Alas, poor Florian!

 

Adam Clery of ACFC has done a breakdown this week of where things are going wrong for Florian Wirtz at Liverpool at the moment.

It does rather seem as if things have got so bad that he might soon lose his start - and perhaps even be let go by the club in the January transfer window. I am very sorry to see this, since I am a great admirer of Wirtz's talent. We have seen often enough for Germany and at Leverkusen what an exceptional player he can be. Heck, we've even seen it occasionally at Liverpool: there was that brief spell from around November last year when he finally found his groove and was producing very good returns for several weeks - until he picked up another injury. And when he came back from that layoff, he never quite recaptured the magic again. Why not? It is a bit of a mystery.

I have suspected from time to time that he maybe just isn't quite physically robust enough - or 'brave' enough, or assertive enough - to prosper in the exceptionally intense environment of our Premier League; he doesn't seem to win many duels, and often gets dispossessed rather cheaply. But then, he does seem to be quick, strong, athletic, eager in the press; and the Bundesliga can be quite physical too. There may be something in this 'physical fragility' argument, but I don't think it's the whole story. Perhaps the pressure of the Anfield crowd, combined with the responsibility of being brought into the side as a successor to Salah, the intended creative linchpin around whom a new team would be built, was just too much for him. And of course it can't have helped that Slot's second season spiralled so badly out of control on so many fronts, with the dreadful results and the manager's deteriorating relationship with the departing Salah. But.... things seem to be even worse now under Iraola. He's lost all confidence and fluency; his decision-making seems to have deserted him; he doesn't appear to have any rapport with his teammates.

If Wirtz does 'fail' in our league, I feel that would be a very sad outcome to a move that promised so much. I said at the beginning of last season that, although I worried it might take him quite a while to settle in, I was confident that his class would eventually shine through. That's never really quite happened.

And I confess, I did have a punt on Wirtz in my initial squad this season. I felt that Liverpool might quickly turn the corner under Iraola, and I thought Wirtz, if he could rediscover that form he'd briefly shown in the middle of his debut season, would be their most valuable player for FPL. That was probably another instance of my recurring fault of taking a few too many chances in my initial selection,... and trusting too much in my admiration of raw talent. Rather too often, I'll have a little gamble on a player because I believe in their capacity for excellence... without waiting to see if they're actually showing signs of realising that capacity in the current season. Safe-and-steady is usually the way to go with initial squad picks - unless you want to start off the new campaign in the bottom half of the global rankings!!

So, is it all over for Florian? I do hope not. I suspect that, with a player of this class, with a player who's cost this much money, Iraola will have to persist with him for a bit longer. And maybe he's a shrewd enough coach to identify the player's problems - whether physical, or purely mental - and help him overcome them.

I imagine he's going to start for at least one more week, anyway - a fortuitous by-product of Ryan Gravenberch's sending-off against City last weekend. Gravenberch is now suspended for the next game against Brentford, which surely means that Szoboszlai will have to play in central midfield alongside Macallister. If Gravenberch had been available, there would have been an enormous temptation to deploy the Hungarian - consistently Liverpool's best and most dangerous-looking player in almost every single game - as the No. 10, instead of Wirtz. (And damn, yes, if that starts happening, Szoboszlai will immediately become a much more appealing FPL asset....)

We shall see.