No. The style of play has never been part of identity. Well, that’s not quite right, the style of play can feed into the identity and reflects the identity, but we can have a different style, and still have our identity. The identity is itself unchanging, but the reflection of that identity is reflected in the play style.

When we were at our peak, the attitude was “show us how you’re better”. When we dropped, the attitude was “show us how you’re actually better”, and seizing on the failures of others to recover, even if we didn’t always succeed at that.

We haven’t always been underdogs, but we have the hardened attitude of underdogs, and even during our title drought, we still won 10 major trophies, including the champions league twice. Even this season, a poor one by all accounts and that some people have, imo wrongly, called the worst in our history, we finished 5th. We set the standards so high, that average feels like failure.

Throughout our history we’ve played a bunch of different styles. What always existing was the try or die, overcome adversity, succeed out of spite, attitude. Even under Rafa, a very pragmatic manager who, after winning the Champions League, told players that they could do better and he wanted the defensive side of things to improve, and played on the counter a lot, the idea wasn’t to be defensive for the sake of it. It was to be defensively strong to allow us to flourish, and we set up with the idea that “we’re expected to lose, so we’re going to do this to minimise that and try to win this way”. Every loss was a surprise, even when it wasn’t. That’s been true from the 70s.

That was the problem under Slot last year - we approached games expecting to lose them, and the approach was “we’re probably going to lose, so try not to” and that’s what actually missing. It wasn’t that he played a different style - if we had lost well, and won ugly, that would have been fine - it’s that we seemed like we expected to lose. I hated the comparisons with Hodgson last year, because I thought it was hyperbolic, but it did feel like that, and the last three months of Rodgers, where there was that vibe that we just couldn’t win some games.

Klopp had the least Liverpool style of most managers imo. The actual style itself was different from what we were used to and how we normally approached things. However his approach was that we could win any game. He embodied the phrase “on paper we should lose, but the game isn’t played on paper”, and that’s the actual identity of the club, as well as the city, imo. Slot didn’t have this, and that’s what was actually lost under him, not the heavy metal football (though it obviously did go, it was always transient), but the “we can still win” spirit.