Manchester United legend Gary Neville reckons Liverpool boss Arne Slot must drop Milos Kerkez to see an improvement in performances.<\/p>\n
The Reds started off the season in brilliant form with Slot\u2019s outfit winning all five of their first five Premier League matches to go top of the standings.<\/p>\n
But since then it\u2019s been a disaster with Liverpool<\/a> losing five of their last six matches in all competitions and all four of their last four Premier League games.<\/p>\n Neville thinks Liverpool, who have dropped down to seventh in the Premier League table<\/a>, could have more points on the board this season if they\u2019d taken their chances and replaced some of their underperforming players.<\/p>\n Kerkez, who scored in their 3-2 defeat to Brentford on Saturday, has been largely poor since joining from Bournemouth in the summer and now Neville reckons he needs to be dropped.<\/p>\n Neville said on Sky Sports: \u201cI actually think that there were quite a few of those games they\u2019ve lost that they could have won, flipping it the other way if they had taken their chances.<\/p>\n READ:\u00a0Liverpool lose in the air and on the ground as chaotic season threatens to unravel entirely<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cEarly on in the season, I felt their full-backs weren\u2019t right, maybe Ibrahima Konate times wasn\u2019t right and\u00a0Virgil van Dijk\u00a0was holding them together and Alisson was in goal.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019ve got two world-class performers there in Van Dijk and Alisson, but the virus is catching. It\u2019s not just going now into the left-back.<\/p>\n \u201cThe left-back is becoming a worry. He [Kerkez] scored last night but watching him, he has to be taken out I think.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m worried about the right-back. [Jeremie] Frimpong isn\u2019t a right-back.\u00a0Conor Bradley\u00a0has been given his head and I\u2019m supportive of that because I think there\u2019s a lot of talent there, but it\u2019s difficult when your team are conceding goals and the pressure is on.\u201d<\/p>\n Neville added: \u201cIf he carries on playing Kerkez at left-back and he carries on playing Bradley at right-back, and they carry on being as exposed as they are in midfield, you\u2019ll keep getting the same results.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery single game you\u2019ll be flipping a coin and thinking, \u2018Are we gonna win or are we gonna lose?\u2019, and that can\u2019t be what Liverpool are about with the way they\u2019ve performed in these last 12 months.<\/p>\n \u201cI like the manager a lot, I like his way of working, I like his manner in press conferences, it doesn\u2019t look like there\u2019s any panic there from him.<\/p>\n \u201cBut deep down, it looks like he\u2019s going to have to interfere with this. He cannot keep allowing the same things to happen each week.\u201d<\/p>\n MORE LIVERPOOL COVERAGE ON F365\u2026 The former Man Utd defender insists Liverpool head coach Slot must change his side to guarantee a \u201cstrong foundation\u201d in order to rebuild their season.<\/p>\n Neville continued: \u201cSlot\u2019s\u00a0Liverpool\u00a0do remind me of our team at\u00a0Manchester United.<\/p>\n \u201cWe went through these mad periods where we\u2019d concede goals. It always looked like we would score but we were all over the place. That wasn\u2019t all the time but there were moments I remember these things happening.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat he [Sir\u00a0Alex Ferguson] would do is he might put John O\u2019Shea at left-back, me at right-back or Wes Brown at right-back, almost go to four centre-backs, and then really narrow the midfield and make them more solid.<\/p>\n \u201cOne thing you can guarantee with\u00a0Mohamed Salah,\u00a0Hugo Ekitike, Florian Wirtz, Alexander Isak, Cody Gakpo, and the others they\u2019ve got, is that they\u2019ll score goals.<\/p>\n \u201cSo the seven plus the goalkeeper are responsible for making sure they\u2019re solid and they\u2019re not open or exposed all the time. It sounds quite defensive and it sounds like going back to base camp and starting from scratch, but sometimes you have to do that.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen everything\u2019s crazy, chaotic and mad, which it is for Liverpool at the moment, you just have to find a strong foundation and that means putting players in there that can keep a narrow back four, prevent spaces, win you duels, make sure you don\u2019t give away easy goals, play it forward quicker than you have been and stop popping it through midfield.<\/p>\n \u201cJust be a little bit more direct, knowing that front three will win you games. That happened at United a lot and I just wonder whether it\u2019s a time now for Arne Slot to simplify and pull it back.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Manchester United legend Gary Neville reckons Liverpool boss Arne Slot must drop Milos Kerkez to see an improvement…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":243901,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,59917,818,1613,50612,44,1614,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-243900","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-football","11":"tag-gary-neville","12":"tag-home-page","13":"tag-liverpool","14":"tag-milos-kerkez","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-premier-league","17":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243900\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/243901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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