Liverpool 0-3 Watford: Stop blaming helpless Dejan Lovren

Liverpool lost 3-0 to Watford at Vicarage Road in a surprise defeat but we all need to stop blaming Dejan Lovren for the loss.

Joe Gomez pulled out of the starting side with a minor injury and Croatian was thrown into the deep end by Jurgen Klopp, to the surprise of us all and probably to Joel Matip as well.

Matip has been the go-to man whenever Gomez wasn’t fit, but now Dejan Lovren was given the honour and struggled.

To be fair to him, nobody impressed as a side fighting to avoid relegation managed to stick three on us. Virgil van Dijk was poor, too, although much less focus has been on the Dutchman because of his supreme form up to now.

Lovren has been here before and any mistakes he makes are normally pounced upon and magnified through a cruel lense of football Twitter and hysteria.

He’s a player that has divided fans for a long time, and this latest episode is likely to cast memories back to that horrible game against Tottenham and all the bad things that came of that.

This is a man who hasn’t played league football in nearly two months, and a man who was denied the chance to get minutes in his legs by the decision not to field any senior players against Shrewsbury.

He was tasked with stopping Troy Deeney, who duly made Lovren’s life very difficult, but what did we really expect? Even Matip would have struggled after barely featuring for so long.

And that’s the downside of having such a settled team. When it works, things are brilliant. But when a reserve player has to step in after next to no football it is always going to be difficult.

We need to support our squad players, especially after difficult periods. Dejan Lovren is no different, despite his history.