It feels a little at the moment as though nothing is working on the pitch for Liverpool Football Club. That everything that possibly could be going wrong is. As a result, if you ask any fan or pundit, chances are they’ll focus in on a different problem.
Following changes to the forward group, the press simply isn’t working. By trying to increase the fluidity in midfield and free up Ryan Gravenberch, there are gaps being exploited. Asking Mohamed Salah and Cody Gakpo to stay wide and the fullbacks
to underlap seems to be blunting the attack.
Is the big problem the press, then? Or perhaps it’s the midfield balance being off. Are continually underlapping fullbacks an unnecessary complication to a well established system? Or maybe they’re a needed, if difficult, evolution. Perhaps, even, it’s all just fickle finishing.
“We worked so hard to gbut if you concede a second goal like that, obviously that’s the disappointing part,” was captain Virgil van Dijk’s take following Sunday’s loss at Anfield to Manchester United that saw a Harry Maguire 84th minute winner off a second ball from a corner.
Liverpool didn’t close down in initial short cross well at all. Liverpool’s players lost track of their men as the ensuing cross was headed half clear. Maguire was left in space. Goalkeeper Giorgi Mamardashvili, filling in for the injured Alisson, couldn’t react.
“I think we were making wrong decisions and there were moments we were too open if we lost the ball,” Van Dijk continued. “So yeah, it’s a disappointing day. It’s an interesting time now and we have to stick together—not only us as players but together with our fans and everyone who wants us to win.”
Nothing is working like it should and, from the outside at least, nobody can agree on the actual root cause problem that needs fixing. And two full months and eight league games into the season, the Reds lookOver out of time to figure things out from a title point of view.
Having won their first five league games while short of their best, they have now lost the past three. They maybe haven’t deserved that—on balance they created 7.8xG worth of chances while giving up 7.3XG worth in those three games—but they also haven’t clearly deserved to win any of them.
Set against a start where they won a number of games late in ways they probably didn’t deserve to, and this is a side that feels on balance where it should be—a clearly talented but misfiring group with too many question marks to be genuine title contenders.
Things, though, can change quickly in football. These are the defending champions. This Liverpool side, over the first eight match weeks, simply haven’t looked title contenders. Yet unlike most sides one could say that about, we know that sort of a team is in there, somewhere.
“It’s still a long season,” Van Dijk added. “Obviously it’s easy to get dragged into a negative spiral but it’s down to us to keep working, stay humble, and improve as soon as possible and, when you get the opportunity, to show your quality and win your games.”
