‘Liverpool Disaster’ – Going Out of the FA Cup (in 2005) and How I Said It Was Good News

People never learn

Everyone agrees there is too much football.

Far too much football.

Too much is asked of footballers, in terms of expecting them to stay fit, sharp, focused, and uninjured, as the sport becomes ever more frantic and physical.

Yes, they are well paid, but we all know that we don’t want them playing at 60% to conserve energy and avoid injury. No one wants that.

But don’t you dare fucking rest them!

This season, Liverpool have already played two extra Champions League games in the new format, which I think has been a great success (topping the group helps my perceptions), but again, is two more games; and Man City face two more games still (before the nonsensical summer madness).

The extra two games is probably worth it to escape the boring outcomes of the four-team groups and the top two then meeting the same teams each year, due to seedings and same-nation avoidance.

The Reds made it to the gruelling League Cup semifinals, where players regularly dropped like flies with January injuries in enough Jürgen Klopp seasons to know how costly it can be (and look at Spurs this season).

I used this metaphor yesterday, but if the Premier League is a marathon, then the domestic cups are like running 15Ks at the same time.

Add in the Champions League, if you go far, and it’s more like an Ironman Triathlon.

It’s easier to win the London Marathon if you haven’t just done another marathon the day before, and have to swim 50 miles the next day.

And this is a season where the midwinter break, that everyone said the English league needs to protect its players, has been done away with; on the back of various international tournaments in the summer, which left Arne Slot with almost no players (bar Mo Salah and the kids) in preseason.

There’s too much football!

We ask too much of the players! It’s insane!

Again, but don’t fucking-well rest them.

Arne Slot picked a side where he rested key players because the last thing Liverpool ‘need’ is a run in four competitions; but to give kids and returning first-team hopefuls a run out had its uses.

Ideally, had Curtis Jones been fully fit, and had Tyler Morton (100+ club games aged 22, regular England U21 international) not been injured, and had Conor Bradley not been needed to be kept in reserve for the injured Trent Alexander-Arnold, and had Joe Gomez lasted for more than eight minutes, it would have been a ‘reserve’ XI that could have seen off Plymouth, even if that meant fixture headaches down the road.

Instead of the combative and press-resistant Morton with his 100+ games mostly in the brutal Championship, there was a lad of 17, with five.

Instead of Jones with his 162 games, and now an England international after excelling with Morton and Harvey Elliott in the U21s, there was James McConnell, with 14, not many of them starts; and neither he nor Nyoni has yet had a professional loan (McConnell was due to, before Morton got injured).

After his hellish time with injuries that increasingly dog so many young players forced to play regularly in an ever-toughening physical game, the brilliant Stefan Bajcetic, still only 20, is rebuilding his career on loan, where 20+ games at this point, even in struggling teams, is better for him than waiting at Liverpool in case he gets a runout in a League Cup or FA Cup game.

Lewis Koumas is doing well on loan at Stoke, as is late-bloomer Owen Beck at Blackburn. None would get much game-time at Liverpool this season, and the U21 league over here is a bit of a joke.

Instead, it was not even the 2nd XI at Plymouth, but mostly a 2.5 XI, with only Luis Díaz a semi-regular in the first XI, while Jota could be, if fully fit.

Nyoni and McConnell are better ‘footballers’ than anyone in the Plymouth team, but they half as much, as they’re still kids. They don’t have the experience, but this was a step towards getting experience.

(Interestingly, when I spent the day with Rafa Benítez at Melwood in late 2009, a group of young players walked past, and he said to watch out for one of them; I wrote about it, but didn’t name the player, and always used get asked who it was, or it was assumed to be Dani Pacheco. It was actually now-Plymouth sub, Victor Pálsson, who has had a very good career in top divisions in decent European leagues, and gained 47 caps for Iceland. Benítez didn’t say he would be a world-beater, but he liked his mentality, and 500 career games suggests he was right, compared to a lot of other prospects who fell away. But again, it was just a casual observation, not that Pálsson was going to rule the world.)

