Liverpool FC Forum

I've heard from Brian in the works canteen that the board are meeting today to discuss 'things'. ?
Could be wrong but he's always been right before. He once predicted no one would like the sausages after they switched from Morrison's to Tesco ones and there was mutiny.

I'm going all out here... Brian in the canteen reckons he'll be gone by tonight.

Slot's sure been giving every excuse in the book these last few games but don't think anyone's buying it. I don't even watch the interviews any more.

I'm going to the Carrier Bags game on Wednesday. If he loses that one then he'll really be in squeekie bottom territory.

Slot's record so far this half season, a season where HE rebuilt Klopp's team to HIS liking, HIS philosophy, to suit HIS style of football that HE wanted to bring us...

POS: 6th        P:23    W:10    D:6    L:7    GD:+3    PTS:36

and not only that, we crashed out of the League Cup, will probably wimper out of the FA Cup and we're not winning the UCL playing like this!

It's all turned to sh*t in 1 half season. That takes some doing like.

Hypothetically speaking, if we had drawn those first 5 games where we played sh*te but scraped a 99min winner you can take 10 points off that tally, puts us on 26 points...  16th in the league.
Not good enough, Slot must go.

Margaret from the Canteen has been fired so hopefully food will be better now. Think it was the old tuna sandwiches that have been causing the issues.

Fwee Bwian!!

Reg wrote:Slot's sure been giving every excuse in the book these last few games but don't think anyone's buying it. I don't even watch the interviews any more.

I'm going to the Carrier Bags game on Wednesday. If he loses that one then he'll really be in squeekie bottom territory.

Carrier Bag 

Looks like Brian in the canteen is full of sh*t.

Dont Fwee Bwian!!

Carra got a point here

https://youtu.be/wh0ESUK4tP4?si=A-PLDSx62-W64_tK

Reg » Mon Jan 26, 2026 1:30 pm wrote:Slot's sure been giving every excuse in the book these last few games but don't think anyone's buying it. I don't even watch the interviews any more.
.

Hey Reg !
Gotta be honest , fk the post match interviews     I'm at the point where I'm not sure if I even want to watch the game .
Just close my eye's , fk about on you tube and hope when I check back in on the score there's been something for me to celebrate 

I'm still waiting   

Well if we win tonight we would cement 4th in the group stages and playing second (home advantage) until the semis. I’ll celebrate that at least. It’s not a trophy but it’s positive news. I don’t see why we can’t win the CL, we have as much a chance as any of the strong teams this year.

As Carra said we are more suited to European games than EPL. The Euro teams haven't got much of this set peice malarkey, also pace is lil slowed down which suits Slot. I think will beat Qarabag tonight.

Good price in the Guardian today, basically English clubs burn out in the EPL so can't perform in the later stages of the CL.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/20 ... SApp_Other

Premier League has the power but still faces reckoning with European giants
Jonathan Wilson

English clubs stroll through Champions League group phase but fatigue tends to take its toll by the spring

Tue 27 Jan 2026 20.00 GMT

Has there been a great game in the Champions League group stage this season? Probably not. Even if there had been, it almost certainly didn’t mean all that much. But that’s the way of the modern game: an extremely protracted clearing of the throat before the real business begins.

Uefa will proudly tell the world that only six teams have nothing to play for in the final round of games on Wednesday, but whether it was worth 126 games to get to the mild peril of Napoli or Club Brugge possibly going out, or the questionable thrill of finding out whether Tottenham or Atalanta will have to endure the playoff round, is debatable.

That the reward for finishing in the top eight is not to have to play two further games is itself telling, an admission that there is too much football and that having to play a couple of extra games is now regarded not as a revenue-raising exercise but as an imposition.

(left to right) PSG's Vitinha, Real Madrid's Jude Bellingham, Barcelona's Lamine Yamal, Napoli's Scott McTominay, Sporting Lisbon's Alisson Santos and Liverpool's Andy Robertson.
Champions League permutations: who needs what from final night of fixtures?

