Ken Early: Liverpool and Chelsea showcase ‘S**t on a Stick: 2024 edition’

Every time he’s spoken about taking over from Jürgen Klopp at Liverpool in the summer, Arne Slot has talked about how he’s really only changed a few small details.
“I think it would be a really strange decision, if this club had been so successful with Jurgen and so many players are still there, then to change everything,” he told Sky Sports over the weekend. “I don’t think that would work out really well. So, you just keep the things that you like a lot and implement a few ideas that you have yourself as well… it would be stupid to change everything where they were successful with.”
Obviously the playing staff at Anfield has hardly changed at all. They only signed two new players in the summer. One is doing a year on loan at Valencia, and the other has barely featured due to lack of fitness.
All the more remarkable, then, that Liverpool already feels like a different club.
Last season, Liverpool beat Chelsea 4-1 at Anfield in one of the last great floodlit demolition jobs of the nine-year Klopp era. The 20-year-old full-back Conor Bradley got a goal and two assists in a storming performance on a night when Klopp’s team finished with 27 shots to Chelsea’s four.
Liverpool beat Chelsea again on Sunday, but everything else about this season’s match was … quite different. Eight shots was Liverpool’s lowest total in a home league match since early 2021. (As for Bradley, who captained Northern Ireland for the first time last week, he didn’t even make the squad.)
It was after he’d been intensely bored and depressed by watching Liverpool and Chelsea contest the semi-final of the 2007 Champions League that Jorge Valdano came up with the phrase “shit on a stick”. The phrase came to define that era of football: in Valdano’s words, “very intense, very collective, very tactical, very physical, and very direct”.
At Anfield on Sunday, the Pep Guardiola acolytes now in charge of Liverpool and Chelsea showcased Shit on a Stick, 2024 Edition.
The basic scene of the new style involves two defenders and the goalkeeper, standing in a line at the back, slowly kicking the ball to each other while the opposition stand watching them. The players in possession are waiting for a press that is never going to come – two years after Roberto de Zerbi shocked the Premier League by telling his center backs to roll the ball around under their studs, who’s still stupid enough to take the bait?
This Beckettian spectacle eventually comes to an end when somebody boots the ball long. It runs out of play or the opposing goalkeeper gets it, and the other team proceeds to do the same thing.
There have been complaints that the Anfield atmosphere is being ruined by Liverpool’s decision to devote too high a share of their new stands to corporate hospitality. Like most other Premier League clubs, they seem more interested in accommodating tourists (who spend lots of money) than regulars (who might sing and create atmosphere).
But to be fair to the crowd, a game like this doesn’t make it easy for them. In 2007, Valdano lamented: “If Didier Drogba was the best player in the first match it was purely because he was the one who ran the fastest, jumped the highest and crashed into people the hardest.”
At least back then the fans got to see people jumping and crashing into each other. In the first half yesterday the teams patiently worked the ball around at the back and sides, waiting for clear openings to appear before they risked a pass into midfield.
With both sides staying compact and keeping the ball outside their structure when they were on the defensive, it seemed as though the play was hardly ever arriving into the central areas, between the lines, where football happens.
The same sort of sterile shadowboxing characterised the games between Arsenal and Manchester City last season, between two coaches who were determined above all not to lose. What exactly are fans supposed to be getting excited about?
When the game is so carefully controlled and managed by progressive coaches, it falls to the referee to introduce the precious spark of chaos. At Anfield, John Brooks was not found wanting.
Less than 24 hours after William Saliba was sent off for a last-man foul on halfway, Tosin Adarabioyo committed an eerily similar foul on Diogo Jota. No red card this time: that would have opened Professional Game Match Officials Board up to accusations of consistency. Brooks powered on – overlooking, awarding and rescinding penalties with no apparent rhyme or reason. Mohamed Salah broke the deadlock from the penalty spot following one of these random decisions.
The only other outbreak of chaos was in the five minutes after half-time, when there were two goals in quick succession: Nicolas Jackson for Chelsea, then Curtis Jones for Liverpool. Both sides soon reverted to the holding pattern. Chelsea, a goal down, remained stubbornly patient to the end.
Afterwards Enzo Maresca said he was pleased with how his team had played. It might have escaped his attention that they recorded just a single shot on target after the 50th minute, when Liverpool went 2-1 up. But then shots are not really what he focuses on, as a coach.
Result aside, the best thing about the game for Liverpool was the performance of Jones in midfield alongside their revelation of the season so far, Ryan Gravenberch.
Gravenberch’s success as a 6 has surprised everybody. Part of it is that Slot gives him a team-mate close by to help. Certainly it’s easier to be one of two sixes in Slot’s system than to be the lone six in Klopp’s. It’s one way in which Liverpool’s new style is less risky for them and maybe less rewarding for the rest of us, but with 10 wins in Slot’s first 11 matches, something seems to be working.