The Genius Way Liverpool Beat Newcastle With 10 Men
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00:00 Hello there boys and girls, Adam Cleary here from 442 and Liverpool!
00:08 F*** me!
00:10 Down a goal and a man at St James' Park, they pulled off one of the most improbable
00:14 and shocking comebacks arguably ever seen in the Premier League.
00:19 And while that result did require some lacklustre finishing from Newcastle and the two goals
00:22 they scored were of the finest margin, just lethal hit, whoa, nae blasties, it still all
00:28 came about as a result of some unbelievably clever on-field management.
00:33 And little 'ah yes' the Newcastle United fan who was there yesterday, by the way, would
00:38 like to show you how they did it.
00:40 Sort of.
00:44 Now that I have to sit here and talk about the most galling thing I have ever been subjected
00:48 to inside a football stadium, I feel like I've been mugged.
00:54 I feel like I have been mugged at gunpoint and the policeman who has come round to take
00:58 my statement about the mugging is the actual mugger.
01:02 That's how I feel.
01:04 Hangover's not helping either, obviously.
01:06 Right, so at the commencement of hostilities yesterday, this was Newcastle and this was
01:10 Liverpool and they were pretty much as evenly matched up as two teams could be.
01:13 And as anybody who watched the game will tell you, leading up to the red card, Newcastle
01:17 looked like they were slowly getting control of the game.
01:20 Liverpool still very dangerous, obviously, but Newcastle were beginning to create chances,
01:23 they were putting a lot of pressure on, they seemed to be getting a hold of things.
01:27 And the reason for that is because of all the individual battles on the pitch, which
01:30 I'll try and illustrate now.
01:32 The midfield battle was obviously key because neither Enzo nor McAllister could really push
01:36 on to Bruno.
01:37 Effectively, one was trying and the other was trying it.
01:39 He was nipping around them and passing the ball.
01:41 But the main one, obviously, was Trent Alexander-Arnold versus Anthony Gordon.
01:45 Now, the reason people always talk about individual battles across a football pitch is because
01:49 while they don't necessarily dictate who is going to win a game, they will always tend
01:53 to dictate who is going to be able to control a game.
01:56 Ultimately, every single football tactic, formation, shape, strategy, everything is
02:00 designed to get you numerical superiority in areas of the pitch where you might want
02:05 it.
02:06 If you think about that from an attacking perspective, that's what overlapping full
02:09 backs are supposed to do, because if the winger doesn't go with them, then you get a 2v1 in
02:12 the wide area.
02:13 It's the reason why teams have gone from two-man central midfields to three-man central midfields
02:17 to now having boxers in the middle to get four because they want numerical superiority
02:22 there.
02:23 So, if you are able to create situations where you can have more players in an area of a
02:27 pitch than the opponent, you can control the game.
02:30 But the thing is, that very rarely happens because for every strategy trying to create
02:34 it, there's another one trying to stop it happening.
02:36 So, you normally end up in individual one-on-one battles.
02:40 And if you win those, whether it's a test of strength, whether it's pace, whether it's
02:43 positioning, whatever it is that's going to give you the edge, if you win those, well,
02:47 you get the picture.
02:48 And Anthony Gordon was absolutely winning that battle against Trent Alexander-Arnold.
02:52 He could have been ridiculous and incredibly harsh, in my opinion, but he could have been
02:56 sent off a few moments before for stopping him going down the line.
03:00 That's where Newcastle got the goal from.
03:02 And let's just look here at his position.
03:04 Yes, it's a bad touch and Gordon does really well to finish, but look where Trent Alexander-Arnold,
03:09 the right back, is when he's receiving this ball.
03:13 If he gives it away here, for example, and Gordon is in down the wing and he's hoping
03:17 that another teammate can arrive in the box and get it across to him and that's how they
03:20 get a goal.
03:21 But he gives it away here.
03:23 And after that, it's relatively straightforward for a player of his ability to burst in and
03:27 score the goal.
03:28 Alexander-Arnold is in that part of the pitch because Liverpool's plan was to have him invert
03:32 in the middle to allow them to have numerical superiority in the centre.
03:36 And after the ball has been turned over, they're getting back into their defensive shape.
03:40 He's then got to come back across and it's while he's doing that, he receives the ball,
03:44 miscontrols it and Gordon gets in and scores.
03:47 Newcastle catch them in the transition.
03:49 And then a few minutes later, Van Dijk is sent off and you're thinking, how many?
