do something with that possession, and it looks like - from the shots on target numbers - that our possession doesn't translate into increased shots on target (we generally maintain our average of 5-6 shots on target per game, IIRC). The only game we actually increased our shots on target in relation to our increased possession, is the Crystal Palace game, where we had 13 shots on target, but only scored one goal (Hennessey had a great game that day for Palace).
We are capable of breaking down teams that come to defend, but it seems when we score against a team that sets up to defend we also tend to dominate the game in the final scoreline.
I'm not sure the numbers show that. The games we failed to win in the list of high-possession games, are:
Bournemouth x1
Burnley x2
Everton x1
Hull City x1
Leicester x1
Man Utd x1
Newcastle x2
Southampton x2
Sunderland x2
Swansea x1
Watford x1
West Brom x3
West Ham x2
I think it's fair to say that the majority of these teams are defensive teams first and foremost, and they are also teams that we haven't dominated. Our biggest scorelines under Klopp have come against Aston Villa (under Remi Garde), City under Pellegrini, Stoke (who try to play football under Hughes), Hull and Watford (exceptions to the rule), Brighton, Spurs, West Ham (under Bilic) and Arsenal.
Additionally, the opposition will try attack more which lowers our possession, but they initially started off playing defensive and only started to attack after we broke them down and scored. I don't think we're a gegenpressing team first, after all we only tend to really see the virtues of it against 6 or so teams in the league. It's just easier to sum up Klopp's attacking vision as gegenpressing, but how many of our goals were directly attributed to that, and how many were some alternate use of triangles, attacking the empty space-pulling defenders away from positions via feints and dummy movements. I'm not versed in football terminology, but surely we play more attacking "X" system than just gegenpressing. Else, how can we explain our position of 3rd in goals scored?
Gegenpressing only happens in the defensive phase, though. It CAN only happen in the defensive phase, because "pressing" isn't an attacking principle. So yes, we form triangles and attacking empty space, but we can only do that because we've pressed the opposition on their attacking transition, won the ball back early, and attacked them in their unbalanced shape that all teams have in between winning and losing the ball. My point is that it looks like when the opposition don'e commit numbers forward, keep a disciplined shape, and give us the ball, then we don't have the opportunity to gegenpress, because WE have the ball. And in those instances, we need a bit more creativity to break down the defensive block, and currently we are short of a quantity of players able to do that. On our position of 3rd in goals scored - most goals are scored in moves of 3 passes or less, so gegenpressing will always increase goals scored in league football (international footballs seems to be different). That is why you look at older pressing teams like Wimbledon, Watford under Taylor, Middlesborough under Charlton, and Cambridge under Beck, and you can see high goals scored totals per season for some seasons. But that was also back in the day when every team wanted to get the ball forward down the wings, or play through the midfield and attack at every opportunity. It wasn't until the 2000s that the continental defence and passing game became more widespread among even lower division sides, so the pressing element became less effective (also, the loss of the back pass meant that teams could no longer use the keeper to rest - because pressing is very physically intensive).
I don't think the issue is the failure of gegenpressing, or the lack of an alternate attacking system to tackle deep laying teams. I think we're seeing Klopp's attacking vision slightly skewed (or tainted) because he's still lacking the perfect players that fit into his system. The failure is more the quality of the chefs cooking the broth rather than the recipe of the broth itself. If we had Keita in our last two games, I'm sure we'd be walking away with 6 points rather than two.
I'm not saying gegenpressing is failing, though. I'm saying that we're not even able to gegenpress in these games, because we have the ball so much. And you can't gegenpress in possession, it's logically and tactically impossible. So in those games, you need to play a traditional playmaking game, and we don't have enough players capable of doing that.
A year ago, how many of us were deriding Pep's "naive" attacking philosophy as lacking the ability to break down the old fashioned English "10 players in the box" defensive model, and having clear flaws in his defense. A year later, "poof", they're breaking records and dominating the league. Surely a combination of very talented players getting comfortable with his philosophy and the influx of new players that added dephs and pushed out players from the rotation that weren't perfect for his model.
I wasn't!
He needed better fullbacks and a better keeper. He went out and got them. The plan didn't change though. They don't concede too many goals when they're exposed now, because Ederson is a superior goalkeeper (the first position every new manager should sort out when they arrive. It's the most important position on the field). But Pep's model is not the same as Klopp's, even though they both use a pressing defence. Klopp's is built around the actual pressing itself. We know this, because he has said it. Pep's model is based around what happens when his team HAS the ball - positional play, using possession to allow players to get to their assigned zones, and then relying on individual 1v1, and then 2v1, combined with extreme width and switching the point of attack, to expose the opposition's defence, or push them back into their box. Like Rodgers, it's entirely based around the ball. Unlike Rodgers, the first thing Pep does is make sure the basics of their defensive system are learned first. Klopp's system is based around the opposition having the ball, and what his team does as soon as they win the possession of it. But the plan comes up against a roadblock when the other team say "here's the ball - break us down". Klopp's plan doesn't have an answer to that, and we don't have enough players capable of providing the answers, although Keita is a step in the right direction (but only if we don't lose Coutinho).
Klopp does needs time, I'm convinced his vision, gegenpressing et al, is fine just as it is.
He needs time. But he also needs players. Success isn't 100% on the player side, or 100% on the manager side. It's always 50/50 for both. We have a good manager, with a good plan. But we need good players that suit the plan, in all it's facets, for sure. But until we get them, we're going to run into more problems when teams let us have the ball more than we really "need" it, I reckon.