Gavin Cooney
IN PAYING APPROPRIATE respect to Crystal Palace ahead of the Community Shield, Arne Slot alighted on familiarity.
“Palace has exactly the same team playing for them today that played for them throughout almost the whole of last season”, said the Liverpool manager.
“We know how good or how smart it is to keep the team together because that’s what we did last season and we know the end result.”
If last season was an instance of Slot winning the league with Jurgen Klopp’s team, this is his first crack at English football on his own terms. And as he tacitly acknowledged before the game, evolution brings its own challenges.
Liverpool’s historic transfer binge is not yet over, and judging by the evidence at Wembley, its issues are ones of quantity, rather than quality. Hugo Ekitike’s first-half was a sort of anti-Darwin show: every touch was swift and purposeful, while his lay-offs were deft and his finish was unerring. Florian Wirtz meanwhile ghosted into tiny spaces and always emerged from them with the ball at his feet: the Premier League won’t have seen as graceful a player under pressure since David Silva. Jeremie Frimpong meanwhile scored Liverpool’s flukey second goal, but he and Milos Kerkez injected the power and pace that was expected.
But in spite of their outlay, Liverpool’s squad looks oddly thin. They lost all impetus when they had no non-Chiesa senior forward to replace Ekitike when he flagged, and nor did they have a senior centre-half on the bench should anything have happened to either Virgil van Dijk or Ibrahima Konate.
The downside of being so adept at selling players is the fact they need replacing: Newcastle should hold firm on their whopper valuation of Alexander Isak, because Liverpool will need to pay it.
This game also offered another potential point of intrigue to monitor at Liverpool over the next few weeks: whither Mohamed Salah?
Salah was uncharacteristically peripheral to proceedings at Wembley. He had only 10 touches in the first half – no outfield player had fewer – and one shot on target across the 90 minutes. He then skied his penalty in the shootout to set the tone for a few limp Liverpool efforts to follow.
Before you feel we are already indulging the media’s hunger for false crises: everyone is entitled to an off-day, especially a 33-year-old playing in what is still, at heart, a pre-season exercise. But it’s intriguing nonetheless to wonder whether Salah will be affected by the splurge that has gone on around him.
Last season’s glory was built on his astonishing level of performance, for which Slot deserved some credit, as he was smart enough to build his inherited team around the Egyptian. Hence Slot had Trent Alexander-Arnold remaining at right back to serve Salah with quick possession, and he had Dominik Szoboszlai standing nearby to do his defensive running for him. The result was one of the greatest attacking performances ever seen across a Premier League season.
Now, though, things are different. Their 4-3-3 is now closer to a 4-2-3-1, with Wirtz playing at number 10 and Szoboszlai playing deeper, and closer to the opposite side of the flank. While Wirtz will elevate everyone around him from an attacking sense, how might this change affect Liverpool’s pressing, with the tireless Szoboszlai now following the press, rather than leading it?
Secondly, how might Salah miss Trent Alexander-Arnold? Slot exempted Salah from defensive duties last season because he wanted to create as many one-v-one situations for his attacker as possible, from where Salah could dribble, shoot, or whip a cross to the far post for the attacker on the opposite wing. To that end, Alexander-Arnold’s wondrous long-range passing from deep was an effective cheat code, and so Salah unsurprisingly excelled whenever Alexander-Arnold was behind him. He averaged 1.2 goal contributions when Alexander-Arnold was in the team, while that halved to 0.6 in the 10 games Salah played without him last season.
One of the biggest question marks over Liverpool this season is how they adapt to playing without the right-back who split opinion as often as he did opposition defences. While they have assembled a phenomenal suite of attackers, their main task is to get the ball up the pitch to them. Look at how Szoboszlai, Wataru Endo and Alexis MacAllister struggled when pressed by the Palace midfield in the final half-hour: while Ryan Gravenberch was a significant absentee, teams could not previously feel so comfortable pressing so high on Liverpool, knowing Alexander-Arnold could float a missile over their heads. Now they need to harbour no such anxiety.
While Palace’s summer off the field has been fraught, with arguments before CAS recently scored to some grumbling from their manager as to the lack of signings, they have thus far retained the side that won last season’s FA Cup, which is a mark of success of its own. Who knows what is in store for Marc Guehi and Eberechi Eze, but there has been bafflingly little speculation around Ismaila Sarr and Jean-Philippe Mateta.
Even given the scarcity of Big Number Nines, Mateta is bizarrely underrated: again today he showcased his all-round game, continually discomfiting Van Dijk. While Ekitike showed great promise in the first half, France have generally thrived when Kylian Mbappe has been able to dovetail with a physical, all-round number nine, whom they have missed since Olivier Giroud’s retirement.
So call this our biggest pre-season prediction: Jean-Philippe Mateta will lead the French line at the 2026 World Cup. By which point we will have learned the true value of Liverpool’s expensive contortions in the transfer window.