03:53 But the answer to how many was zero.
03:56 It was very much the footballing equivalent of call an ambulance, but not for me.
04:00 And that was genuinely because Liverpool turned their numerical disadvantage into a numerical
04:06 advantage.
04:07 And having watched it back this morning, which was a lot of fun, let me tell you, it might
04:11 honestly be one of the cleverest things I've ever seen on a football pitch.
04:16 So you're a Premier League manager, you lose a play-up, sea of urge, and the first thing
04:20 you do is you try and reshape your team.
04:22 Nine times out of ten, regardless of what formation you play normally, teams will revert
04:27 to two banks of four with one striker left up top.
04:31 And the reason for that is obvious.
04:32 Two banks of four is very difficult to break down if you're disciplined and you're rigid
04:36 with it.
04:37 It allows you two players out wide to defend here, it allows you two players out wide to
04:39 defend here, it allows you two in the centre, it allows you two at the back.
04:42 And you have one player up front, either someone big and strong who will hold the ball up and
04:46 let you move the pitch, or someone quick and dangerous who you can hopefully hit a long
04:50 ball in behind and maybe you can get something that way.
04:53 Not all the time, but the vast majority of teams do this.
04:56 But Liverpool did not do this at all.
04:59 Instead of a 4-4-1, what they actually did was they went to a really narrow 4-3-2.
05:05 They didn't worry about Salah and Gakpo initially going anywhere near the centre-backs or trying
05:10 to be dangerous there.
05:11 What they did was they went to this shape in the middle to get that numerical advantage
05:17 back.
05:18 Alisson actually spoke about this in the post-match press conference and said they were trying
05:20 to make the pitch smaller so that the numerical advantage would be less telling.
05:24 And what they did was they tried to do all of the defending within the width of the two
05:28 boxes, pretty much within the width of the two goals.
05:31 But also, and you'd think counter-intuitively, Liverpool were really narrow when they had
05:35 11 men on the pitch.
05:36 Alexander-Arnold was tucking in, Robertson wasn't really doing too much on that side.
05:40 They actually opened up when they went to this back four.
05:43 And what's mad about that is it effectively adds two extra defenders, in a way.
05:48 A lot of managers talk now about treating the touchline as another defender.
05:52 A player can't run that way, they can't pass that way.
05:54 It's effectively a brick wall in terms of the football pitch.
05:57 So if you always show a winger or a wide player out that way, you effectively double up on
06:02 them.
06:03 There's only so many directions that he can go.
06:04 And because Liverpool were sitting so narrow in the first half, it was giving Almiron and
06:07 Gordon loads of room to either go around them, and if they could pull them out slightly,
06:11 they could go inside.
06:12 But as soon as they started defending a lot wider, all of a sudden, they could either
06:16 come into the middle of the pitch, where Liverpool did have that numerical advantage, or they
06:20 could turn back.
06:21 Now, you can do this against Newcastle, because Dan Byrne, for all his qualities, isn't exactly
06:25 going to go and make mad, crazy, pacey, overlapping runs.
06:29 He's certainly not going to do that, given the pace Liverpool have to hit on the counter.
06:32 And Kieran Tripp, he's one of the most progressive defenders in terms of ball progression, not
06:37 because he listens to like Muse or something, but he's one of the best progressive defenders
06:40 in Europe, but because of his passing, not because of his running.
06:44 He will get into this area of the pitch, and then sort of stop and look to play the ball
06:47 forward.
06:48 He won't physically, usually, make that run and make the numbers tell.
06:52 So what that basically means, if you're willing to join me on this metaphor of treating the
06:56 touchline as an extra defender, is that Liverpool have a 2v1 here, a 2v1 here, a 2v1 here, and
07:03 a 5v3 here.
07:05 It's a risk, but when you think about it, when you have one player less than the opposition,
07:09 you've kind of just got to sort of pick someone on their team that you think won't be able
07:13 to hurt you and just forget about them.
07:15 If you stop defending them, you effectively go to parity in terms of the players you are
07:20 worrying about.
07:21 But what Liverpool did was they picked two players.
07:23 They were fairly confident it wouldn't be too damaging, and that went from levelling
07:27 it up to giving them a man advantage back.
07:30 And it's a risk, obviously, because Dan Byrne could have made some great run into the final
07:33 third or Kieran Tripp could have got loads of space and played next on the ball.
