Iraola’s dynamic football will energise Liverpool despite worry over workload | Jonathan Wilson

There comes a point in most discussions when all the detail and complications fall away and the issue can be crystalised into a single straightforward question. For Liverpool that became: do they have more chance of challenging for the league title next season under Arne Slot or Andoni Iraola ? Put like that, the answer was clear and so Slot was replaced. That answer may seem counterintuitive. Slot won the Premier League last year and Iraola has never so much as managed a club in Europe. There will be those who see the decision, and the widespread consensus that it was the right thing to do, as evidence of football’s impatience. Perhaps it is. Perhaps Slot next season at Anfield, in less testing circumstances, could have regained the confidence of the dressing room and reinvigorated the side. But in management that is very rare. Bela Guttmann observed that being a football manager was like being a lion tamer: the slightest sign of fear and he is lost. A club owner I met recently spoke of being able to recognise the moment when a light goes out in a manager’s eyes, when their judgment goes, paranoia takes over and they begin railing against enemies, real and imagined, who are undermining them. Slot perhaps didn’t quite reach that stage, but there was a sense by the final games of the season that his relationship with the fans and his squad had reached a point of no return . …