Writing about Liverpool is really hard lately. Watching them fail through October has been scarier than anything Halloween threw at me. But as hard as it is to write about that, I imagine it’s 100 times
worse to actually be them. They are stuck in a rut, and every game seems to dig them deeper. Saturday night, they play again against Aston Villa at home, and I don’t think I’ve ever been less confident about their ability to pull out a home victory.
Virgil van Dijk understands the frustration and concern coming from fans, and in the most recent match programme notes, he tries to assuage those fears to reassure us that they are working hard to fix what’s broken.
“I can assure you that everyone in this dressing room understands the challenge facing us, and that we are all working as hard as we possibly can to turn things around,” he said.
“None of us likes what is happening, but believe me when I say I have full confidence in the quality and character of this team. I see the work that is being put in on a daily basis, and the ability of our players, but now we have to go out there and show it on the pitch. Everyone, myself included, has to stand up and be counted.”
That phrase, ‘stand up and be counted’, is a good way to describe it. Liverpool Football Club is home to some of the best football players in the world, and recently it feels as though they have shrunken down and made themselves smaller. He’s right — it’s a team effort, but the individual players do need to put their heads up and show us the magic that got them into the side in the first place.
This isn’t a Roy Hodgson situation where the team is made up of underwhelming players getting asked to play in unfamiliar positions. Arne Slot clearly knows how to structure a team, and it’s easy to see how the new additions are meant to fit into the dynamics of the squad that won that league last season. It’s the execution that has been disastrous.
With October out the rearview mirror and, after I press publish on this story, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-erased from my memory, hopefully we will begin to see the team we were all expecting in the summer.