Rio Ngumoha, just 16, is the most talented of the current crop, but I took one look at the pitch, one at the ref, and one at the Plymouth tackling, and thought he’s hospital-bound if he goes on and tries to dribble past anyone. The ref only cracked down on the Plymouth physicality late on, lest he have to send anyone off; just as refs book keepers in the 89th minute for time-wasting, again, lest they have to send them off if they book them earlier. (It’s like being seen to be doing your job, but once past a point of it backfiring on you by having to actually do your job.)

McConnell is yet another, like Jayden Danns this season, who missed half the season.

Last season, it was Ben Doak, Conor Bradley, Bajcetic, and various others who missed half or all the season, often with stress-related fractures, that also dogged Curtis Jones until he was 23. Harvey Elliott also missed the first half of this season with a foot fracture, that I don’t know if stress-related or just a kick.

(Add Kaide Gordon and Calvin Ramsay to bright young things who have also essentially missed two years. And add all the promising strikers who did their ACLs at 17 and 18.)

This was a chance for those players to get some experience. However, when surrounded by further inexperience, and players lacking cohesion and fitness, it’s hard for anyone to thrive.

Isaac Mabaya – another promising talent at 17/18 wrecked by two years of bad fortune – and the still promising but featherweight Trent Kone-Doherty, were on as subs in part because the best youngsters include Ben Doak, tearing it up on loan where he’s got a ton of minutes, and others, who are getting to play each week.

Federico Chiesa was so out of shape due to not having a preseason in Italy, arriving late and then getting injured because he obviously was unable to adjust, that he had to have his own preseason in the winter. He needed the minutes. He looked lively and showed great control, but zero understanding with any of his teammates, and wasn’t helped by the rawness around him (including Mabaya making his debut in difficult circumstances).

Diogo Jota, whose ribs were crushed by a DOGSO foul that was only a yellow vs Chelsea, was coming back from yet another long layoff created by a bad tackle on him, and then some minor muscle issues in the reintegration.

Joe Gomez needed the minutes too. In the end, as the one Liverpool player with a BMI over 16, he got eight of them. (And set-pieces were not much use without all the big guys.)

We can’t have it all.

We can’t expect the team to win every game; and for the manager to play the kids, as everyone says it’s great to see the kids, then despair when they’re not bullying guys built like heavyweight boxers who absolutely obliterate them in tackles, on an iffy pitch with a ref who, like every other ref, lets more go in the cups, lest he be seen as a spoilsport, especially on national TV where the broadcaster wants an upset.

Liverpool got criticised for not ‘respecting’ Plymouth, nor ‘respecting’ the FA Cup, when winning the FA Cup or League Cup is meaningless in terms of general club stature and, for those managers struggling, keeping your job; unless you are maybe Newcastle or Spurs, and any kind of trophy will do.

Even then, the last Spurs manager to win a trophy got sacked, and another got sacked right before a cup final. It’s not what Big Six managers are judged on. Mauricio Pochettino was great for Spurs, and won nothing; but reached a Champions League final, which far eclipses winning a handful of games in a domestic cup. He just got Klopped, that’s all.

There’s this total fantasy that the FA Cup still matters. It doesn’t, unless you win it, and then it’s lovely.

But even then, no one parades it around in a bus anymore, unless it’s an underdog club, and they rarely win it anymore anyway. It used to be the centre-piece of English football, even into the 1990s, and now it’s not, no matter what BBC or ITV say, as they don’t have live rights to the competitions that matter. The 1990s changed football with the rebranding of the European Cup and the First Division to the Champions League and the Premier League.

(Do kids and newbies understand what people mean when they say Liverpool were ‘First Division champions’ a record number of times? Do they think they won the third tier?!)

The domestic cups are still good things if you’re doing well in the league and the Champions League, and can afford the effort; but Liverpool just played a League Cup semifinal literally days ago, and go to Goodison for an immense clash within three days.

Giving the senior players a proper weekend off is surely sensible long-term planning?

Or don’t they play too much football now?

Twice in the past three years Liverpool had ‘quadruple’ tilts, and by the end of it all the team ends up running on fumes, riddled with injuries, and narrowly missing out; and all the trolls have a good laugh, often when their team has won nothing (or nothing of note) for 10, 20, 30 or maybe 100 years.

Quadruples are impossible as the English league is the most brutal, there are two brutal domestic cups, and the Champions League is getting bigger. And now the winter break has gone again.

