drippin
Obsessed with "Mature Trusted Members"
Country: Finland
Try to understand football for a moment. What makes Liverpool so dangerous is that Firmino occupies both CBs with his movement leaving Salah and Mane mostly 1v1 with a fullback and a full head of steam headed towards the box. What we did in the first half today was essentially play without a striker because Emery had everyone hiding in the middle of the park and Auba and Pepe both coming in from the flanks. Pepe was actually taking up the more central postions of the 2 in the first half. Because of that, Robertson and Alexander-Arnold were free to set up camp in our defensive third and ping in crosses at will. It also ensured that Liverpool had longer spells of possession since they always had options in acres of space on either flank to play the ball to and retain possession.
If Lacazette starts then you force both CBs to account for his movement meaning that Robertson has to drop back in to mind Pepe and Alexander Arnold has to drop back in to mind Auba. Instantly you take away Liverpool's ability to camp in the final third like they did and instead of having Auba and Pepe isolated when we did try to counter, now they have Laca to play off of and a less settled Liverpool backline to attack. It's unbelievably basic stuff. Pepe by himself put the fear of God into VVD and Robertson. If he actually had Lacazette to interplay with as well as drag attention away form him rather than having to wait for Auba to come over from the other side of the pitch he'd have been ever more dangerous. It was redundant to play Xhaka and Guendouzi together. It added nothing to the defensive gameplan. Lacazette would have both made us more dangerous going forward and helped us to take away such comfortable possession defensively.
Good points, but we have to rotate. Like I assumed, Laca will be on the bench in at least some away games, to be brought in as a substitute and a force. Also we would have one less in midfield and we have been overrun there earlier and in counter attack. Now with two 20-year olds starting.
Personally I think he made the right choice, Pepe & Auba are very good at counter attack, even faster than Laca.