{"id":159,"date":"2015-07-27T16:45:02","date_gmt":"2015-07-27T16:45:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/?p=159"},"modified":"2015-07-27T17:06:16","modified_gmt":"2015-07-27T17:06:16","slug":"can-we-learn-anything-from-liverpools-pre-season-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/can-we-learn-anything-from-liverpools-pre-season-campaign\/","title":{"rendered":"Can We Learn Anything From Liverpool’s Pre-Season Campaign?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Pre-season is an interesting time of year. On the one hand clubs play games against different levels of opposition (sometimes good, sometimes not so much) and fans watch under the assumption that the results might mean something. On the other hand the players see it as a slightly more intense version of a training session, hardly giving their all and often not taking it entirely seriously.<\/p>\n
So what does it all mean? Does pre-season offer anything of any value to anyone at all? In the pre-season of the 2013-2014 season Liverpool won 7 matches and lost 1, scoring 21 goals and conceding just 2. They went on to finish 2nd<\/sup> in the league, missing out on the league title by just 2 points. In the pre-season for 2014-2015 the Reds won 5 matches (one via penalties) but lost 3, scoring 13 and conceding 9. They went on to finish 6th<\/sup> in the league, 8 points off 4th<\/sup> placed Manchester United.<\/p>\n Most people would say that pre-season means nothing and that you can\u2019t read anything into it, but is it any coincidence that Liverpool\u2019s best pre-season in recent years preceded their best league finish? Equally, is it shocking that a mediocre pre-season came before a decidedly mediocre league campaign?<\/p>\n Sufficed to say, then, that whilst you shouldn\u2019t use pre-season as a gospel for how a team will perform in the upcoming season, it can offer a slight barometer of how your team will do when the ball starts to get kicked competitively. Here\u2019s what Jose Mourinho had to say about it, \u201cPre-season is fake, for good and for bad. If you’re very bad, it’s fake, and if you’re too good, it’s fake\u201d.<\/p>\n Whilst the results themselves may only give us a slight indication of what\u2019s to come, we can still learn plenty from the pre-season games themselves. What formation does the manager seem to favour? Are some players being used more regularly than others? What tactics will the team use as the season commences?<\/p>\n Liverpool\u2019s pre-season so far suggests that Brendan Rodgers is going to employ one of either the 4-3-3 formation or else the 4-4-2 diamond that worked so well for the Reds in the 2013-2014 season, when they came so close to winning the league. He attempted to use the 4-4-2 diamond at times last year, but a combination of the heartbreak the players seemed to be suffering from after missing out on the title, the loss of Luis Suarez and the fact that Steven Gerrard didn\u2019t seem to have the legs to play the deep-lying midfielder role meant it never quite clicked.<\/p>\n Instead the Reds spent two thirds of the season playing 5-3-2, a formation that they hadn\u2019t really used in pre-season and that only worked intermittently during the course of the season itself.<\/p>\nIn Formation<\/h2>\n