When you’ve just had a defeat at club level, sometimes the last thing you want to do is go away on international duty. You want to stay and put things right at your club, correct those wrongs.
ut when you have been on a bad run of form, it can do the world of good to get away from the club environment, go off with your national team and come back with a fresh vision.
You need a break from each other as a group. When you are in that rut with your club, you are seeing the same faces every day, hearing the same voices. In a sustained bad run, you have an air of negativity around the place. So when everyone is miserable like that, it’s great to get away.
That should be the case with Liverpool now as they face into a few days which could define their season – Arsenal away on Saturday and Real Madrid on Tuesday.
They have had a break, most of them were on international duty, some of them had a good week with their national teams, and they will look to build on that.
The manager also needed a break after the time he’s had, and ten days without working with the squad should clear his head as well.
On their day, Liverpool are good enough to win the Champions League, but they need to prove it and this is a big opportunity to kick-start a run into the last nine league games of the season.
They are the champions, but they need to show a reaction to what’s gone on, and a strong reaction in the Premier League can benefit them in the Champions League. They should be massively disappointed with what’s happened to them since Christmas, but this is their chance to draw a line under it and aim to get into the final of the Champions League at least. And then go on and win it.
The Arsenal game is huge for Liverpool. They need to show signs of what they can do in the final part of the Premier League season and they should look to win the game. Arsenal away can be a tough game, but Liverpool’s focus should be on keeping the pressure on the teams above them in the table.
Manchester City struggled against Leicester earlier this season, but they made a lot of errors that day, which they won’t do again when they play them this weekend. Really, it’s a case of City being a week closer to winning the league. Even when they leave players out, they’re not weakened.
For Liverpool, trying to catch Chelsea in fourth is a big ask, but they need to get into a run of form where they at least challenge for the top four. I have read interviews with Liverpool players saying they can have no excuses, that they should be in the top four. Now is their opportunity to go and show that – prove that they are a good side.
The Liverpool team of six months ago would easily take care of Arsenal, but time has moved on. Arsenal are a tricky side, very up and down, but still dangerous on their day, with enough players to cause Liverpool, or anyone, problems.
Arsenal’s issue is that they’ve not been consistent enough in making the most of those players. I always wonder if they have that steel about them, how they react if they go behind, but if Liverpool show they have been revived by that break, you’d expect them to win.
Struggle
If Arsenal is a struggle for Liverpool, that just confirms that the decline has really set in, that they have taken their foot off the gas this season and can’t get going again.
The Champions League is the only trophy Liverpool can win this season so they have to be serious about it. Real Madrid are not the side, or the club, they once were, but they always seem to find a way to win games in this competition, so it’s a tough fixture for Liverpool. In their domestic league, Real have struggled, scraping wins and draws, but they raise things in Europe when those games come around. they have that know-how in winning big games.
A first-leg win for Liverpool would give them confidence that they can overturn what’s gone on and have a strong finish to the season. If they can beat Real, they’ll believe they can go all the way and win it.
But if they drop out of the Champions League at this stage, you’d have to put this down as a pretty bad season for them. They need to be looking for silverware to fix a miserable season and the Champions League is their only way to do that.
Liverpool need to go to Madrid in a strong frame of mind, with Mo Salah concentrated and focused on Liverpool, not anything else. They need to prove what good players they are. As a squad, they have underperformed for three months. They have lacked intensity, weren’t exciting to watch.
It’s not all down to ability, it’s about personality and confidence. The next two games provide a chance to show what a Klopp team is really like.
No real progress but O’Shea the main winner
After three games in a week, I don’t think we know any more about the Republic of Ireland side than we did before this camp.
The performance in the Qatar game on Tuesday was an improvement on what happened against Luxembourg, but you need to qualify that by saying it’s Qatar and Luxembourg.
Ireland’s next qualifier is away to Portugal and that’s the standard that we need to meet. We are where we were a month ago, and maybe a break until June and those two friendly internationals will do everyone good. When the squad regroups in September for the next games in the campaign, things might have changed.
Especially with a new manager you look for progress in every international window… and I didn’t see progress over the last week, compared to October/November. The only hope is that over the next few months, what the manager is trying to achieve can work.
It was a disappointing window and now it’s down to the manager and his staff to find out why it’s not happening.
His staff are key right now, and Stephen Kenny needs to listen to them. He was annoyed by some of the criticism but Kenny needs to listen to and read what exactly the commentators, including ex-players like myself, had to say and why we said it and he needs to be open to change, to make sure that the next time the side come into camp that they are hard to play against.
People in the camp have praised the Slovakia performance last year, a draw and a defeat on penalties. But the performances have not improved since then, so the manager has to work over the next few months to figure it out.
If there was one big plus from the last camp, it was Dara O’Shea at the back, he played really well for such a young player. He did well any time he was posed questions and he’s shown, to me, that he’s more than capable of being that first-choice centre half.
He looked confident and strong, and as he plays more games and gets more experience he will learn what it’s like to play against top-class strikers.
I said after the Serbia game that Dara had made an error of judgement for the first Serbian goal, and that’s only natural in international football for a young player. The key is for him to learn from it, as I and so many other players had to do at the start of our careers.
To be fair to the squad, you can’t pick out one player and say he had a terrible time over the Ireland camp. They all did ok in some ways. But if it’s a case of seeing who can step up, O’Shea was the one who looked like he’ll be around for a while.
