Let's please not forget that the football showcased at the WC is unlikely to ever meet the standards of club football. There are so many different styles of playing the game, from the overall general outlook to individual roles and directives within that set up.
Clubs have so much time to fine-tune tactics and the connections between players through the course of a season (and pre-season), while national teams just don't come close. Personally, I usually feel like I'm watching a Lite version of the game at the WC, and so it's hard to judge players on all that they're capable of bringing to a new club team from watching these games.
Especially if that club is Liverpool. We are a system team. Most players, even great ones, just aren't suitable to ours and would actually compromise it. So when watching the WC, we're kind of limited to appreciating qualities like individual skill and determination/character.
Many "good" players just won't shine in this environment. Either from being limited to a system that stifles their skills, from having poor self-motivation for this occasion, or from being in an unskilled team or one full of players lacking character/drive.
Many average players will shine because they lift for such an occasion. Or their system allows the freedom/opportunities to showcase individual skills. We all know of many players signed by clubs after a positive WC (including ours) who don't have the focus/drive to play great football week in, week out. We all know of teams of determined but average players who knock out a complacent team of stars.
So many great players have been knocked out of the tournament so far, and while some may have genuine grievances with teammates and/or tactical approach for such, many showed a far from acceptable hunger to take control of games and win. Some of these just seem to confirm suspicions about their characters when faced with adversity (or complacency within their team), while others you wonder if long season after long season has just taken its toll on body and mind for this tournament.
So it's often a fine line where praise perhaps should be limited or criticism restrained. There are plenty of players we'd confidently sign in a heartbeat who haven't had an amazing WC to date, who we know would step into our club with determination, work hard, and create within our system.
That's what is important for us, not a player capable of one or two showy performances with fresh legs in teams that don't press hard. Not a player who needs to be the focal point of a team, who can then be tactically eliminated by the better opposing managers, leaving us with nothing.
I'd take our system with our players over the chance of having a Messi or Ronaldo anyday. Barcelona won La Liga and Madrid won the CL but damn was their football boring more often than not this year. We won nothing last year, but I was entertained throughout the whole year. As much as I'm keen for us to win the PL, I don't think I'd have been motivated to sit through every game at stupid o'clock over here in Australia if we had to play like, say, Man Utd in order to do so. I'm a bigger fan of football than winning haha.
So yeah, give me hard-working, determined players with strong transitional capabilities anyday over these 100+ mil stars.
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