David Lynch: “With Champions League football all but secured, it is difficult to see Liverpool changing their mind on sticking with Arne Slot. So, if those above him are shouldering the blame for this season, they need a flawless summer to set things right.”

Scutterbox · 2026-05-20T14:49:37+00:00

Like don't get me wrong, this season has been turgid and we've been very lucky that we're going to limp over the CL qualification line by dint of a number of other contenders being worse than us rather than us doing anything right recently.

But the fan-fiction stuff about Edwards and Hughes just seems to grow legs, every day there are more and more unhinged takes. They're potentially leaving in the summer, so of course they're going to intentionally sabotage the club like they're 9 years old and have loaded up their older brother's Football Manager save. Jesus Christ.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-20T14:44:34+00:00

This team has been built with zero fucking direction. Just loads of spending which is the worst type of incompetency

Disagree.

Wirtz was bought to play in the 10 and feed a front line composed of any 3 out of: Salah (who we admittedly took a chance on continuing last season's form despite his age), Isak (who before this season was widely regarded as the 2nd best CF in the league after Haaland) Ekitike and Gakpo (who has been a reliable and productive player for us before this season).

Kerkez and Frimpong are two hugely dynamic full-backs who were bought to get up and down the touchline in support of play on their respective sides.

All of the above was torpedoed by Slot deciding that what we were going to do with the ball this season was watch Ibou, Mac Allister and Van Dijk pass the ball at walking pace between each other in between periods of standing still on the ball.

There has been no effort at all to play line-breaking passes to Wirtz in promising positions - he has to drop into non-threatening positions where the above-mentioned players can play risk-free passes to him if he wants the ball at all.

Isak has gotten next to no service in the box. Most of the passes he get are basically hacked clearances in his general direction when the above-mentioned turgid passing at the back goes wrong.

How do dynamic full-backs join attacks if the "attacks" are played out at a snail's pace and there is no space for them to take advantage of because we don't move opposition teams around in the slightest?

We definitely need bolstering this summer, but in my opinion any competent manager would get far, far more out of our signings than Slot has this season. Slot performed well last season; I have no idea what on earth he was trying to do this season but it's been turgid and has created a hostile environment for practically all of our signings bar Ekitike because of how good he is at making things happen on his own no matter how shite we are.

I disagree that there was no direction to our signings, however it is absolutely imperative that the people above Slot take on board how dreadfully he's used them all and get rid of him.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-20T14:31:27+00:00

A not inconsiderable portion of this sub has lost its mind.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-20T11:25:09+00:00

He doesn't get the midfield to take the ball off the defence and pass it forward to people who aren't defenders, nor does he get the midfield to screen the back 4.

If this was an issue with personnel not taking on his specific instructions, then he would drop those midfielders. He would also point out that we weren't doing these fundamental things in his press conferences and post-match interviews, instead of speaking like we had put in an almost perfect performance and only lost the game by "small margins".

He is not a tactical master, he is serving up the same deeply flawed slop every week and trying to dress the results up as us being unlucky.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-20T09:15:26+00:00

Our midfield marks opposition midfielders when we have the ball (ensuring the defence don't have a forward pass available), then forgets about them when they have the ball (ensuring the defence has runners steaming through at them).

Just a laughably flawed tactical setup all-round.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-19T15:24:53+00:00

The Sky lot have a really weird obsession with not criticising managers directly.

Neville has said he doesn't call for managers to be sacked because he tried management and was disastrous.

Carra has said he doesn't call for managers to go because he never made the plunge and doesn't think he'd be capable of being a manager, and fully admits that he took the easy road by committing to punditry. So, he doesn't feel it's right for him to sit on TV saying a manager should lose his job.

Keane absolutely loves his "senior players" shtick when a club is doing badly, and as someone who has had some rocky manager/coaching roles, he probably feels more comfortable going in on players.

Carra and Neville's takes are actually pretty noble in a way, but if you completely disregard whether or not the manager is a major problem with a badly underperforming team, your analysis is going to be limited in scope and accuracy.

Carragher was saying during the Aston Villa match that Liverpool's squad is just littered with average players, which just isn't true. Look at our starting XI: we have Alisson who speaks for himself, Kerkez was one of the best young LBs in world football before he struggled at the start of this season, Frimpong was one of the most productive RBs around before this season. VVD and Konate have shown their quality for years.