And how many times have Liverpool nearly won the league in the last six years – sometimes losing a lead, sometimes coming up late, sometimes staying within touching distance all the way up to 97 or 92 points – for fans to not take it for granted, and not want to keep it the no.1 priority?

This season, the league is far from won, but the position is better than in 2021/22 and 2023/24. To think it’s as good as won is unhelpful. Two defeats, and it’s back to a dogfight again.

Winning at Goodison is not a given, as the reason ‘form goes out the window in a derby’ is both a cliché and a truism is that the weaker side has extra motivation, and will raise their game (especially when at home), unless you can break their spirit early on.

Liverpool lost there at a vital stage of last season when the ref gave the home side nine free-kicks (to zero) until they took the lead just before half-time; drew there the season before, and drew there two seasons before that, and the season before that, too.

All while Everton were, quite frankly, utter shite. (But big, aggressive, direct shite.)

Liverpool may not beat Everton this week, as it’s not an easy place to go when you’re Liverpool – and this season could be even more feisty as the Goodison farewell and a chance to dent the Reds’ title hopes – but mitigating against injury at Plymouth will also be vital for what follows.

Slot and his staff have been exceptional at balancing the demands of a crazy season on the back of a major international summer, and limiting (as you can never fully eradicate) muscle injuries; with fractures just bad luck.

This will be Everton’s cup final, which is ramped up by the fact that they don’t ever have any proper cup finals.

Just as this was Plymouth’s cup final, while Liverpool were just trying to get through to the more meaningful games, that come thick and fast.

Liverpool did not disrespect PSV or the Champions League when also leaving the big guns out, as those players then went, three days later, to Bournemouth, the team with truly elite home underlying numbers, where they’d literally outplayed everyone ... and the Reds won 2-0.

Now, PSV was virtually a dead rubber, but equally, you can’t field the same XI every three days. And you can’t always rotate the side so that it’s just a few changes, when it gets so intense.

Bournemouth away, Spurs in a semi-final, and then Everton away, in a two week period, needs a release valve when another game is in there too.

Sometimes, not being on the bench is a chance to clear the mind, and rest the body. It doesn’t mean you’ll win the next games, but nor does winning the previous games. Momentum as people think it exists is a myth.

Between mid February to late February, in the shortest month of the year, Liverpool play Everton, Wolves, Aston Villa, Man City and Newcastle in the league.

That is insane, and in part, due to the League Cup success (bringing forward the Aston Villa game), while playing Everton was due to a postponement due to a storm.

Newcastle last season, Spurs this season, and Aston Villa this season, have crumbled, relatively speaking, due to the weight of extra games and the raft of injuries. Once ‘new’ teams get into the Champions League they cannot manage both.

Villa are supposedly suffering some post-Champions League hoodoo, when it’s just the utterly obviously nature of busting your balls three days earlier in midweek, as those of us watching these things for decades have realised.

(Plus, I’ve always felt that the game before the big game is a time when players ease off mentally; see Newcastle before their League Cup semifinal. This occurs before Champions League games too.)

Every game adds to every other game, which adds to every other game, in mushrooming of effort required. Without a break, it compounds.

When I saw that Arsenal had gone to Newcastle three days after beating Man City I noted on this site that I expected to see a hamstring injury. Gabriel Martinelli lasted about 30 minutes.

When Mikel Arteta gave 17-year-old Ethan Nwaneri his first start a while back, then started him again a few days later, I said before that game that I expected him to be at risk for a muscle injury (duly it arrived). When I saw that Micky van der Ven seemed rushed back again by Ange Postecoglou, I hardly needed to be a physio to predict an injury.

Managers get drawn into these desperate or egotistical decisions, then suffer the consequences. In the fog of war, they make mistakes that compound. They may get away with it, and everyone may be okay. But it’s a risk in its own way.

Martinelli should be back before Arsenal face their toughest games, but if he’s not, how does that help their season? Wouldn’t he be needed for Notts Forest away, Man United away and Chelsea at home? And the two Round of 16 games in between?

Reaching the League Cup final guarantees Slot’s team one more tough game (against talented and physically strong opposition), but perhaps more pertinently, shifts Aston Villa away from a weekend, to just four days before going away to Man City (who fortunately have their own hellish schedule). This is all coming down the pike.

