Much of the chatter surrounding Liverpool ahead of its Carabao Cup final clash with Newcastle last Sunday touched upon the fact that were the Reds to triumph at Wembley, manager Arne Slot’s first piece of silverware as Liverpool manager would be the same as Jurgen Klopp’s last.
Liverpool’s success in the 2024 Carabao Cup ensured that Klopp signed off with a trophy in his final season at Anfield and Liverpool’s run to the final of this year’s edition of the tournament presented the opportunity for Slot to pick up right where his predecessor left off.
Not the Dream ending
Instead, Slot’s first Carabao Cup campaign ended not as Klopp’s did in his final season, but as it did in the German’s first in 2016: with defeat in the final.
And in truth, the contrast between Liverpool’s performances in the cup’s finals a year ago and on Sunday could not be more stark.
On February 25th of last year, Liverpool’s starting XI and bench was missing some notable names. Injuries and illness had forced Mohamed Salah, Curtis Jones, Darwin Nunez, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Diogo Jota, Dominik Szoboszlai, Joel Matip, and Thiago Alcantara all out of action for their side’s League Cup final with Chelsea.
That left Klopp with no choice but to turn to the likes of Jarell Quansah, Conor Bradley, James McConnell, Jayden Danns, and Bobby Clark, all of whom were under the age of 21 at the time.
Combined, they had made fewer than 40 first team appearances. But in an incredible show of maturity and bravery, those five players, having barely entered the primitive stages of their careers, fought their way to a well deserved victory over a Chelsea side with a squad value of hundreds of millions of pounds.
However, while Liverpool’s unlikely triumph a year ago pointed to a promising future for the younger personnel involved, its appallingly lacklustre showing against Newcastle on Sunday once again raises questions about the crop of first team regulars in the present.
Why has Liverpool’s organization and intensity taken such a notable dip in the past few weeks? Where was the intensity with which they have competed for most of the campaign on Sunday? Where was their fight? Where was, well…anything?
A Shell of Themselves
Liverpool were unrecognizable from the side that surged to the top of the Premier League and the Champions League’s league phase against Newcastle.
The Premier League leaders failed to establish any significant footing as they labored to even break out of their own half of the pitch.
With frequent surrenders of the ball and poor decision making, what has been uncharacteristic of Liverpool for the overwhelming majority of the campaign became its norm throughout the 90 minutes at Wembley.
Liverpool did not manage a single shot until after Daniel Burn, the tallest player on the pitch who the Reds left completely unmarked, headed the Magpies in front from a 45th minute corner.
By the time Liverpool produced a second effort, it was already down another goal. Federico Chiesa’s finish in the 4th minute of added time put the game within a goal of parity, but in truth, Slot’s side could have lost by three or four times the margin it did and no one in the Red half of Wembley could have departed the stadium with any complaints.
Above Newcastle by 23 points in the Premier League, Liverpool was several levels below its opponents on Sunday.
The instinctual explanation for how Liverpool could have possibly been so poor is fatigue. Five days earlier, nine of the players from Sunday’s starting lineup also started in the second leg of Liverpool’s Champions League tie against PSG. The majority of them completed all 120 minutes.
Unlike Newcastle, Liverpool must balance its commitments in both domestic and European competition and that challenge is now even greater in an expanded Champions League format with additional fixtures.
The Reds have now completed 29 Premier League fixtures and another 10 in the Champions League. Their struggle to consistently maintain their highest standards over the past few weeks is the inevitable result of such a taxing schedule.
However, while fatigue is one factor in what went wrong in the final, it is far from the only one and certainly far from the most consequential one.
Duelists no longer
Of all the statistics available, it is Liverpool’s success rate in duels that offers the most revealing insight into why it simply could not contend with its opponents on Sunday.
Liverpool won 37 of its duels in total to Newcastle’s 51. Of the duels on the ground, the Reds won only 46% and their success rate in aerial duels ended even lower at an appalling 32%.
Those figures represent nearly a complete reversal from Liverpool’s comfortable 2-0 victory over Newcastle at Anfield less than a month earlier when it won 54% of its ground duels and 64% of its aerial duels.
At Wembley, however, Liverpool’s struggles as a collective unit came down to the fact that its players could not win their crucial individual battles against their opponents.
For once in his Liverpool career to date, Arne Slot was out coached. It was clear that Newcastle manager Eddie Howe prepped his side to disrupt Liverpool’s usual approach of playing out from the back by having his side press high up the pitch.
Newcastle’s pressing forced the Reds to instead play long balls over the top, where it then made the superior height of its players count to win back possession right by, if not in Liverpool’s half.
Having guided his players to convincing victories over Xabi Alonso’s Bayer Leverkusen, Carlo Ancelotti’s Real Madrid, and Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City twice, Slot quite remarkably had no answer to Eddie Howe’s game plan.
The Dutchman has extracted the technical qualities of his players to spectacular effect since his appointment as Liverpool manager, but Howe’s prudent set up ensured that Sunday’s cup final played solely to the physical strengths of his players and not one bit to Slot’s.
Football is by and large more physically demanding in England than it is at this level anywhere else in Europe.
Slot took up the Liverpool role with no prior professional football experience in English football and for the first time in his nine months in the job, it finally showed.