Sean Rogers

as close to zero XG goal difference as you're going to get.

There's a few things tactically with them that you can take from the Tottenham game, which is what they do.

Liverpool quite suit their 4-4-2 mid-block.

And Emery likes to set them up in this 4-4-2 zonal shape.

And obviously against a 4-4-2 in a mid-block, a couple of things you can do.

But there's pockets around it to try and get in.

And something Tottenham did, which we've done in the past, is they had four runners.

with a lot of people trying to get in behind.

We actually saw Darwin Nunes have a lot of success against Peltares.

He used to make a lot of runs into that channel.

Mo Salah would drop in, Trent being able to play balls in.

There's that game at Anfield where Liverpool just get in and behind them in that channel constantly.

So the carrot does dangle a little bit there and there's things you can look at that Tottenham do in terms of them dropping the midfielders into full-back areas to progress the ball, try and tempt the Villa wingers out.

And

that's definitely something I think Liverpool need to look at against Villa because once they go into that low block the problem is they can defend that pretty well what you've got to do is sort of build out and try and play through Villa when they're in that mid block which is what Spurs did really well and I think the big thing for Liverpool is that Villa get most of their attacking chances from high press shots and set pieces like a lot of teams it's a problem for Liverpool we've got to defend set pieces really well

which has been a challenge.

And the other problem that dangles for Liverpool is what you do when that's their biggest strength.

I think the carrot's there that Liverpool have got to be creative, maybe more creative than they were against Chelsea in terms of what are you going to do to break down these lines and have runners getting in the back of Aston Villa.

If I show you on the tactics board very quickly this is in yellow that is Aston Villa's set up about how they build out from the back and what Spurs did against them is they went man to man but the problem is they split the back two and have Martinez just stand with his foot on the ball so what they did was they gave Richarlison the task of jumping the keeper blocking passing lanes and you force them into a forward pass the problem

is you're going to have to have two midfielders who are right on top of them and really good at winning the ball back.