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Liverpool Suspect Mole Inside Club, Still Doesn't Explain Poor Form

The club fear someone inside the club is leaking line ups to the interwebs. The real question is: does it actually matter in terms of on pitch production?

This is not the screen.
This is not the screen.
Alex Livesey/Getty Images

It was an inside job all along.

A year ago, at the insistence of Brendan Rodgers, Liverpool submitted plans to the city to build a privacy screen around one of the pitches at the club's Melwood training ground. Completed in October, the privacy screen was meant to keep out prying eyes in order to prevent details about Rodgers' team selections showing up online in advance of each match.

But team line ups still show up online in the days leading up to each game despite Rodgers and now Jurgen Klopp using the screen during closed training sessions, and the club have now had to face the consideration that despite the expense of the screen, it looks like the leak is coming from inside the club and not fans standing atop bins and cars to get a peek at Klopp's team selection.

Fans have always enjoyed the mental exercise of trying to figure out who might feature in the manager's starting eleven. Liverpool fans relied on Bib Theory™ for some time, carefully determining from official club photographs who was a starter and who was not based on the colour of each payer's bib.

Fans videotaping training sessions were apparently a larger concern, but it always seemed a bit farfetched that fans were taping in order to deliberately sabotage their club online rather than for their own personal reasons. True, rival clubs could have sent spies to stand on bins, but that seems equally farfetched.

Suffice it to say, mole or no mole, it's not necessarily that difficult to guess who the manager might select week in and week out with a lengthy injury list and limited rotation. Liverpool have been playing poorly enough on their own of late that their opposition having twenty-four hours notice of the line up they'll face probably doesn't benefit Liverpool's opponent nearly as much as the Melwood investigators fear.

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