Arsenal, meanwhile, are enjoying a 10-day break right now, to refresh and reset. Going out of the FA Cup did them a favour. They were gutted when they lost to Man United, I’m sure, but are currently reviving themselves.

For Liverpool, going out of the FA Cup, while not intended (but also, wisely not insured against by risking more senior players), now frees up an absolutely vital weekend, days before the away leg of the Champions League knockout.

• 26 Feb 2025, Premier League, Newcastle Utd

• 1 Mar 2025, FA Cup 5th Round

• 4 Mar 2025, Champions League, likely PSG?

Smarter

I love that Arne Slot is a much wiser, more pragmatic manager than I expected; and I expected a top-class manager. He’s just not bothered about the bullshit.

I expect some Liverpool fans to be smarter than the herd, but the media is all about narratives not facts. They want the narrative of the upset, and they want the narrative that their competition matters, if they are the one broadcasting it. They are about the instant moment, not long-term planning. Headlines don’t care about nuance.

It gives great headlines, but it’s also exactly 20 years since I wrote about the hysteria (and there was hysteria!) about Liverpool going out of the FA Cup to Burnley, which included a BBC Radio Five verbal autopsy that I also covered in my first book, that I was writing as that season unfolded. But I wrote about it on blogs at the time.

That Rafa Benítez fella was ruining Liverpool, they said, and the Reds would never win anything. Zonal marking was stupid, and so on.

(The next season, 2005/06, when Liverpool went about six months without conceding from a corner, someone got free and scored, and the commentators said “well, that’s zonal marking for you, it doesn’t work!”. In that first book I’d noted a game that I think was a 4-4 between Norwich and Boro where five goals came from bad man-marking at set-pieces and no one said a dicky bird.)

So I wrote about how Liverpool had one foot in the League Cup final, and in February 2005 I wrote about how I expected Liverpool to knock out Bayer Leverkusen, probably win a quarterfinal as the team was good when it was on its game, and then likely face Chelsea in the semis, and how the pressure would get to Chelsea, just as it had when Arsenal ‘Invincibles’ faced the then far inferior Chelsea a year earlier.

Obviously I didn’t expect it to follow the script that closely, as it was just a general sense of what could follow. But going out of the FA Cup enabled Istanbul, I’ve no doubt about that. The squad wouldn’t have coped with the FA Cup as well as the Champions League.

I wrote all that 20 years ago, and for all the advancement in knowledge in some ways, there’s a reversal of intelligence going on via the emotions of social media and WhatsApp groups and live-streamed insanity and the YouTube algorithms; driven by the instant reactions to primitive emotions, and the increasingly schadenfreude-riven nature of people enjoying others’ failures more than their own successes. See Spurs at the end of last season, and how it (rightfully) got to their manager.

I was going to write an article last week called:

Spurs Fans Broke Postecoglou, Postecoglou Broke Spurs’ Players, Spurs’ Players Broke Spurs’ Fans

But maybe it says it all.

It’s not that I’m always right (far from it), but the same nonsense appears on an annual basis. It’s now 25 years since I started doing this, and 20 since I began writing books; and 16 since this site launched on WordPress (before moving to Substack). I often find myself saying the same things, as no one learns.

Maybe more people follow football now, but few seem to properly understand the complexities of the game (and I’m like that with advanced tactics, but I accept my limited knowledge and do my best to be humble, and also learn). There’s more niche content out there, but most of it stays out of the mainstream. Stuff like xG is mentioned in passing, as if it’s some wacky nonsense.

Many ‘fans’ seem to care more about the transfer windows than the football, and about bragging or dunking on social media, or abusing opposition players or, totally counterproductively (which shows the low IQs involved), their own players.

That new players can initially make a team worse, as I observed a decade or so ago (and how it tended to be the season after a season with a big spend where the uptick occurred), is not a consideration. All players are robots, who can go game after game, without any consequence, as being a well-paid professional athlete means you are beyond human. All new signings will change everything, and fit right in as if surrounded by the same players that helped make them look good before.

The Athletic said that Liverpool had a shocker of a transfer window back in the summer, and Man United were the clear winners of the window, with all their great signings.

