I once defended Brendan Rodgers on here after a bad result. When most were knifing away at him I said the players let him down. Once they cross the line its up to them to perform.
Most replies stated that he picked the players and they played as he instructed ( tactically not bad on purpose).
So now I ask who is to blame for our terrible form this month? Players or klopp? Players letting manager down or he picks the team and tactics?
Answer is a choice of 2 don't hide your answer by introducing owners, directors kitmam, coach driver or the building company that threw up the new stand!!
Results have been poor but I don't think performances have dropped nearly as far as it's being suggested Bri.
Plymouth, home and away was the kids basically. We can't use that as an accurate comparison to the form of the full first team for the previous half of the season. So in the sense I'd cross them off your list.
Today I can buy the attack on the defence, they deserve all the stick that's heading their way it was a shambles. The worst I've seen us defend all season and while Klavan takes the brunt of the blame Clyne and Lovren shouldn't be rushing off so quick and should shoulder plenty of it too. Not nearly good enough that and when you ask Klopp or players in this section then I hang it on the players for this performance at the back. It wasn't tactical that makes you completely misjudge things as they did, it was individual errors on top of individual errors that just compounded how poor each of them were.
United, I thought United were very lucky to come away with a draw, we created plenty in that game and if you listen to Jürgen's presser afterwards he explains it perfectly. They were reduced to hoofball with bogbrush up top and that for me says it all.
Southampton is the one performance that I thought deserved criticism and Jürgen has also accepted it. This is the low point and maybe all the games over christmas/new year caught up with on this one. I'm not making excuses because that wasn't good enough but when we think that's one game out of how many, then I can accept the occasional blip, especially in our first full season under Jürgen.
So Jürgen or players, well personally I think there's a huge over-reaction to us playing still pretty damn well in attack. Today we could have had 4 or 5 in the first half with 8 or 9 decent chances. We still scored 2 and had quite a few more chances in the second half. We're still top scorers in the league and we're still creating more chances than anyone else. That's where I don't buy the criticism at all, in attack it's not justified, in midfield I think the loss of Mane has actually disrupted this the most. Losing Lallana from the 3 has meant that we've got too many players doing similar roles and they're not complimentary at all. Can is looking a little out of his depth if truth be told, despite the odd good performance and I can see this being addressed soon enough.
Defence, well today go for gold, rip into them because they deserve all the get. Overall though we've been keeping clean sheets with increasing regularity and to me, apart from set-pieces, we've been getting better with today being the exception. So for me it's more a player issue than a manager.
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