(Edit: Well, this turned out a lot longer than intended. Sorry. Anyway.) I'm pretty baffled by the lack of patience shown to Benteke. You'd think he was Balotelli, and not someone who was doing pretty okay here and who has a proven track record in the PL. You'd think we had better options. He isn't, and we don't.
First of all: Benteke's been a little disappointing, but he's also scored five goals in about 1000 minutes of play here, none of them pens. His non-penalty goals per 90 minutes rate is about .4, in both the PL and in all comps, and add in assists and it's up to .5 in the PL and .6 in all comps. Those aren't amazing numbers - they're not Sturridge numbers, for instance - but they're not horrible. They're respectable. Certainly it's more than Firmino, Lallana or Coutinho are giving us. Even yesterday, when he was scapegoated thoroughly, he got on the end of a few good chances. Those will hit the back of the net plenty. There are things he doesn't do well at all that are a stylistic problem, like pressing, and I readily admit that. But in a lot of other areas he's unfairly denigrated. He's no less creative than Ings or Sturridge, for instance.
His pedigree is worth considering too. Three years, almost 8000 minutes of Premier League football, and each year he's been roughly a .45 NPG90 striker. That's a remarkable sort of consistency. Ideally a first-choice striker at a top four club would be at .5 or higher, but a slightly-less-than-1-in-2 proven Premier League striker is still a massive asset. If he gives nothing else but a goal every 200 minutes he plays, that's still substantial value. And that is, historically, what he's done whenever he's been played. Those goals come in bunches, admittedly, but they do come.
So already I'm pretty wary of this idea that Benteke's **** enough, or has been **** enough here, to deserve being sold right away or dropped. But that especially makes no sense when there's no answer to the question of Who the **** else are we going to play?
Let me make clear that I like Origi. I liked him a month ago when people 'couldn't see it' and I like him now when people have decided he's the New Henry and New Anelka rolled into one. (You're all wrong: he's the New Aubameyang.) But he's played 800 minutes of competitive football for us and scored exactly two non-fluke goals. He's had one good game in red and it's worth pointing out that that came partnered with Sturridge (who is a massive vortex that positively distorts the attacking performance of everyone he plays with). Every other time he's played, particularly up top on his own, he's looked in over his head.
And then there's Sturridge (hah) and Ings (injured). After that, maybe Firmino? Who has looked just as bad as Benteke, if not worse. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't have Benteke near the first XI in a perfect world, for reasons both stylistic and quantitative. But in our world, with a broken Sturridge, an Ings who's out for the year, and still-a-kid Origi? In a straight choice between 1) a 25-year-old scoring at a .4 NPG90 rate with shot numbers to back it up and a history of being a roughly 1-in-2 PL striker, and 2) a 20-year-old who has scored at a not even a quarter of that rate for us and who is something like 1-in-6 for his career, but who runs around a bit more, are we really choosing #2? There's such obvious upside to playing Benteke into form (getting a 1-in-2 striker playing like it) at almost no cost (how much more is Origi really going to give us? is his running around that essential?). At some point that paradigm will change, but we're nowhere near it.
It's also worth pointing out that for as little as he's integrated himself into the way we play (a fair criticism), we've done little to craft a viable attack around him. Or anyone else, really, which is part of the reason I don't really understand the instinct to just keeping binning off underperforming strikers, as if they're the cause and not the symptom of a larger attacking malaise. I guess this should've been the major thrust of the post, but I'm too far in to rewrite it, so: in games where we couldn't just counter (so no Chelsea/City aways, because those are different beasts - remember Benteke looked good in those games too), we've had one game all season with a proper attack, and that was with Sturridge up top, who dragged us into attacking viability through sheer class. That's because Sturridge is one of the best strikers on the planet, and genuinely world-class. Like I said, he's a vortex: he can just pull off magic that changes and opens up games, and suddenly everyone else looks better for it, the attacking patterns look like they work when they may not with anyone else playing in them. Without Sturridge, no matter who's up top, we've looked dull. You can say that's because all of our strikers are ****, but how many **** strikers have we gone through then? At some point it makes sense to look elsewhere, in particular at our nonexistent attacking patterns. Not much creativity, not much composure, not a lot of really big chances. Benteke, let me emphasize, is part of the reason for that, but so are a lot of other people - the biggest culprit is a general lack of understanding and general lack of identity. I see no reason that our attacking play can't improve with Benteke as we pick up that understanding and identity.
