Arne Slot’s Liverpool tactical shifting is gambling on more Wirtz and less Salah | Jonathan Wilson

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Brian Clough could not follow Don Revie.When there has been a successful transition it has tended to come from within. Liverpool did it best, the Boot Room tradition stretching all the way from Bill Shankly through Bob Paisley and Joe Fagan to Kenny Dalglish.Modern football makes such continuity extremely difficult and, unless Liverpool had decided Pep Lijnders was the man – and given his stint at Red Bull Salzburg, no one is suggesting he was – there was no obvious internal candidate to step in when Jürgen Klopp departed.How, then, could a measure of continuity be achieved?

Debate now focuses on the effectiveness of the revolution rather than on the new manager.Which is how Liverpool are in the position they are, undergoing major transition in Slot’s second season. There was some scepticism last season when Jamie Carragher suggested Liverpool needed half a dozen new players, but they did bring in six as well as the 18-year-old central defender Giovanni Leoni, who would probably have been involved had he not torn an anterior cruciate ligament.Modern football being what it is, there has been scepticism about the scale of the challenge facing Liverpool this season: is this really a transitional season?

The obvious conundrum is Florian Wirtz, who has produced stats so contradictory that it’s possible to make almost any argument about his start to life in the Premier League.Liverpool’s Arne Slot (right) and Mohamed Salah, who is struggling under his manager’s tactical tinkering. But more significantly, although he has spent some time on the left this season, it seems almost certain Wirtz was bought to play through the middle, behind a central striker.It’s hard to understand how that could work with the wide forwards Liverpool have at present, at least without a much more defensive back six, and the development of the sort of “broken team” that was common in Serie A in the 90s, which would seem to go against the entire recent evolution of the sport toward universality.That perhaps glances ahead to a future without Mohamed Salah – and it’s telling Liverpool have been linked with the far more dynamic Antoine Semenyo – but may also indicate further change to come.