\n38<\/td>\n | 2.20<\/td>\n | 0.77<\/td>\n | 2-0<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n I understand that xG isn\u2019t for everyone, but it is a good indication of the underlying numbers that tells us more than a simple scoreline ever could. Whilst Liverpool\u2019s defensive frailties have been well documented, there have definitely been times when the defenders could have looked at the attackers and thought, \u201cAny hopes, lads?\u201d When we played Newcastle at home, for example, the xG was 2.85 to 0.86 and yet we drew the game 1-1. Against Burnley at Anfield, it was 1.65 to 1.08 but we lost 1-0. A makeshift defence is always likely to concede soft goals, but the attack wasn\u2019t makeshift and yet struggled to score far too often.<\/p>\n It Was A Freak Of A Season<\/h2>\nWhether you want to talk about the manager\u2019s mum dying, Alisson Becker\u2019s father dying, our main central defender being handed a season-ending injury with no repercussions to the perpetrator or discuss the ludicrous Video Assistant Refereeing decisions that went against us week after week, it\u2019s entirely fair to point out that the Reds are unlikely to endure a season like that again any time soon. The manager made some mistakes in his team selections once it was clear that we\u2019d be without any first-choice centre-backs for the remainder of the campaign, but he\u2019d be entitled to wonder whether the team should have responded better to the adversity regardless of that fact.<\/p>\n I also wonder if he might ponder whether he can work at reducing the extent to which his players are dependent on a crowd. Every club was without supporters for the majority of the season, yet Liverpool seemed to suffer more than most. J\u00fcrgen Klopp got his players finely tuned to work with the crowd, feeding off their passion and having it give them a little something extra in their play. When that was taken away, it seemed to take the Reds too long to adjust to the \u2018new normal\u2019 and that\u2019s the sort of thing that might give him pause for thought. Ultimately, though, we managed to regroup and not only gain a Champions League place but also to finish third, which will be a platform I\u2019m sure he\u2019ll enjoy building from.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It would be decidedly easy to look back at Liverpool\u2019s season as something of a failure, based on the fact that we had hoped to challenge for the title once again. Having taken Manchester City to the wire in 2018-2019 then overtaken them in 2019-2020, stopping them from being the runaway winners during our most recent campaign is the least many of us were hoping for. In the end, we finished seventeen points off them, which many might consider to be a disaster. Certainly there were some members of the punditry class that were busy suggesting that ours was the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1743,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1957"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1957"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1960,"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1957\/revisions\/1960"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andcouldheplay.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} |