And for every S'oton, you can probably find other clubs that dropped well off, like Liverpool. And this season isn't half-way through. Saints won't hold up, everyone knows this.
I don´t get the Southampton comparison in the first place. Yes, they do very well given their circumstances, but so did we for three years. We lost a key player every season but did well in compensating that for a fairly long time.
This season it did not work out, but Ramos and Immobile failing the fill the void which Lewandowski left behind is only one small part of the current problems.
We can discuss tactics all we want, but if the vast majority of the lost points comes down to individual feck ups in the defense and extremely poor chance conversion in the offense, I have a hard time pointing towards the guy on the side lines when it comes to blame.
This crisis is largely down to the players, which is also why most of the anger of the supporters is directed to them and not Klopp:
- Talents, who stagnate in their developments and are currently doing more harm than good (Ginter, Durm, Jojic)
- Players, who had their careers disrupted by larger injuries and are nowhere near their normal abilities (Subotic, Bender, Gündogan, Piszcu)
- New guys, who failed to integrate themselves, which is extremely hard if the team is so unstable (Immobile, Ramos, Kagawa)
- Important, in some cases even lead players who are currently in slumps and fail to take charge on the pitch (Kehl, Weidenfeller, Großkreutz, Mkhitaryan)
- Injured key players, who have the ability to turn things around in top form (Hummels, Reus, Sahin)
If you have some of these cases, you might be able to buffer it with the collective strength of the team, but if basically only two players (Sokratis, Aubameyang) consistently perform to the expected standard, you simply won´t get decent results. Add to that the common downward spiraling mentality (here probably lies the one point, where Klopp is partially to blame) and a good portion of rotten luck and you land where we are right now.
What we probably need the most right now is time, which we won´t get until the Winter break. We somehow have to get there with as much points as possible and then refocus and attack in the second season half (similarily how we did last season). Klopp is still far from being in danger of being sacked, though. He has still too much credit amongst the supporters and officials.