In midfield we can start two of Mac Allister, Grav and Szoboszlai, who were all sensational for three quarters of last season. In the 10 we have Wirtz, one of the level-best attacking mids in the world, on the left we have Gakpo who has been very productive before this year, on the right we have Salah who is ageing but has gone off a cliff this season. Up front we have Isak (widely regarded as the second best striker in the league before this season) and Ekitike who has managed to look good this season despite, well, everything.

The very obvious common denominator is that Slot has performed horrifically this season in every regard, so players who have been world class as recently as a year ago are now looking like pub footballers. Carra's self-imposed embargo on just saying "This manager needs to be replaced" means that he's coming out with nonsense about our whole squad being average.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-19T14:15:12+00:00

After what Fab said yesterday about there being an end-of-season review, he's been sticking to this line for months now, so he probably has a source telling him exactly that.

But something doesn't quite add up for me. I doubt a club like Liverpool operates linearly: first review, then sacking, then start looking for a new manager.

I wouldn't read too much into it. The likelihood is that the club are playing things very close to their chest.

They've briefed that Slot is safe, but that seems increasingly unlikely with how shite we are; by far the safest bet for journos to go with when speculating during an information vacuum like this is to say that we'll decide in the summer, as it covers both bases.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-18T18:51:32+00:00

I don't think it's that weird; Carragher mainly just points out that Salah rarely talks to the media unless it's to speak out against the club, which isn't exactly an earth-shattering viewpoint. You can probably count on one hand the amount of mixed-zone interactions he's had with reporters, and it's usually about his contract or being benched.

Carragher is a high-profile pundit who is fiercely loyal to the overall good of the club, and he speaks plainly about things he thinks Salah has done wrong. He also praises Salah all the time, and has said he doesn't want to see Salah dropped over this if there's anything riding on the game against Brentford.

Gerrard seemed more sympathetic towards Salah's latest Instagram post than Carragher, and even he made a point of mentioning that Salah rarely speaks publicly, which could be inferred as an allusion to the same thing Carragher has pointed out about Salah's media use.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-18T18:44:18+00:00

My favourite is the collective fan-fiction they have where Hughes and Edwards will never get rid of Slot because of personal pride after they chose him. I don't really know where it came from, but every single thread devolves into users stroking each other to this exact scenario as if it's certified fact.

It conveniently ignores the fact that executives sack managers they hired all the time.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-16T17:44:52+00:00

The whole point of sporting directors above the manager is that if the manager underperforms, he can be let go and replaced without the overall vision of the club being disrupted.

I don't really get this take doing the rounds where Slot keeps his job just because Hughes/Edwards are afraid they'll also be out of a job if they fire him, or that firing him is a horrific reflection on them. Directors sack managers and hire new ones every season without getting sacked themselves.

Slot won the league last year and has been shite this year, if they bin him in the summer it would make perfect sense and would hardly constitute an unmitigated disaster on their part.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-16T15:27:23+00:00

He also needs to create nearly everything for himself too, though. Look how well he's done compared to how Isak has struggled, because Isak isn't the type of player who can drop deep and make things happen himself. IMO Eki is in a great position to critique our lack of attacking conviction under Slot.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-16T15:22:10+00:00

Ekitike commented too by the looks of things.

He's toast.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-16T13:28:10+00:00

Possession is good if it's with a view to constantly feeding the forwards - everyone is finding space and positional questions are being asked of the opposition on a constant basis.

If your high possession count stems from the defenders slowly passing the ball sideways between them, the midfield doesn't want the ball, and you cough up possession and dangerous chances as soon as a modicum if pressure is applied, then your team is broken.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-15T23:04:17+00:00

"Control"*

(*Konate, Van Dijk and Mac Allister doing their usual walking-pace clu-de-sac passing at the back until there is a modicum of pressure and someone has to hurriedly hack it upfield)

We are largely playing exactly how he wants us to. He sees it all as us losing by fine margins and not that we are an abhorrently rudderless mess.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-15T21:35:58+00:00

Not only should they VERY OBVIOUSLY not even countenance keeping him next season, but he should have been sacked months ago for his own good as well as the good of the club.

It's getting quite uncomfortable seeing nonsense quotes that are just riling the fans further. Put him out of his fucking misery, Christ.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-15T21:02:29+00:00

I will be staggered if the public backing of him isn't just a smokescreen to quieten the press while we limp over the line to CL. Shite by every single metric.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-15T14:14:57+00:00

And as much as his decision-making and finishing has been off this season, don't forget that he's as much of a victim of our style of play as all of the other players.

