Liverpool are not in a good place on the pitch at the moment, with Arne Slot’s Reds needing to improve in a number of areas including passing, creating chances, and defending. His Reds have now lost four Premier League games on the trot, including a home defeat against Manchester United and most recently a shambolic 3-2 loss at Brentford.
That’s the bad news. That and the fact that even when this group was winning earlier in the season, they never looked especially convincing. And that one can go
back to around Christmas last year and see just about every underlying statistic trending in the wrong direction since. So. There might be a lot of bad news. But it’s not all bad, actually.
“It doesn’t look good for the manager right now but what you have to say is there is no lack of effort from the players, who are all clearly still playing for him,” was Liverpool legend John Aldridge’s take on the struggling defending champions. “There were one or two challenges that were shirked, but on the whole the work rate and the desire is there.
“What is undermining everything right now is they don’t know how to defend and Brentford’s approach was very predictable on Saturday. So I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw Giorgi Mamardashvili play a couple of poor passes out wide to Conor Bradley to concede throw-ins in dangerous areas for Brentford inside the first few minutes.”
One of those throw-ins led to Brentford’s opener, and long balls generally have been the undoing of Slot’s Reds this season. Long throws, set-pieces and corners, punts over the top. It’s the most rudimentary of football, really, and Slot has identified it often enough as an issue in press conferences that it becomes all the more worrying it keeps happening.
Liverpool are a side that has become almost laughably easy to unsteady and exploit via what, at its core, is Route One football. They are, fundamentally, a poor defensive team—and adding a goalkeeper like Mamardashvili to the mix who is an outstanding shot-stopper but arrived as a known liability with the ball at his feet certainly doesn’t help that.
“Mamardashvili should have known about the throw-in problems that Brentford could cause,” Aldridge added. “It was so naive and it baffled me. It boiled my blood seeing it unfold and Virgil van Dijk and Slot both said after the game defending long throws was something they worked on all week in training. Clearly not enough work went into that.”
Still, it bears repeating: the players clearly are still playing for the manager. When everything’s gone wrong and they have to chase the game the fire, passion, and energy and commitment do still appear to be there. At times when they’re playing that way, in manic chase mode, they even look good. What happens before then, though. That’s the issue.
