It’s becoming almost impossible to say the words “Liverpool center backs” without also including the phrase “much maligned” right in front of it. There’s plenty of blame to go around for Liverpool’s 5-0 embarrassment in the Premier League last weekend.
There’s lots of scapegoats for their having to settle for a draw, and failing to take all three points against Sevilla in Champions League this past week too.
Typically, it’s the back line that gets called out the most, with the central defenders the primary targets for criticism.
The next natural step is to then question Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp, for failing to resolve this specific issue in the summer transfer window. Anfield aggressively pursued Southampton’s Virgil van Dijk, but got derailed by a tapping up incident. LFC even had to issue a public apology over it, and you just knew that this pursuit was inevitably doomed.
Making matters worse, there weren’t any great contingency plans in store. Today was the weekly Jurgen Klopp news conference and he used the opportunity to justify both his current defenders and the transfer window agenda.
“I said if there would have been a solution out there we would have done it. There was no solution,” Klopp responded when asked about a plan B.
“I cannot speak in this country about any players I tried to get. Give me other centre-halves?”
“With all the history before I came in and since I’ve been here with how people talk about these players, you really should try one time to go out there and ask other clubs what they think about these defenders and whether they would like to pick them. You would be really surprised,” Klopp said.
“No. We watched all of them 500 million times.”
“Just to cool the people down, what if the new player doesn’t hit the first ball [like Dejan Lovren against Sevilla] and he makes exactly the same mistake? A mistake they all made in their life, but it is like ‘He is a £65 million signing, he will improve.’
“Why do you think the other one cannot improve? I don’t understand that. We want to make the right decisions. A big part of football and life is really putting faith in the people you work with, trust them, because they all can improve.
“They all can. They are all good out there but they are not that good that you say ‘yes they could help immediately.’ I had to make a decision and the decision was our boys are not worse than them.”
“What I see from all the questions, you start too early coming back to these things.
“For me it’s really difficult always to come completely on your planet, visit you and say ‘Yeah you’re right, there were five good options out there and we missed them because, I don’t know, we wanted to spend the money anywhere else.'”
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net and TheBank.News, which is partnered with News Now and Minute Media. Banks, a former writer for the Washington Times, NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com, currently contributes regularly to WGN CLTV and Chicago Now.
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