07:36 It is a risk, and Newcastle did have the chances to go and win this game, but it was a calculated
07:41 one and it worked.
07:43 Just to illustrate how effective blocking off this central zone was, here is Bruno Guimaraes's
07:47 passing map from that entire game.
07:50 You can see, obviously, everything goes through him at Newcastle.
07:52 He had the most passes, he had way more than anybody else.
07:55 Everything goes through him, right?
07:57 This is his passing map after the sending off.
08:00 Now, for a start, this should just shock you because we're talking about 28 minutes versus
08:04 the entire rest of the game, and you've removed pretty much half of his passes in the process.
08:09 But just, if you can see, it's not the easiest to see on this thing, but if you look, how
08:14 few of them are incisively through this part of the pitch?
08:18 How many of them are sideways or backwards?
08:20 There are a couple, yes, but they really did limit his ability to pass the ball forward.
08:25 Liverpool have not lost any of their last seven games when they've gone down to 10 men.
08:31 And I think when you look at this system and how it allows them to keep control of a game,
08:36 you can see why.
08:37 But you see, this is the change that allowed Liverpool to keep control of the game.
08:41 It's not the change that allowed them to win the game.
08:43 And that change was this, just with a very, very subtle twist.
08:48 After Klopp had made all his substitutions, and I think they had Elliot on by that point,
08:51 and Jota on that point, and Nunes, obviously, they were no longer a 4-3-2, but he just rotated
08:57 this round ever so slightly and turned it into a 4-2-3.
09:03 And by adding Nunes to this equation, all of a sudden you've still got a big numerical
09:07 advantage, but now you've got Salah and Jota in positions where if they can find gaps between
09:11 the full-backs or even getting behind, they're free to do so on their side.
09:15 But also, crucially, Nunes is going to stretch this Newcastle defence and push them further
09:20 and further back.
09:21 And even when he's doing that, Liverpool retained their numerical advantage in the middle, but
09:24 it allowed him to put the pressure on those defenders, and he got two opportunities through
09:29 doing that and took them absolutely clinically.
09:33 Now, I've already seen some people saying that the margins on those two goals are really
09:36 small and over the course of a season, Nunes isn't going to do that every single game,
09:41 so it's kind of that Liverpool got a bit lucky, but like, no, they didn't.
09:46 They manufactured this situation to give themselves a chance of those exact opportunities developing,
09:52 and when they did, they were able to take them.
09:55 Now, don't get me wrong, you play this game again, Nunes misses one, possibly misses even
09:59 both of them, and Newcastle win, it's a whole different conversation, but this is exactly
10:04 what they were trying to do, and if that works, even if there is a slight bit of fortune in
10:09 it, you have to say that, like, that's the plan.
10:12 You have to hand it to them.
10:13 And the thing is, the equaliser was the worst possible thing that could happen to Newcastle,
10:17 because all of a sudden, they knew they didn't have control of the game, but now they had
10:20 to really push everything as far on as they could to try and rescue that win back, and
10:26 all that did was it created even more space in behind for Nunes to get into.
10:31 Like, it played right into their hands.
10:33 Honestly, right, and if you watch the channel a lot, you'll know I don't just say stuff
10:36 like this and really mean this, right?
10:38 Honestly, I think it was the most impactful and effective tactical change I have ever
10:44 seen in a football stadium while I've actually been there.
10:47 You could see it so vividly when they did it, and I was just like, oh, that's really
10:53 clever.
10:54 And then, you know the rest, it worked really well, they got two goals, Liverpool won, I
10:57 went and did tequila slammers with my friend Jess, and I'm now clinging on to a bottle
11:00 of Lucas Aid Energy for dear life.
11:03 Oh, and finally, one really important, very cerebral, clever tactical insight I have for
11:08 any Newcastle fans watching this video, right?
11:12 Don't worry about it, got beaten by a better team for the second week in a row, but it
11:17 happens.
11:18 It happens.
11:19 They'll be fine.
11:20 Like, my soul feels like it's made of dog s*** after having to watch that, but it'll
11:25 be fine.
11:26 Anyway, though, if you did enjoy this video, please do consider subscribing to us here
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12:08 In the meantime, though, and until next we meet, get me on Twitter @adamcleary, C-L-E-R-Y,
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12:15 And it's in the top of the video the entire time.
12:17 Thank you very much for watching.
12:19 I am away to see if anywhere will deliver a fry up at midday.
12:22 Goodbye.