National team manager says he tried to play £60m Liverpool star in a new position this week

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Hungary manager Marco Rossi has claimed that he experimented with where to play Liverpool’s Dominik Szoboszlai this week.

Szoboszlai has been one of the Reds’ outstanding players in the early months of this season. Indeed, the 22-year-old has played every minute of Premier League football.

That has continued for his national team, with Szoboszlai scoring and assisting for Hungary against Lithuania on Tuesday.

It wasn’t an easy game for the Hungarians, though. They were 2-0 down before the Liverpool midfielder inspired a comeback, 2-2 the final score. And speaking to MTI via Infostart after the game, Rossi admitted that his experiment with Szoboszlai ‘didn’t work out.’

“My idea was for Szoboszlai to play football further back, but it didn’t work out,” said the Italian. “It’s as if we missed the first half completely, we left a large area for the opponent, who took advantage of it.

“The changes made during the break worked, the picture of the match completely changed, we broke through the opponent’s defense several times, so we had a lot of chances.

“But the Lithuanian goalkeeper defended brilliantly, so we didn’t manage to win.”

Rossi admits Szoboszlai mistake

Rossi has previously spoken about playing Szoboszlai as a defensive midfielder.

However, back then the coach implied that a deeper move may come about once the Liverpool man advances to a late stage of his career.

For the time being, Szoboszlai is clearly most useful in a box-to-box type role. If you play him in-front of the defence, you lose a lot of the qualities he brings.

As we’ve already seen at Liverpool, you want the £60m midfielder able to get within shooting distance of the goal.

His long shots are a real weapon, and can help to pull a goal from nowhere.

But playing Szoboszlai further back also limits his obvious technical and pressing ability. Just like with Alexis Mac Allister, a job as a No.6 doesn’t show off the Hungary captain’s true quality.

It’s likely that Jurgen Klopp will have seen Rossi’s attempt at utilising Szoboszlai in a different way. Hopefully the Reds boss doesn’t try anything similar anytime soon.