Defeat to PSV on Wednesday was another cookie-cutter performance from any of our other 9 defeats in 12 games, and it’s beginning to get to the breaking point for some Liverpool fans.
Liverpool suffered their joint-biggest European home defeat under the lights at Anfield, and now PSV hold company with Real Madrid and Gasperini’s sensational Atalanta side that took us to the sword in 2024.
A club of Liverpool’s stature and history get turned over like that extremely rarely; however, performances and results like tonight's are becoming a weekly occurrence. Arne Slot has been the first to declare that things must change, but will he be around long enough to exact the revolution?
Arne Slot is on borrowed time
The standard at Liverpool is extremely high, and most managers trusted with that pressure don’t survive it. Slot is at risk of being relieved from those duties, should that form continue.
I’ll start by saying that I don’t want him gone. I’m against the modern football way of just removing your manager when the going gets tough instead of allowing the Premier League winner to rectify what is going on.
Sadly, I’m not in charge of that decision, and recent history suggests that managers have been let go for less than what Slot is doing with this team currently.
Whilst he apparently got the backing from the higher-ups after the Forest defeat last Saturday, another 3-goal home defeat 4 days later is hardly helping his case.
West Ham away just got a lot bigger for Arne Slot and his Reds, and if I’m being honest, they’ve shown me very little recently for me to believe we’ll take all three points.
He’s on thin ice, and if that ice were to crack, I’m not even sure who’d be next in line. Let’s pray it never gets to that.
Defensively, we’re the worst I’ve seen us
I’ve been lucky enough to see some very good Liverpool sides in my time as a Liverpool supporter. I’ve seen immensely high-quality and disparagingly weak teams. I’m not sure I’ve seen a team collectively this bad at defending in that time.
On paper, we’ve had much worse defenders and conceded fewer goals than we are now. We’ve conceded 24 goals in 12 games, and it honestly feels like it could have been more.
When low confidence affects a striker, they’ll get into a bit of a goal drought, but they can typically play their way through it without too much scrutiny.
Chances are, your midfielders or wingers will chip in to lighten the load and ease the pressure off your shoulders.
When 2 of our starting 4 defenders are costing us chance after chance after chance, it becomes a detriment to the team on the whole. Ibou Konate and Milos Kerkez have shown that, in their current form, they are incapable of defending our team.
We can’t continue to play out-of-form defenders and expect them to gain confidence by being responsible for us losing goals and games.
We need to see Joe Gomez and Andy Robertson coming in to take the pressure off of those two instead, and have them try to play through it.
Unwillingness to make these changes and drop your out-of-form players could be the straw that broke the camel's back when it comes to Slot’s time at the club.
Confidence is a fickle beast
These days, Liverpool has this uncanny knack of showing you exactly how good they can be for extremely fleeting moments in each game.
After we went down 1-0 again, we settled and started to play football as we used to when we used to demand 3 points from teams.
We discarded the long ball nonsense and played it through the midfield to drive us on, and it worked. We saw our best passages of play right before the break, and it had many of us believing that we were finally going to kick on and turn a game around.
What came out in the second half was a different team entirely. The sharp passing, the intelligent runs, but more importantly, the press, had disappeared.
We created chances by pressing the PSV back line in the first half. By not giving them a minute to settle, we saw results. But the press we showed was unorganised and easy to play through.
For the 2nd goal, Salah got turned from practically inside their half, and they were able to advance 40+ yards and score.
After that, it felt like we gave up, and that’s the most frustrating part. Last season, these ‘fleeting moments’ were 90 minutes long, and those seem like a distant memory. We need to be reminded of that again if we’re going to get any shred of confidence back.
Build the team around Hugo Ekitike
Alexander Isak could be the world's most expensive bench warmer because of the talent we’ve all seen from this young Frenchman.
He is forever the bright spark in any Liverpool performance, and his unpredictability makes him a defender's nightmare.
At Liverpool, we have a terrific track record of developing younger players into superstars and if Hugo is showing these levels of quality and performance in this current Liverpool side and his young age, we could be in for a treat.
Nurture him, help him and improve and give him minutes. If we can have one beacon of hope in this dire season, allow that to be Hugo Ekitike (and Dominik Szoboszlai).