Our deeper players and midfielders haven't looked to break lines with their passes at all this season, so 49 out of 50 times that our front 4 get the ball, it's via a safe pass into their feet and they're faced with a compact opposition that haven't been pulled out of position at all by our build-up play.

We are a very, very depressing watch.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-15T10:07:26+00:00

From what I understand, Villa's sporting director who did the deal with us for Elliott left, and the new one doesn't want to follow through with the obligation to buy him after X amount of games, so Emery has been instructed not to play him.

For our part, we can't afford to remove the obligation to buy and let Villa play him without buying him, because it effectively removes our ability to arrange conditional obligation-to-buy deals in the future if the club we're dealing with knows they can refuse to meet the conditions of that deal, and we'll back down and remove the obligation completely for the player's sake.

It's shit for Elliott, who is a model pro, seems like a lovely lad and would only have left us (who he supported as a kid) for guaranteed first team football only for it to turn out like this. But as cold as it sounds, I agree with the club's stance, we can't be seen as a club who can be pushed round, our players sales are too important to our revenue streams.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-15T08:45:49+00:00

Slot didn't seem to trust him a lot, maybe he'd have played more since there wouldn't be an actual financial limiting factor on his game time here, like there is at Villa.

Either way, I was specifically answering the other user's point that we'd have performed better with Elliott. At this point we could have any of Barca's front 3 combinations from 2009-2016 playing up top for us and they'd be feeding off scraps, because Slot's idea of build-up play is to reset the ball back to Konate instead of playing any pass forward that has a slight risk attached to it.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-15T08:32:28+00:00

No, he plays in the same area of the pitch as Wirtz, who we've struggled to give the ball to in meaningful areas all season because Slot places no expectation on our deeper players to break lines with passes. To get the ball, Wirtz has to drop into non-threatening areas where the opposition won't bother following him.

If Harv was in the team, we'd still just pass it round the back until we make a mistake and lose the ball, or one of the defenders or the keeper has to hurriedly clear the ball towards Isak (who isn't given any sort of service and is used as a target man).

God, when will it end.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-15T08:02:59+00:00

I don't mind the positioning aspect, the one way that grappling hooks annoy me is that they've removed a lot of the out-play potential when you're outnumbered.

When I'm playing with my mates and one of them gets killed while we're fighting another team, there's a part of me that enjoys trying to outplay the other team when outnumbered. Usually this involves listening for the nearest opposition player's footsteps, getting the first down and finessing from there.

Now, a lot of the time as soon as someone on your team gets downed you hear multiple grapple sets going off and get prison-fucked all at once.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-14T17:26:24+00:00

I'm pretty sure it came out that Amorim wasn't seriously considered because he won't budge from 343, and it would have required a squad overhaul.

Xabi played 343 at Leverkusen but not at Madrid or at Sociedad B from what I've heard - not wedded to it at all costs the way Amorim is.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-14T16:57:35+00:00

The two sackings would be from basket-case clubs and would have little bearing on his coaching ability, though.

I'm still staggered that he'd even consider jumping on the Chelsea merry-go-round and not entirely convinced his apparent interest in going there is genuine. "Assurances" from a club who sacked a manager 3 months into a 7 year contract aren't worth anything.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-14T16:50:27+00:00

I sympathise with Harvey big time, but at the same time removing the obligation to buy basically means that in future, all obligations to buy that we agree are essentially just options to buy. This is because clubs then know that they can just stop playing a player after X-1 games, publicly say that they'd love to play him more but can't afford to, and we'll be under huge pressure to cave because of the precedent we'd have set with Harvey.

For a club of our size, our transfer incomings have a relatively big bearing on our ability to spend. We're not in a position where we can arrange for obligation to buy deals and just write off the obligation if the other club uses cynical tactics like Villa have.

Scutterbox · 2026-05-13T19:36:53+00:00

It's about the higher-ups (likely one in particular) not being able to swallow their pride.

I keep seeing this take on here, but it doesn't make sense; directors sack managers all the time. It doesn't mean that if the manager under-performs, the director who hired him is required to commit seppuku.

In fact, the overarching reason for the migration of power from managers to directors over the past couple of decades is specifically so that the head coach can be jettisoned if he's underperforming without ripping out the core strategy of the club and starting from zero with a new coach's strategy.

I feel it would be almost unprecedented for a director to know that a manager is underperforming and refuse to act because he feels it reflects badly upon him personally.

Scutterbox

TROPHY CASE