Liverpool must look to Man City and Ajax to solve an early-season problem of their own making
Liverpool kicked off their 2021/22 Champions League campaign with a 3-2 victory over AC Milan at Anfield, and aside from a few minutes shortly before half-time, it was a very dominant performance.It might be Milans first match at European footballs top table since 2013/14, but they finished second in Serie A last season and have three league wins from three in this campaign. To have dominated them so comprehensively should not be taken for granted. While expected goals can be a useful tool for assessing matches, here the circumstances of how the game unfolded make it somewhat irrelevant.Infogol valued the chances each side had using their model and scored the xG as 2.71 to 1.47 in Liverpools favour. However, those figures do not account for many relevant factors. Trent Alexander-Arnolds effort which led to the Reds taking the lead is excluded as it led to an own-goal. Mohamed Salahs saved penalty and Diogo Jotas follow-up header added up to 1.1 expected goals and Liverpool were not going to be scoring more than once from that situation. The same was true for Milans second goal, where the two shots in the move combined for 1.2 xG.For this match, it may be more pertinent to consider the shot totals, and they were very one-sided: 23 for the Reds and just seven for the visitors.Read MoreRelated ArticlesRead MoreRelated ArticlesMilan conceded an average of 12.2 shots per league game last season so Liverpool gave them something close to a double dose of what they would normally face. Per FBRef, there was only one Serie A match in which they conceded at least 23 shots in 2020/21 against eventually relegated Benevento, strangely enough and Internazionale had 27 when knocking their city rivals out of the Coppa Italia. But in their other 51 games in all competitions, no team had more than 21 shots against Stefano Piolis side.It wasnt just the most goal attempts any of the 32 teams took in Champions League match week one, but more than the rest of the teams in Group B had between them. At the same time that Liverpool and Milan were serving up a thriller, Atletico Madrid hosted Porto. The match ended 0-0, with the home side having just six shots to the visitors five. The Spanish champions defensive, dour, grinding style of play is hardly a surprise as Diego Simeone approaches a decade in charge of Atleti. Nonetheless, to only have two shots in the box at home to the team that most people would consider the weakest in the group (no matter what UEFAs seeding process might say) is not a good look. When Jota tried to head home the rebound from Salahs penalty, it was Liverpools ninth shot and there were less than 14 minutes on the clock. They had already outshot every other team in their group across their full matches with 76 minutes still to play.But as one-sided as the match was for about 95 per cent of it, did Jürgen Klopps team actually have too many shots? Or perhaps a better question is: did they have too many of the wrong kind of shot? Read MoreRelated ArticlesRead MoreRelated ArticlesLiverpool had three Opta-defined clear-cut chances against Milan, but one was the penalty and the rebound header which immediately followed was another. That moment aside, the other big chance was for Salahs goal and even then, the Egyptian had to hook the ball home after it had bounced. If it was clear-cut thanks to the short distance from goal and the lack of defensive pressure, it absolutely was not when it came to ease of execution.While a high shot count can never be an entirely bad thing, a glance around Europe on Wednesday night illustrates that it certainly isnt everything either. Manchester City had 16 shots on their way to beating RB Leipzig 6-3, while Ajax brought a 5-1 win back from Portugal despite only having 13 goal attempts against Sporting. There are similar examples from Liverpools past in the competition too. The Reds beat both Maribor and Spartak Moscow 7-0 in 2017 without having more than 20 shots against either of them and have similarly recorded 5-0 victories over Porto and Atalanta under Klopp without requiring more than 15 attempts at goal each time. Liverpools wastefulness is becoming a theme this season. It may not have particularly cost them yet, but their division-high total of 100 shots has only seen them score nine goals in the Premier League, and they have taken at least 19 shots in every single match. By this measure, the Milan game was entirely par for the course for Liverpool in 2021/22: dominant, shot heavy, and closer than it needed to be. Sometimes, less is actually more.Read MoreRelated ArticlesRead MoreRelated Articles
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