In terms of both energy and structure it is an improvement on the baton passed to the incoming coach from the unsteady hand of Arne Slot, but it would have been uproarious had it been worse. Slot's hopes and dreams were little more than writing on the sand of a beach, washed away in the first incoming wave.
The last two games I watched, the team failed to hit the high note and were out of tune on so many occasions. Against Fenerbahce it was Slot mark 2. Hard to watch. In the previous game against Arsenal, while denied an obvious penalty which the Premier League authorities have since acknowledged, they simply failed to create a serious goalscoring opportunity. There is a caveat but it offers little in the way of mitigation. The ineptitude of VAR officials has in large part led to me now being in agreement with Caoimhin O’Muraile on VAR. Although Ryan Gravenberch should never have been sent off in an earlier game against Manchester Cheaty courtesy of another VAR howler, which changed the direction of travel of the game and arguably the outcome, this is not a Liverpool thing.
VAR is destroying soccer. It should be scrapped or radically overhauled to the point where it no longer strips the beautiful game of its most beautiful and beneficial characteristic - entertainment value. That aside, it is not a matter of Isak not being up to it. He is on fire but is not being found by those whose primary purpose on the pitch is to create chances. Such was their ineffectiveness that one sports journalist observed that David Raya 'could have had a cigar in and read the papers for most of the second half.' While Wirtz is improving gradually and Barcola is still adjusting to life in the Premiership, the un-fun fact is that against the Gunners Liverpool showed they had absolutely no guns. For the first time since the 2003-04 season, across 442 league games at Anfield, Liverpool failed to place a shot on target.
I missed most of Sunday's game away to Crystal Palace, catching the first thirty minutes in a Dublin bar as we crawled our way pub by pub to the FAI Cup final. What I did see gave little cause for optimism. Palace aren't exactly high fliers in the English premiership just now but they were allowed to sniff out the Liverpool gaol all too easily. Allison despites some dodgy performances of his own in the other two defeats, kept the scores level. Liverpool emerged 1-3 winners so while the front line has delivered on that occasion, serious questions remain about the backline, which conceded from three set pieces. That is abysmal defending. Even Jeremy Jacquet, so reliable throughout this current campaign, had a seriously off day.
I missed most of Sunday's game away to Crystal Palace, catching the first thirty minutes in a Dublin bar as we crawled our way pub by pub to the FAI Cup final. What I did see gave little cause for optimism. Palace aren't exactly high fliers in the English premiership just now but they were allowed to sniff out the Liverpool gaol all too easily. Allison despites some dodgy performances of his own in the other two defeats, kept the scores level. Liverpool emerged 1-3 winners so while the front line has delivered on that occasion, serious questions remain about the backline, which conceded from three set pieces. That is abysmal defending. Even Jeremy Jacquet, so reliable throughout this current campaign, had a seriously off day.
Virgil Van Dijk commented after the Fenerbahce game that the way the backline performs is not sustainable. But he was making the same sort of claims from early on in Slot's last season to little avail. If the captain understands the problem he shows no aptitude for fixing it.
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