In fact, going back to the Sturridge point, we've been spoilt for world-class strikers the past few years, and I wonder how much that's papered over the genuine, fundamental and deep-lying problems in our attacking play. People like to talk about 'the way we played in '13-'14' like it was a concerted effort and not simply the result of having two world-class strikers pulling rabbits out of hats on the regular. Those strikers go away, we replace them with normal human beings (because buying world-class strikers is hard), and we find that normal humans can't pull that stuff off. So then we have to rely on our attacking patterns, and it turns out our attacking patterns are nonexistent, and we just got away with it because Suarez and Sturridge warp attacking play.
But it's all Benteke's fault, sure. Bin him off for Origi, and when Origi looks like a 20-year-old 1-in-5 or so striker up top on his own, bin him off too, for...Ings? Who I like too, but who isn't going to solve the problems. And then go out in the transfer market, buy another roughly 1-in-2 striker for crazy money (because goals are expensive), only from Germany this time because that's sexier, and wonder why he isn't solving all our problems either. Unless we luck into Sturridge staying fit or somehow buying another top-10-in-the-world striker, there is not simple solution to this problem. In lieu of those magical cures that almost certainly aren't going to happen, we need to actually develop our attacking play: What does a Liverpool goal look like? How is it scored? Who contributes? What are the patterns? How do we get Benteke to score at that 1-in-2 rate we know is possible? How do we put out an attack conducive to those patterns? And so on.
That happens on the training ground. It happens with time and effort. IT happens by a lot of hard work. It happens by letting your strikers get used to those around them, and vice versa, to develop relationships. It's playing Benteke through this and making a real effort to integrate him, one we don't give up at the first sign of weakness. None of that is quick or easy, but it will make us better off long-term. So it's exactly what I expect Klopp to do, and what he should do.
First of all: Benteke's been a little disappointing, but he's also scored five goals in about 1000 minutes of play here, none of them pens. His non-penalty goals per 90 minutes rate is about .4, in both the PL and in all comps, and add in assists and it's up to .5 in the PL and .6 in all comps. Those aren't amazing numbers - they're not Sturridge numbers, for instance - but they're not horrible. They're respectable. Certainly it's more than Firmino, Lallana or Coutinho are giving us. Even yesterday, when he was scapegoated thoroughly, he got on the end of a few good chances. Those will hit the back of the net plenty. There are things he doesn't do well at all that are a stylistic problem, like pressing, and I readily admit that. But in a lot of other areas he's unfairly denigrated. He's no less creative than Ings or Sturridge, for instance.
His pedigree is worth considering too. Three years, almost 8000 minutes of Premier League football, and each year he's been roughly a .45 NPG90 striker. That's a remarkable sort of consistency. Ideally a first-choice striker at a top four club would be at .5 or higher, but a slightly-less-than-1-in-2 proven Premier League striker is still a massive asset. If he gives nothing else but a goal every 200 minutes he plays, that's still substantial value. And that is, historically, what he's done whenever he's been played. Those goals come in bunches, admittedly, but they do come.
So already I'm pretty wary of this idea that Benteke's **** enough, or has been **** enough here, to deserve being sold right away or dropped. But that especially makes no sense when there's no answer to the question of Who the **** else are we going to play?
Let me make clear that I like Origi. I liked him a month ago when people 'couldn't see it' and I like him now when people have decided he's the New Henry and New Anelka rolled into one. (You're all wrong: he's the New Aubameyang.) But he's played 800 minutes of competitive football for us and scored exactly two non-fluke goals. He's had one good game in red and it's worth pointing out that that came partnered with Sturridge (who is a massive vortex that positively distorts the attacking performance of everyone he plays with). Every other time he's played, particularly up top on his own, he's looked in over his head.
