With Stoke City now relegated, the mantle of slogging chore to visit has surely been passed on to Burnley, and on Sunday Liverpool had to meet them in the wind and rain, completing the cliché.
Sean Dyche made just one change to the team that drew with Manchester United in mid-week, swapping out Dwight McNeil for Aaron Lennon in Burnley’s 4-4-2 shape.
Having had two less days to recover than Burnley, Jürgen Klopp made four changes to the side that beat Leicester City on Thursday. Naby Keïta and Jordan Henderson replaced Curtis Jones and Thiago Alcântara in midfield, while Sadio Mané and Mohamed Salah returned following their respective success and failure in the final of the African Cup of Nations, at the expense of Luis Diaz and Diogo Jota. Liverpool set up in their usual 4-3-3 formation.
Burnley would press high up the pitch, however they preferred to drop back to plug gaps than really commit to pressuring Liverpool’s backline. One of the strikers would step out to press their side’s centre-back, but the other would generally drop back in to cut off the pass into Fabinho rather than pushing forward to make it difficult to pass across to the other centre-back. This meant that Burnley’s pressure wasn’t very useful for actually regaining the ball as it left open passing options, but they were difficult to play through.
The banks of four behind them would stay narrow to make it difficult for Liverpool to play through the centre, encouraging them to play out to the wings, where Burnley could then pressure Liverpool. This would leave space on the opposite flank open though.
This is primarily how Liverpool looked to attack: working the ball down one side then switching it out to the man in space on the opposite flank.
While Burnley’s narrowness did leave space out wide for Liverpool to exploit, it still packed the centre with players to defend though and, in order to score (given you are unlikely to get a good shot away from the touchline), Liverpool had to bring the ball from those spacious wide areas into the packed centre to get into shooting areas. A few times Liverpool appeared to have caught out Burnley, only to see their attack repelled when the final ball was played into the middle.
Liverpool also tried to make use of their “flexible triangle” on the right. When the ball went wide to Trent Alexander-Arnold, Maxwel Cornet would move out to close him down, which left space for Jordan Henderson to pull out wide into. Erik Pieters was unable to step out of the backline to close down Henderson without leaving space for Salah, but Josh Brownhill would typically follow Henderson anyway to ensure he wasn’t given too much space. Liverpool’s captain had a pretty poor game in possession, so this strategy wasn’t of much use to Liverpool.
Liverpool were starting to look a little frustrated, and, in the miserable weather, gave the ball away sloppily a few times.
In the end, these struggles in open play didn’t matter though. For the fourth match in a row, Liverpool got their opening goal from a set-piece. Burnley used a mixed-marking system that somehow mixed the worst of both man-marking and zonal systems. Firstly, they pulled two men back onto the posts, but then also had three men defending inside the six-yard box, rather than along the line. This meant that despite Cornet already defending the near post, Connor Roberts was stationed a metre or two in front of him, leaving a big obvious space to attack along the six-yard box.
Secondly, Burnley didn’t leave enough men to man-mark Liverpool’s runners. Mané was left free, appearing to actually be marking Ben Mee himself rather than the opposite way round, so it wasn’t exactly shocking that he was the man to peel off and attack that near-post area along the six-yard line Burnley had left open. Alexander-Arnold whipped the ball into that gap, Mané flicked it on and, left free due to a confused Mee spotting Mané’s run and half-heartedly moving to follow him, Fabinho met Mané’s flick-on. Nick Pope managed to stop the first shot, but it rebounded straight back to Fabinho for the Brazilian to bundle across the line.
Once again opposition frailty at set-pieces allowed Liverpool to take the lead without actually having to solve the problem of breaking down a defensive side, and, once they had it, they didn’t let it go. Thiago was introduced in place of Henderson to give more control to the midfield. This freed up Keïta to push forward, but the Guinean wasn’t pulling wide and overlapping as Henderson would, but simply sometimes pushing forward between the lines through the centre. Mostly they would sit back alongside Fabinho to provide passing options and protect the centre as Liverpool managed the game.
Burnley didn’t really offer much to threaten Liverpool. They had a good chance on the counter-attack in the first half, but mainly they resorted to long balls. Usually they would pass side-to-side across the backline yet there was rarely much attempt at actually penetrating through the lines before they simply pumped the ball over the top of them, handing possession back to Liverpool.
It was another professional performance from Liverpool. They struggled to break down Burnley initially, but once the goal came there was little chance of them blowing the lead.
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