It’s no secret that Liverpool haven’t been firing on all cylinders since the season began.
However, Tuesday’s clash with Galatasaray has some Liverpool fans' worries turning into actual issues that should be addressed and amended.
We’re two months into the season, and it’s been up and down to say the least. During the periods of late winners and excitement, it’s easy to paper over the cracks, but when the results are no longer coming in, questions need to be asked.
Our style of play
The long and short of it is that we are quite easy to play against at the moment. In every game we’ve struggled in this season, the overarching theme has been pressure from the opposition. Newcastle pressed us, Crystal Palace pressed us, and Galatasaray pressed us.
We’re not coping when teams get in our faces, and the more teams that get success by playing that way, the more we’ll see it.
Now your Burnley's, Wolves’ and West Ham’s are not going to be pushing our lads too far into our own half, but well-disciplined teams will. With the players we have, we need to be performing better over the course of the game.
Naturally, opposition teams will have spells where they push and apply pressure, but we need to be better at defending that, which I’ll get on it very shortly.
1-0 down and away in the Champions League, and I can’t remember a ball getting knocked into the middle of the park in the last 20 minutes.
We have technically talented players to get on the ball and bridge the gap between the back line and the front but weren't using them at all.
Our last 20 minutes here were predictable, sloppy, long-ball focused. We’re easy to defend against because we aren’t utilizing what we have.
If you give the Galatasaray back line an option between tracking runners and chasing short passes vs heading long balls clear, which do you think they’ll choose?
Wirtz is like 10% away from completely controlling an entire game, but for every 2-3 things he does well, he counters with 2-3 done badly. He can be either very creative or very costly.
Slot's substitutions
A big surprise for me came with bringing Macca on when Ekitike got injured. That move pushed Wirtz out to the left, where he’s shown against Palace that he cannot play.
Had Rio Ngumoha come on, it would have given the opposition something different to think about, but instead, we cast our $150 million number 10 out to the left and we didn’t hear from him again.
Slot has shown this year on a couple of occasions that he doesn’t always get the substitution correct.
Case in point, when dropped to a back 3 when we were 2-0 up vs Bournemouth on the opening day, and they scored.
Hopefully, that ‘just put Wirtz out on the left’ can find the same bin like the ‘three at the back tactic’ did.
Ibou Konate and our defence in general
Speaking of the back, the next surprise is me struggling to tally up Konate’s mistakes. He is very lucky that we have very little cover for him because if it were any other position on the pitch, he’d be hooked until Christmas.
He’s lacking confidence, he’s nervous, and has been our sloppiest passer all season. As a team that relishes the chance to play out from the back, this is less than ideal.
Whilst I’m not Joe Gomez’s biggest fan, anything is better than calamitous Konate at the moment. I’m giving Ibou a hard time, but that doesn’t excuse the rest of them.
We’re forever giving chances away and filling opposing teams with confidence.
Slot doesn’t know his best team yet, which makes sense as you could argue 5 of our starting 11 only met for the first time, at the most, 2 months ago.
Whilst we’re a patient bunch, we need to see something a little different against Chelsea, otherwise we’ll be sitting here at the weekend repeating ourselves.
It's frustrating football at the moment, but maybe it has been like that all season and we were just distracted by the result.