Liverpool boss Arne Slot. (Photo by PAUL ELLIS/AFP via Getty Images)placeholder image
Liverpool boss Arne Slot. (Photo by PAUL ELLIS/AFP via Getty Images) | AFP via Getty Images
Arne Slot has spent most of the season tinkering, but what is the strongest Liverpool XI?
Arne Slot has been tinkering with both personnel and formations trying to find the right balance for Liverpool this season.
The summer exodus meant that new signings were thrown in at the deepend with only Hugo Ekitike being met with universal praise in a dysfunctional team so far. Florian Wirtz has threatened to become more influential but has yet to break from consistently good performances to great ones.
The defeat to Man City soured recent progress and it also saw questions being asked, once again, about what the Reds’ strongest XI is after a record transfer spend.
John Barnes picks his best Liverpool XI
With everyone giving their opinion on what the strongest line up is, John Barnes has given his verdict on how Slot should send out his Liverpool team. The Anfield legend said of the engine room when speaking to Liverpool World: “Now, if you're going to have a midfield, attacking midfield players or midfield players who are good on the ball, like you have, you know, Gravenberch is not a real no. 6, and now there's Mac Allister, and then you're going to have Wirtz in there.
“When you lose the ball, as we did against Bournemouth, they're going to counter-attack and score from the edge of their own box. So trying to fit Wirtz in somewhere is problematic.”
Barnes is right, trying to fit Wirtz in the midfield is problematic because Liverpool’s best player this season has been Szoboszlai, who does his best work where Wirtz dominated for Bayer Leverkusen. Of the recent wins against Aston Villa and Real Madrid showed anything, it is that Wirtz is more than capable of playing on the left-hand side and being allowed to drift in field.
Is Mo Salah the problem?
Barnes continued to go through his selection and identified Mo Salah as being an issue that Slot has to solve: “But then also, you look at what's happening with Mo. Now, the problem we have is when we played before, the way the team was set up and designed was for Trent to create and Mo to score, yeah? Mo scored because we created for Mo, and Trent created.
‘Now, all of a sudden, with Wirtz and Ekotike and other players who want to be creative, it's not just about Mo scoring. So therefore, as much as Mo is not scoring as many goals, it's because we're playing in a much different way now. We're playing in a much more varietal way in terms of us creating from different areas, with Ekitike and Wirtz and people doing different things.
“So in that respect, we don't see as much as Mo. So getting that balance right, but I think that notwithstanding Mo not getting as many chances because of the way the team plays, I think we have to get this midfield balance right and the defensive balance right, because I think Wirtz has been very good. Apart from yesterday (against Man City), I think he's been very, very good.”
There hasn’t quite been too many cooks, but Liverpool have gone from Mo Salah being the main man to Wirtz, Ekitike and Alexander Isak all trying too hard to make things happen. Slot was on the right tracks, ripping up a successful plan just because of one defeat to Man City would only take Liverpool back to square one even if Salah has to adjust how he plays.
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