damjan193 » Thu Oct 15, 2015 11:23 pm wrote:You know, I'm slightly concerned about this "gegenpressing style", as I'm not 100% convinced that it can work in such a demanding league as the Premier League and I'm also not convinced that running and covering distance is the best sort of tactics. If running and pressing will be our tactic than we can expect Milner and Henderson to be regular starters in central midfield. I personally cringe at that thought. Hopefully, Klopp has more in his locker than just running tactics.
But I know that Klopp also likes players that can tackle and defend intelligently, and Lucas fits perfectly for that. JK will just have to find the right balance in the team.
I don't think it's that simplistic mate.
Klopp needs to ensure he has the basic foundations of his footballing philosophy firmly entrenched into these players before he can expand on his theory and overall strategy on the football field. Without these foundations of implementing these running tactics and the overall fitness required of the squad, he can't do this.
We will soon find out who in the squad can play his style and who will be shown the door. I don't think any of us can 2nd guess at this stage who will go and who will stay, as it's fundamentally a new system that will take a fair bit of time to bed down. More importantly he still needs to identify which key players are central to this system and which ones he needs to go out and acquire, only then can we start judging him on how he is tracking.
After having seen first hand the transformation of the Chilean national football team over the last decade, I can see where all this can lead to. When Bielsa took the reins about 8-9 years ago he demanded that the players work on their fitness and accommodate their playing style around how HE wanted the TEAM to play. He encountered a lot of contempt at the start with "star" players unwilling to accept this but stood his ground showing them the door (early international "retirement").
The media, country and "experts" quickly turned on him. He simply didn't care. He molded the next batch of players coming through the youth system and got them playing his fanatical pressing style. Two players central to this system were Sanchez and Vidal. I have every belief that if they hadn't started their early careers playing under Bielsa, we would never have seen the top players that they have become today. Same thing applies to Klopp and the players he has molded at Dortmund that have gone on to become world class stars.
Because of the foundations that Bielsa installed into the national Chilean psyche from 2010 onwards Chile has gone on to play in the round of 16 of two consecutive World Cups, win a Copa America for the first time in it's history and find themselves in the world's top 10 countries. I have every faith that Klopp will replicate this sort of success at Liverpool. His only glaring weakness at Dortmund was finding a way of getting his players to keep the hard running, pressing and fitness game beyond a number of seasons. I think that has more to do with the fact that he lost most of his key players and was not given an adequate budget to replace them with other players central to his system though.
We are in good hands, let's just give him the time and money he needs to make us a power again, just like Bielsa did with the Chilean national team so many years ago.