Everything Everywhere All at Once
Liverpool suffered a shock 3-0 loss against Atalanta on Thursday night. What on earth happened?
You’ll read a lot about complacency on the back of Liverpool’s disastrous performance against Atalanta on Thursday night. You’ll read plenty about the Reds needing a new number nine, too. People will blame Jürgen Klopp for rotating too much. They’ll question Mohamed Salah’s form, and they’ll ask you whether you’d think about selling Luis Díaz this summer.
Liverpool don’t get beat very often, in case you can’t tell. Indeed, before their recent Europa League clash, Klopp’s men had lost just four matches all season, with all of those defeats coming away from home. At Anfield, Liverpool have been imperious, or at least that was the case before Gian Piero Gasperini rocked up on Merseyside.
The Italian is an expert at what he does. He showed up in my search for a Klopp successor when I first launched this Substack two months ago. Gasperini coaches a dominant brand of football, and he’s consistently overdelivered with good but not great ingredients in Bergamo.
Atalanta are different, and Liverpool have just suffered from one of the main features attached their playing style that makes them so unique. You can point at Kostas Tsimikas, Darwin Núñez or a lack of desire all you want, but there’s a football reason behind that dismal 3-0 loss.
This wasn’t the first time that Liverpool have struggled to come to terms with man-marking under Klopp. They lacked cohesion and seemed like a gang of strangers against Atalanta, and that can happen sometimes.
There aren’t many managers who still embrace man-marking as a fixed principle. It isn’t as popular as it once was, and that’s largely because of how easily it can be exploited by great players and relatively simple tactics.
Whenever Klopp comes up against a man-marking system, he always seems to encourage more fluidity than usual. If your opponents are going to follow you everywhere in their attempts to regain the ball, it makes sense to confuse them by switching positions on a regular basis.
By roaming around and constantly swapping places with your teammates, you’re making it difficult — in theory — for your opposite number to know who to track in any given moment.
Marcelo Bielsa is another manager who is wedded to man-marking as a concept. When he managed Leeds United in the Premier League, his game was known for being nuts. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it really didn’t.
In fact, in his debut contest in England’s top flight after receiving promotion from the Championship with the Whites, Bielsa faced Klopp at Anfield. Liverpool ended up winning 4-3 in a real blockbuster. And there was also a crazy 6-1 win at Elland Road that we mustn’t forget.
Klopp faced Gasperini in the Champions League group stages just a few years ago. Liverpool won 5-0 in their first bout against them, with Diogo Jota — who scored a hat-trick — playing in place of Roberto Firmino as a means of adding that extra bit of fluidity as he regularly rotated with Salah and Sadio Mané up front.
But Atalanta won the second match at Anfield by two goals to nil. If things go right/wrong against man-marking sides, they tend to go very right/wrong with not much in between. You end up unconsciously playing the game that your opponents want you to play, or vice versa.
Erik ten Hag is another manager who likes the idea of a man-marking approach, albeit not quite as much as Gasperini and Bielsa. And in Klopp’s first game against him in the Premier League, Liverpool were a mess.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Distance Covered to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.