West Brom boss Bilic explains reason for substituting Jake Livermore v Huddersfield
Slaven Bilic has explained his reasoning for substituting West Brom midfielder Jake Livermore during the 2-1 defeat to Huddersfield Town on Friday evening.
The Baggies handed the impetus to Brentford in the Championship automatic promotion race with a lacklustre display against the Terriers.
At half-time during the match, Bilic made the decision to take off Livermore and Matt Phillips, bringing on Filip Krovinovic and Kamil Grosicki in their place.
And Bilic has now explained his decision to remove the 30-year-old at the interval.
As quoted by the Express and Star, the boss said: “I wasn’t happy with the first half. They didn’t have chances but we didn’t either so I wasn’t happy with the performance.
“I wanted to liven the team up and I wanted to win the game so I put a couple of players on to hurt them more and get better passing from Filip, but sometimes we looked like some moves were there but not in waves like we wanted before the game to take the ball at them in their own half.
“It was too nervous.”
This is the second week in a row where we’ve written a piece on Bilic’s decision to hook Livermore.
Last time he did it, it caused general uproar among fans as we stumbled to a 1-1 draw against Blackburn Rovers, and for Bilic to then repeat that substitution again this week was a bit of a concern.
Livermore just brings a solidity to the centre of the park that was sorely lacking at times yesterday.
The Englishman has averaged 1.76 more interceptions per game than Krovinovic this term, as well as winning a higher percentage of his duels, as per Wyscout.
There are times to take risks, and there are times to solidify a shaky performance, and yesterday was definitely the latter.
In other West Brom news, Adrian Durham has slammed this Albion player after a clip of him went viral on Twitter.
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