Tincanalley
Turns player names into a crappy conversation
Another factor (or another way of saying it) is that for heavy metal football you need young guys. You need amazing fitness (and all the help you can get!). So the physios and docs and training regimen comes into play. I remember once Neville and Keane saying that a big ‘secret’ of the 90’s SAF days was being fitter than the rest. I was struck against Real how much Pool ran out of steam. The 50/50 balls suddenly went from Red to White, even before half-time. . In the end Modrich was embarrassing a guy half his age. That’s a serious problem for Klopp. More patient styles like Real have a longer shelf life. Jurgen needs a new challenge. Liverpool need a patient rebuild in a different model. Klopp just burned them out. It’s in his face, his tired smile.It's not an issue that he's pretty one sided tactically because it's a brilliant tactic. The problem is he utterly failed in replacing that engine room constantly with fresh legs. Thiago seemed a shrewd buy if you think in general terms but he's a completely different player from Wijnaldum and was never really suited towards their style. Keita has been awful and a crock for years. Elliot isn't even a midfielder. Carvalho was pointless. So he's still playing a bunch of players from that 2018 team 5 years later and they don't have the legs they did then, and thus you get performances last night where they blow their load in 20 minutes but eventually wear down and get circles played around them as they get exposed.
SAF sustained success for so many years not only because he was a bit more versatile, but because he constantly refreshed his squad and was always willing to deal with perhaps a year or two of growing pains blooding in the new signings. Klopp notoriously hated rotation anyways, and his style is harder on a footballers body than any other team in the world. So they now have a midfield of spent footballers and Bajtetic who's just 18 and should never have to be relied upon against fecking Real Madrid with as little experience as he has.
It's pretty clear to me that Liverpool's talent ID was more a product of their backroom staff/data dept/Edwards and less Klopp. Many of them are gone, and you can see in recent windows it's sort of a scattergun approach to signings (chasing Bellingham and Tchoumeini without backups, Nunez for a huge fee, Gakpo, Carvalho)