For teams who miss out on Champions League football, the Europa League often feels like scant consolation.
As well as not providing anything like the same level of financial benefits, participation in Europe’s secondary club competitions forces teams in England to play on Thursday and Sunday.
This tight three-day turnaround occasionally occurs when competing in the Champions League, though in that instance it’s down to fixture selection by the television companies.
Indeed, Jurgen Klopp has vociferously railed against this issue in the past. He had to contend with the same problem last week though.
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Both fixtures were in the Premier League on this occasion, but Liverpool’s match at Burnley kicked off just 64 hours after their game against Leicester had concluded.
And a match at Turf Moor in horrendous weather inevitably presents a greater challenge than almost any game will at home. The order in which the matches were played did the Reds few favours.
Although Klopp had intended to start Diogo Jota against Burnley, the Portuguese forward’s dead leg meant that Sadio Mane made his first appearance since winning the Africa Cup of Nations in the starting XI.
The result was Liverpool fielding their joint-oldest side for a Premier League match this season, at 29.0 years old.
All that experience was essential for such a testing match and it’s easy to see why Klopp held new signing Luis Diaz back on this occasion.
The weather conditions also meant that Liverpool had to tweak their approach. It would struggle to have been more different from how they played against the Foxes on Thursday evening.
Opta’s The Analyst site contains data on how teams play. They look at the average number of passes per sequence of possession, and Liverpool have seen a shift from 4.44 in 2020/21 to 4.07 in this campaign.
This means that they also now play a little faster. Opta measure each team’s direct speed, which they define as a measure of how quickly a team progresses the ball upfield, in metres per second.
The Reds’ figure has shifted from 1.39 last season up to 1.54 this term, but more interesting is the contrast between the matches against the Foxes and the Clarets.
Liverpool had a similar level of possession in both games – 63 and 67 percent respectively – and the number of sequences featuring at least 10 passes was only different by two (18 and 20) as well.
A closer look at Opta’s style of play reveals some key differences though.
This was not so much the case in the passes per sequence data, as their figures against Leicester (3.84) and Burnley (4.3) were their 14th and eighth highest from their 24 league matches. Fairly close to average, in other words.
But Liverpool’s direct speed of play could not have been more different between the two games.
In the 2-0 win at Anfield it was the lowest (and therefore slowest) it has been throughout 2021/22, and by quite a margin.
The Reds’ direct speed across their first 22 matches ranged from 1.03 against Tottenham to 1.94 at Chelsea. It has clearly been fluctuating a lot in the last two months.
Against Leicester it was just 0.86 but soared to 2.0 in the match at Turf Moor. While other teams may have had games with similar figures, they are way outside what any other side in the Premier League averages.
Remember too that there’s an obvious correlation between passes per sequence and direct speed. Teams who move the ball forward quickly don’t tend to have lengthy passages of possession.
Yet that’s exactly what Liverpool did against Burnley. Only five times in league and Europe have they attempted more long passes this season, and in four of those games they also attempted at least 60 more passes in total.
It was a sensible tactical shift in light of the opposition’s style and the weather in which the match was played. It was not a game for fancy football, and indeed it was a rare instance of Liverpool having more shots from set pieces than in open play.
But it being a logical change in strategy from the match against Leicester does not mean that Liverpool winning both games should have been taken for granted. They deserve credit for overcoming both challenges by tweaking their style
It will be fascinating to see what changes Klopp employs in the Reds’ next huge match, against Inter Milan.