As tournaments have expanded and proliferated, so fatigue has become a defining force. It perhaps explains why, as Tariq Panja observed this week on the Libero podcast, only Arsenal and Paris Saint-Germain of the game’s elite seem better now than they were five years ago. And it probably explains why Premier League teams are so dominant at this stage of the Champions League but win it relatively rarely.

One image perhaps stands out from the group stage, which is that of Micky van de Ven running the length of the field to score Tottenham’s third goal in their 4‑0 win against Copenhagen in November, opponents hanging off him like Lilliputians trying to bring down Gulliver. That was an extreme case, but there were plenty of examples across the group stage of Premier League sides bullying physically smaller European opponents: Newcastle did it to Athletic, Arsenal did it to Atlético, Liverpool did it to Real Madrid and Chelsea did it to Barcelona.

To an extent, of course, that’s been true for at least 20 years, a reinvocation of the late 70s and early 80s, but with the advent of Long-Throw Britain, as English football has moved away from the Guardiola paradigm, it has become especially pronounced. Because Premier League clubs, en masse, are so much wealthier than the rest of Europe, they can buy the best players for their preferred model of play. That’s why, heading into this final round of games, there are six Premier League teams in the top 11, with only Manchester City outside the top eight who will skip the punishment round.

Given that level of domination, though, why have English clubs won only three of the past 10 Champions Leagues? A clue is perhaps offered by the experience of Italian clubs in the 90s, when Serie A was the dominant league in Europe. The situation was slightly different in that, barring the European champions, leagues were limited to a single participant until 1996-97, but between 1992 and 1998 there was an Italian team in the final every season. Only two of them won.

In part, of course, that’s the nature of knockout competition. There is a degree of randomness. But perhaps it was also the case that, come the final in May, the Italian team had been wearied by the exertions of the Serie A season in the way that, say, Ajax or Borussia Dortmund had not been by a season in the Eredivisie or the Bundesliga. That’s the issue English clubs now face.

It was striking last week how straightforward Spurs found their Champions League game against Dortmund compared with the Premier League matches against West Ham and Burnley that fell either side of it.

On the one hand there’s something viscerally thrilling about Djed Spence, pressed into service as a winger, tearing past Yan Couto every time he got the ball, but on the other it doesn’t feel quite right.

A lower mid-table Premier League side shouldn’t be able to treat the second-best team in Germany like a sixth-former playing against third‑years. Which is not to say that Dortmund in the Premier League would be in danger of relegation, rather that the expansive way of playing that works for them at home leaves them horribly vulnerable to the intensity of even a struggling English side.

When the quarter‑finals are played in April, though, Premier League teams are exhausted from a season of playing against other Premier League teams. That makes them vulnerable against the very best of the rest of Europe. It was notable that in the most recent Deloitte Football Money League, released last week, although there were six Premier League teams in the top 10, none of them is in the top four.

Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern and Paris Saint-Germain are able to compete financially with the best of the Premier League and by the business end of the Champions League, they have a significant advantage of freshness. That perhaps explains why last season Arsenal beat PSG comfortably in the group stage, but then lost against them in the semi-finals.

That example, of course, only underlines the futility of this stage of the Champions League. So long as a team get through, the group stage means very little. Liverpool didn’t benefit from topping the league last season, and it didn’t harm PSG that they finished 15th. All of this is essentially filler until we get to the real business of Euro giants against exhausted English clubs in the quarter-finals.

Thats down to the premier league having more competitive teams than any other league in Europe. The other big European sides dwarf their league counterparts in revenues as well so can afford much higher quality players and bigger squads that they can afford to rotate on a regular basis. You cant do that and still expect to challenge in England on all fronts.

All that's true but it's not exactly news. The Premier League has been the toughest league in the world for as long as I can remember, and playing in the most difficult league week in week out has always been the cause of fatigued performances in Europe, for all English teams.