An FA Cup shock shouldnโt unhinge Liverpool, but football isnโt logical
Plymouth showed the worldโs oldest football competition still has life but Arne Slot wonโt be too worried despite his team winning just five of their last 11 gamesSign up for Soccer with Jonathan Wilson here It was, it has to be acknowledged, a much-changed Liverpool lineup. Of the 11 players who began Sundayโs FA Cup fourth-round match at Plymouth Argyle, only Luis Dรญaz had made more than 10 league starts this season and only three others had made more than five. Even allowing for that, Plymouthโs victory registers as one of the great shocks of recent times, only the fourth time the leader of the Premier League has ever gone out of the competition to lower-division opposition. As their quietly charismatic 42-year-old Bosnian coach Miron Musliฤ pointed out afterward, it was a day that will go down in Plymouthโs history, that will be recalled for generations, as a one-off result more impressive than anything they achieved in reaching the semi-final in 1983-84. It was Liverpoolโs ninth defeat to lower-league opposition this century but, in terms of the scale of the shock, it felt perhaps most akin to their exit against non-league Worcester City in 1959 when they were a second-flight club, a defeat that precipitated the decline that led to Phil Taylor making way for the great Bill Shankly. Continue reading...