Arne Slot, Mo Salah and more widely Liverpool have had to endure negativity recently, but in football results quickly change a narrative…
CULTURE wars.
They’re not funny or clever. Mostly because they involve people who are neither funny nor clever doing unfunny, unclever things.
You can find them everywhere. They can be in the form of flags, billionaires or the pound shop Enoch Powell of today that is Robert Jenrick, chasing people around train stations asking if they’ve paid a fare.
Do they exist in football? You can argue they might. Not to quite as sinister a degree as general society, but in this current season they’re present.
One reason why is because ugly football is back, baby. Games are now constantly broken while we navigate the authenticity of injuries, or while teams curate a set-piece routine like it’s a major Broadway production.
The ball goes long from the kick off. It goes long from the goalkeeper. It goes long from throw-ins. Football has reverted to attritional levellers without the shit pitches or technically deficient players.
Arne Slot has brought this up at every opportunity this season. Even in the press conference before Brentford he talked about Liverpool facing 178 long balls this season before another 59 against Manchester United.
The Liverpool head coach mentions set-pieces whenever he can. The balance between threat and opportunity is clearly not where he’d like it right now. That’s understandable.
Slot and Liverpool will get a massive dose of this at Brentford again tomorrow. A set-piece coach in charge of a good Premier League squad with a Saturday night crowd is migraine-inducing for all of us, not just Virgil van Dijk and Ibu Konate at full-time.
Watching Slot mention this harps back to the days of Jürgen Klopp with the schedule. That dog-with-a-bone irk they have which manifests in every interview, prompted or not.
The moral vacuum that is Richard Keys might think this is Slot giving teams the blueprint of how to beat Liverpool when talking about it, but then he’s built a career on reductive takes.
Clubs have an army of analysts who already know this stuff. That won’t change. Slot will have to decide whether he wants to be a purist in playing style, but also a campaigner for how he wants the game to be played.
He’s currently the only one standing on ceremony for the soul of football, but it isn’t always helpful, especially when you’ve lost a game to such tactics. People see it as excuses.
Slot also had to bat off several questions about Mohamed Salah at the presser. The Egyptian’s mood and character is once again being questioned due to social media activity and body language.
We’re in somewhat unchartered territory with Salah, who usually starts the season on fire only to then drop off later.
A slow start, coupled with losing him to AFCON will be a major blow for Liverpool, and the hope should be that he can rediscover form before then.
By form, we’re talking about hard numbers because that’s what Salah is. He knows everything is measured in output. If it can’t be put on a spreadsheet it doesn’t count.
Salah has never apologised for being this player. He owes nothing to you, me or Sadio Mane in this sense because his numbers always speak for themselves. But, similar to Florian Wirtz, if you’re not registering them – be it a two yard pass or five yard open goal tap-in – you’re there to be ridiculed.
Where Salah and Wirtz take the measure of any criticism is what matters. If either of them scroll X, they need to really consider some life choices.
If they’re in a stadium with Liverpool supporters behind them, that should always be enough.
We can fight our own culture wars with so-called LFC fan accounts posting provocative content, but who cares? We’ll move on from this stuff quicker than The Traitors expelling Stephen Fry once Salah starts scoring and Liverpool starts winning.
There are battles to be fought everywhere. Some will tell you it’s for the soul of a football club, or even the country. They’re almost always wrong. It’s never that deep. Worse, it’s borne out of self interest or forced agenda.
Agendas will never be far away. Nor will sensationalism when a club as big as Liverpool aren’t winning. It’s our job to stay together and wade through the long-throws, missed chances or the removal of social media bios.
It all starts with results changing. I personally think we’ve been without luck. We need to be clever on Saturday for this noise to subside.
Slot needs to fight this battle by winning games.
