Injury-hit Liverpool defeated Stoke City 1-0 in the first leg of Semi-final of the Capital One Cup at the Britannia Stadium.
Klopp made three changes to the team that started against West Ham, Toure, Allen and Lallana coming in for Sakho, Ibe and Benteke. So it was clear to see that Firmino will be leading the line in absence of the Belgian.
It was a 4-3-3 with Toure and Lovren as centre-back pair, Lucas in that holding role, Allen and Can patrolling the area from box to box. Firmino leading the line as ‘false 9’ and Coutinho and Lallana just behind the Brazilian.
Let’s now take a look at the general formation and movements of Liverpool players :-
With two injuries during the game, there were a few positional changes of players, with Ibe and Milner coming on very early in the game due to injuries to Coutinho and Lovren, so in this case Lucas was shifted to centre-back alongside Toure and Milner joined the midfield with Can and Allen. Ibe replaced Coutinho in a straight swap.
We will now focus on the false 9 system and how it created a sense of cohesiveness among the players. Firmino’s off the ball movement again gave plenty of headaches to Stoke’s defenders, and Coutinho (later Ibe) and Lallana pressed the channels so that Stoke were not allowed to play a free-flowing passing game, they were instead forced to go long.
Once the creativity of Arnautovic and Shaqiri were limited by constant pressing, Stoke looked very bleak in their attacks and in all departments Liverpool were the ones who were playing better. Another important aspect of this system is off the ball movements and how it forces opposition sides to play in an opposite way to usual.
We’ll take a look at how Liverpool worked out when they were not in possession and what were the key areas leading to this almost perfect performance:
We can see Firmino occupying and pressing the center-backs, Lallana and Ibe pressed the wide areas where Pieters and Johnson look to move forward, Milner and Allen tracked back and helped the fullbacks in blocking the creativity of Arnautovic and Shaqiri, whilst Bojan was largely anonymous because of this.
When in possession, Ibe and Lallana became more narrow and allowed Milner and Allen to run the wide areas and link up play from there. The main advantage of this system is the ever-changing target man for center-backs to mark. This was generally Firmino but when Ibe and Lallana narrowed themselves, Shawcross and Wollschied were unsure whether to mark the false 9 or the on rushing pla-ymakers.
So, subtle tweaks and movements were there on display which bamboozled the whole Stoke system and made an easy route for Liverpool to get an important away goal advantage going to Anfield in three weeks time.
It has to be said that it was a perfect reaction from the Reds after that debacle at West Ham and the two injuries in early the exchanges of this game. Klopp again has to be the man to be given credit for implementing this false 9, 4-3-3 system and pressing the opposition higher up the pitch to draw mistakes.
One could say that Liverpool have one foot in the final with this away goal given Stoke’s horrible record at Anfield, but still, in football nothing is guaranteed and we’ll have to wait for three weeks until we get a finalist from this tie.