It’s just a shame the teams have to play actual football matches, I guess.

A football team is about balancing out strengths and covering for weaknesses, and about the relationships and understandings within, and how it develops over time. It’s not just a collection of players, who instantly mesh.

This weekend saw an overly young Liverpool side, an overly small Liverpool side, and overly lightweight Liverpool side. It was an overly unfamiliar side.

It wasn’t even remotely close to the fastest XI either. It was a team lacking pace, heft, height and experience.

There were no ‘goals’ from most positions, especially midfield or defence. Two of the attackers lacked match sharpness, having barely started in months, or all season.

It lacked the three 6’4” starters (Virgil van Dijk, Ibou Konaté and Cody Gakpo) and the 6’3” starter in midfield (Ryan Gravenberch) who could have gone toe-to-toe with the home side’s terrifying fleet of giants.

(Indeed, in 2015 I wrote that Liverpool were far too small as a team due to the myopic approach of Brendan Rodgers prior to 2015, and Jürgen Klopp inherited a team with zero heft, except in players who weren’t very good. You can still have smaller guys, of course, but in England they must be exceptional players, like Mo Salah and Alexis Mac Allister, and you must provide them with hefty bodyguards, which is what Man City eventually did when purchasing Rodri.)

Or the 6’1” and 6’2” guys with the stamina as well (Dominik Szoboszlai and Curtis Jones).

It lacked the hardest runners, including Conor Bradley, one of the fiercest tacklers too, which seems more allowable in the lower leagues.

One fast 6’2” guy, Darwin Núñez came on. But so did some kids making their debuts. Again, all to protect the team for the rest of the season.

(Including being able to properly train today, I presume, instead of just doing warm-downs.)

I don’t know how many times McConnell and Nyoni have played together but I doubt it’s many. Between them they weigh the same as half a Dominik Szoboszlai.

The same lack of hard-wired partnerships can be said of Chiesa and anyone in the team, and Endo and Jarell Quansah as centre-backs. No one was on the same page.

The reason why Liverpool may win the league this season and won the league in 2019/20 (as I said at the time) was precisely because no new components were added.

The shared understandings, once the quality is there, can increase, while adding a fresh new component, unless one is absolutely vital or an absolute game-changer, can disrupt. Without new players you can generally get off to a better start; again, unless you have really bad players who can be upgraded with great players.

The midfield that promised but faltered last season is, in its second season, possibly the best in the world. The £160m+ spent is paying off this season. The £35.4m paid for Cody Gakpo looked decent value at first in 2023, but now looks a steal. It took time, and adjustments. And he’s still only 25.

(And even Mo Salah, who seemed to be slowing down last season, has found a new level in a team that has improved around him, in part due to the foundations Jürgen Klopp laid, and in part due to the interventions of Arne Slot, and after, years earlier, the scouts and data guys had to convince Klopp to take him in the first place. One thing I’m happily wrong about this season is Salah’s continued excellence in 2025, even if he has to surely melt at some point.)

And in the end, the Reds lost to Plymouth via a penalty out of nothing from what could have been a dangerous high boot instead (an overhead kick in close proximity to an opponent), and otherwise they hit the post when a yard offside. (Had Liverpool had taller players, then someone just heads the ball clear, and it’s not Harvey Elliott there to start with.)

Their keeper made two outstanding late stops, but overall the defeat saved everyone bar Joe Gomez, who needed to come back at some point, from injury and fatigue, and got minutes into the legs of Jota and Chiesa, while giving valuable experience to youngsters who may not have a future at the club (such as Mabaya, due to his injuries), but where the long-term picture has to override any short-term ‘embarrassment’.

Remember, if you’re worried about being owned by sadcunt57 on Twixxer, you’ll always lose. He’ll vanish if you win 20 games in a row, then pop up and find it hysterical when you draw the 21st. He’ll vanish if you win the quadruple, then demolish you when you only win the treble the next season. That’s his game, and he can never lose.

Therefore, you can never beat sadcunt57.

Indeed, all of us, as a society and as a species, have to stop worrying about sadcunt57.

None of us can beat sadcunt57, and the sooner we stop trying, the better. Because sadcunt57 ruins it for everyone, if we let him and his ilk into our lives.

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