“In the whole game we didn’t win enough challenges, to be honest. They win a challenge and all of a sudden we are completely open, how is that possible? We have two or three players in a challenge, moving toward the ball. When you are there, you have to win the ball, if you don’t do that and they get out, it looks like ‘eh, where are they?’.
The above was part of Jurgen Klopp’s assessment of his side’s performance in their 2-2 FA Cup draw with Wolves. It’s clear the Liverpool manager had a problem with how the men in red dealt with challenges, which are known as duels in the football data world. He was entirely on point when noting his players didn’t win enough of them.
Liverpool were only successful in 35 of the 81 duels which occurred on Saturday evening, a 43.2 per cent win rate. These figures do not correlate perfectly with winning matches, as three of the five games in which the Reds lost a greater proportion of the duels this season were victories against Manchester City (in the Community Shield), Newcastle United and Napoli. There are wider trends which are of grave concern though.
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In Klopp’s first full season in charge, Liverpool were successful in 48.1 per cent of their duels in the Premier League. Their figure rose each year until 2019/20, when they won 50.5 per cent of their challenges, and far more importantly won the league title for the first time in three decades.
With the injury crisis the club endured the following season, a fallback was inevitable. The Reds recovered on the duel front last season but after 17 matches of 2022/23, their win rate stands at 47.5 per cent. This is both the lowest in the division this season, and (arguably more concerning) below what Klopp’s Liverpool offered when his time in England began. While the percentage shifts haven’t been huge, there is an air of ‘back to square one’ at present.
Breaking the duel statistics down by the first and second half also hints at what supporters have been discussing all season, namely that the team no longer has the legs to run hard and cover ground as it once did. This could be seen against Wolves, where the Reds went from winning 51.4 per cent of the challenges in the opening 45 minutes down to 37 per cent for the remainder of the match.
In only six of their 17 league matches have Liverpool won a higher proportion of the duels following the interval and in just three has the rise been greater than 1.6 per cent. Coincidentally, just six of the games this term have seen the Reds win more than 50 per cent of the challenges in the first half.
On one hand, it’s encouraging that the last five games all fall into this category, but on the other, it’s a problem that none of them have coincided with second half improvements. In other words, when Liverpool have been more successful in duels after the break, they were starting from a low point anyway.
If we forget about improvement and look at matches in which the Reds triumphed in at least 50 per cent of the duels in both halves, we find six examples from their 27 games in all competition this season. The group includes Champions League wins over Ajax and Rangers (both home and away for the latter), as well as the recent victories over Aston Villa and Leicester. Liverpool’s performance against the Foxes left a lot to be desired, proving that winning the majority of the challenges is not the be-all-and-end-all. It certainly appears to help though.
“Whoever you play, you have to win challenges. It’s something I already mentioned in the dressing room and I will mention it again,” said Klopp after the Wolves draw. He knows what the issue is, the main challenge is how to resolve it.
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