And then there's Sturridge (hah) and Ings (injured). After that, maybe Firmino? Who has looked just as bad as Benteke, if not worse. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't have Benteke near the first XI in a perfect world, for reasons both stylistic and quantitative. But in our world, with a broken Sturridge, an Ings who's out for the year, and still-a-kid Origi? In a straight choice between 1) a 25-year-old scoring at a .4 NPG90 rate with shot numbers to back it up and a history of being a roughly 1-in-2 PL striker, and 2) a 20-year-old who has scored at a not even a quarter of that rate for us and who is something like 1-in-6 for his career, but who runs around a bit more, are we really choosing #2? There's such obvious upside to playing Benteke into form (getting a 1-in-2 striker playing like it) at almost no cost (how much more is Origi really going to give us? is his running around that essential?). At some point that paradigm will change, but we're nowhere near it.
It's also worth pointing out that for as little as he's integrated himself into the way we play (a fair criticism), we've done little to craft a viable attack around him. Or anyone else, really, which is part of the reason I don't really understand the instinct to just keeping binning off underperforming strikers, as if they're the cause and not the symptom of a larger attacking malaise. I guess this should've been the major thrust of the post, but I'm too far in to rewrite it, so: in games where we couldn't just counter (so no Chelsea/City aways, because those are different beasts - remember Benteke looked good in those games too), we've had one game all season with a proper attack, and that was with Sturridge up top, who dragged us into attacking viability through sheer class. That's because Sturridge is one of the best strikers on the planet, and genuinely world-class. Like I said, he's a vortex: he can just pull off magic that changes and opens up games, and suddenly everyone else looks better for it, the attacking patterns look like they work when they may not with anyone else playing in them. Without Sturridge, no matter who's up top, we've looked dull. You can say that's because all of our strikers are ****, but how many **** strikers have we gone through then? At some point it makes sense to look elsewhere, in particular at our nonexistent attacking patterns. Not much creativity, not much composure, not a lot of really big chances. Benteke, let me emphasize, is part of the reason for that, but so are a lot of other people - the biggest culprit is a general lack of understanding and general lack of identity. I see no reason that our attacking play can't improve with Benteke as we pick up that understanding and identity.
In fact, going back to the Sturridge point, we've been spoilt for world-class strikers the past few years, and I wonder how much that's papered over the genuine, fundamental and deep-lying problems in our attacking play. People like to talk about 'the way we played in '13-'14' like it was a concerted effort and not simply the result of having two world-class strikers pulling rabbits out of hats on the regular. Those strikers go away, we replace them with normal human beings (because buying world-class strikers is hard), and we find that normal humans can't pull that stuff off. So then we have to rely on our attacking patterns, and it turns out our attacking patterns are nonexistent, and we just got away with it because Suarez and Sturridge warp attacking play.
But it's all Benteke's fault, sure. Bin him off for Origi, and when Origi looks like a 20-year-old 1-in-5 or so striker up top on his own, bin him off too, for...Ings? Who I like too, but who isn't going to solve the problems. And then go out in the transfer market, buy another roughly 1-in-2 striker for crazy money (because goals are expensive), only from Germany this time because that's sexier, and wonder why he isn't solving all our problems either. Unless we luck into Sturridge staying fit or somehow buying another top-10-in-the-world striker, there is not simple solution to this problem. In lieu of those magical cures that almost certainly aren't going to happen, we need to actually develop our attacking play: What does a Liverpool goal look like? How is it scored? Who contributes? What are the patterns? How do we get Benteke to score at that 1-in-2 rate we know is possible? How do we put out an attack conducive to those patterns? And so on.
That happens on the training ground. It happens with time and effort. IT happens by a lot of hard work. It happens by letting your strikers get used to those around them, and vice versa, to develop relationships. It's playing Benteke through this and making a real effort to integrate him, one we don't give up at the first sign of weakness. None of that is quick or easy, but it will make us better off long-term. So it's exactly what I expect Klopp to do, and what he should do.
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