Friday Thoughts: Slot, Gakpo, Salah, More Gakpo, and Optimal Shot Zones

Some surprising shot data included

How Will Slot Be Under Pressure?

One thing I recently researched was Arne Slot’s losing runs; and bar the start of the post-pandemic season, his teams have never lost more than two games in a row. That’s a sign of stunning consistency.

But bad runs do happen.

I just hope he doesn’t come across like his fellow Dutchman Erik ten Hag, whose much inferior English and lack of any noticeable personality make his statements all the more odd. (But for those reasons, I don’t expect Slot to do so.)

Having started his first season with five wins from eight games, and then had four in eight last season, the United manager is now at three wins from eight; in contrast to Slot’s seven from eight in England so far.

“I think every team has this in a season,” ten Hag said after a 1-1 draw with Twente. “In a season when you play 60 games, I am sure there will be games where you are not happy with the performance.”

I’ve found ten Hag’s increasing bullishness fascinating because managers need to defend their records, and deflect from reality. But they can stray close to ‘getting a draw at Everton would be utopia’. On the back of almost being sacked in the summer, he’s just sounded more and more detached from reality.

You also have to ‘admire’ a manager who thinks his team will play 60 games, and with just three wins from eight, that there will be merely some games where the performance is wanting across those five dozen matches, when already the bad seems to outweigh the good. Three or four bad displays from eight is a big chunk of your season’s bad days already.

But that’s Man United’s issue. What we haven’t seen yet is Slot’s reaction to adversity, and in fairness, there aren’t too many managers who don’t start to look a bit frazzled or lost or even unhinged when things go really wrong.

There’s almost nothing they can say publicly that won’t make things worse, albeit saying that to have got a point at Goodison would have been utopia is clearly like buying a giant box of matches before proceeding to a gasoline spillage.

But because of their Dutchness (and baldness), Slot has ten Hag (will he be as bad as him?), as well as Jürgen Klopp (he can never be as good as him), to contend with in terms of comparisons.

I think I’ll always miss Klopp not being there, saying the right things, or the funny things. And sometimes, losing his shit. It’s weird that I haven’t fully processed the loss of Klopp from my life, so if he pops up somewhere, it’s like seeing a recent ex, and yearning for them, even though, by the end, you’d both run out of gas and it seemed logical to split.

So far, Slot’s succession has gone swimmingly; but I wrote a piece recently to prepare ourselves for the bad days.

My concern when attending the Nottingham Forest defeat was that the football might be too aimed towards passing at the expense of shooting, but it also seemed that the players may just be caught between the old and the new. If the Forest display was what Slot wanted, I would be worried.

However, the subsequent games have taken the sample size to seven games where the Reds played an excellent all-round style of football (including types of attempts at goal), and one tepid showing, post-international break, where I said that could be the big caveat.

So far it’s 18 goals scored already (two just three conceded), from eight different scorers and eleven different assisters, and Forest remains the only game where the team looked confused; as I posited at the time, not just a confusion between the Klopp Liverpool and the Slot Liverpool, and when execute certain things (speed up, slow down, shoot), but fresh from two international games, and back for only two days after.

Bar Forest, the passing game has been sharp and incisive, and the different types of goals a sign of a multi-faceted attacking plan.

And all of the six forwards are either in top form, or on the way there.

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