AFTER reading an interesting article about Jamie Carragher’s opinion on Luis Suarez having the potential to be Liverpool’s greatest ever player on ESPN’s website , it was a much smaller detail that drew my eye.
Carragher revealed that if our players were polled on where they expected LFC to finish in the Premier League this season, answers would vary from 5th to 7th.
This was fascinating for me because I have always been a believer that the players with the greatest mental strength expect more than those with less confidence in their ability. While some would write players off as deluded if they were to state that we would finish in the top 4, that attitude is actually preferable in my mind.
If the team is confident that they will take that Champions League berth, then overall I would expect that their results would be better than if they expected to finish 5th or lower. Whether that mentality would actually take them into the top 4 is another matter but football is about accumulating as many points as possible and a positive mentality can help glean those precious additional points.
That none of Carragher’s teammates were prepared to expect a 4th place finish spoke volumes about the performances of the team this season.
Let me be clear, I would not want LFC to be making bullish statements to the press via senior players or the manager that we will get into the top 4, we have seen too often this season how that has had an adverse effect on the team. This should be an inner mentality, one that is not shown to the public.
This Liverpool team seems to have been a victim of expectation from the outside this season, another aspect of the mental flaws within the group. Whenever the side has played with pressure, they have either not performed or not got the result.
Against West Ham, we played terribly and escaped with what was probably a lucky win when assessed in hindsight. At the time, it felt like it was an LFC side beginning to be able to churn out results when not playing well. Often as a fan it can be hard to just accept that a win was fortunate and it is always tempting to look for vindications for the team.
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Against Aston Villa at home we lost when we appeared to be gathering momentum and against Southampton we lost, on the back of a potential season turning win over Tottenham, when Everton piled on the pressure with their win over Man City. It is when Liverpool have looked in their most threatening positions this season that they have capitulated.
However, in the recent interview with Dr Steve Peters in The Independent, my theory about the link between player expectation and success is emphatically rejected. Peters has been tasked with resolving some of Liverpool’s mental difficulties, having provided successful mental training to the British cycling team at the Olympics.
In an illuminating interview, he suggests that the only goals that should be held are those that are within a sportsman’s control and that the aim should be to do the best that they can do as individuals. Perhaps with this in mind, the Liverpool stars will be encouraged to look solely to personal targets to try and achieve better team results and to tune their brains to be clearer on match day.
However, although players will have their individual goals, the team as a collective also has a goal within their control and that is winning the match that they are playing. Whether Peters can foster a collective to achieve a goal from individual targets is an experiment I would like to see the results of.
Peters also discussed how emotion plays its part in mistakes being made. An individual can make poor choices by virtue of emotion alone; this is perhaps the greatest challenge for footballers to overcome. Football is a sport which is very emotional, the fans are passionate, the footballers are wrought with raw feelings and when players and fans combine the potential for bursts of irrational behaviour is magnified.
When one considers how emotional Liverpool Football Club is, this problem is further intensified. Peters must help the players this adapt to this environment if the debilitating results that have punctured Liverpool’s current season are not be repeated in the future.
Ultimately, it seems that my critique that Liverpool were not setting their sights high enough to achieve their dreams was perhaps misplaced. Peters would suggest that using league position as an aim at all is counter-productive mentally.
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I agree that the players need to expect to finish 4th. If you don’t believe you can do it you never will.
You are clearly missing the point Karen. What he said was top 4 should be an aspiration, something we should aspire to achieve. Not an obligation set in stone. There’s a difference. And if the players can distinguish between the two, it would ease a lot of mental pressure on the players. But easier said than done i guess….
We do not have a squad strong enough or capable enough to compete with the likes of Tottenham, Arsenal and Chelsea for 3rd and 4th spot.
We have a very weak squad
The two Manchester Clubs have easily the biggest and strongest squads
Followed by Chelsea, Then Tottenham and then Arsenal.
Newcastle also have a better squad than us, we have the 7th best squad in the league, its not only a coincidence that we now challenge Everton, Fulham and Stoke for a top 6-10 position every year. Our club needs some Major surgery completed to playing staff, we need to clear out the average hard working players and replace them with class,quality hard working players. And all the clubs with better squads than us now will all strengthen in the summer also, so how do we bridge that gap?
A Major Overhaul of the playing staff out and inwards is despratey needed. The owners need to dig deep into their poclkets or to sell the club to some owners who will and will get club back to the top of theleague and competing with the elite teams in europe again. As we have now been out of champions league for five years and its five years too many.
The owners need to back B Rodgers with £90-£120M over course of this year in summer and winter , so rodgers can build a side who can compete for honors every season and so we can start challenging United regularly again for the title. 23 years without a league title, is way too long we need to change that over next year or two.