So basically we really want Ian Rush, go look up some videos of him, it was called attacking from the front, now it's called pressing. And he was very f**king good at it, scored a shitload of f**king goals too, hence why he's our greatest ever striker
It's nothing new, just that Sturridge is too much of a lazy c**t to do it!!
Ian Rush played at a time when Liverpool was at its peak, went to Juventus and came back when things were nowhere near as bad as they have been in recent history.
That is the thing that is wrong with nostalgia, falling in love with history and thinking that the road to greatness can be paved by simply replicating the past. Rush, Fowler, Owen, Torres, Suarez, Sturridge are all great strikers, but they do not share the same play style. John Barnes was a fantastic winger, does it mean that every left winger that comes to the team must be a prototype?
That is a problem. We seem to have a desire to build something and to build it one way and one way alone. What happens if that methodology is harder to achieve? Do you persist or do you adapt? People want a striker that will score loads and will press, yet they have an issue naming one striker that they think is attainable.
Counter pressing was supposed to be the key playmaking tool for Klopp and teams seem to have figured out that sitting deep cancels it out, and not only that, but there is a propensity to gift goals on the other end. Goals from around the pitch have dried up, midfielders have found it an issue to create because their norm is to press and counter and forwards are finding less and less space to not only run into but far fewer pockets of space that a passes can originate from.
The cure to this? Find another striker than can press. It is Einstein's definition of insanity. Get a midfielder that can dictate, a midfielder than can create and reduce the reliance on pressing as the single biggest chance creation tool, have something you can fall back to if teams sit back. More and more, it is more about who scores the first goal. If the opponents do that, they sit back and it is had to come back and get a win. If LFC gets the first goal, then chances are that the other team will be forced to look for a goal and that opens up the field of play. That cannot be the thing that defines a team.
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