Six reasons for Liverpool to feel uneasy following that Old Trafford capitulation

While it would be a knee-jerk too far to suggest that their season is over, Liverpool have a work to do after their loss to Manchester United.

So it’s the morning after the night before, and in a break with recent tradition following matches between Liverpool and Manchester United, it’s Liverpool supporters who awoke with something of a sore head. Losing this match was a double-whammy for Liverpool supporters. Not only is losing to Manchester United a matter of local pride wounded, but the nature of their defeat also pointed to broader problems which may have been overlooked a little over the last few months.

It’s important not to jerk those knees too harshly. One swallow does not a summer make, and Liverpool’s injury list does make for pretty unpleasant reading. What went wrong at Old Trafford could be recovered in a couple of weeks, and for those of us who tipped Liverpool to perform strongly again this season – the core of this team, let’s not forget, came within a couple of points of winning the Premier League title and the final of the Champions League last season – their early-season slump has definitely come as a surprise.

1) This result cannot be considered a one-off
This may have been Liverpool’s first competitive defeat of the season, but it’s not quite enough to chalk this down as some sort of accident of fate and move quickly on. Losing to Manchester United should also be taken in the context of failing to get a win from either of their first two matches against Fulham and Crystal Palace, so putting this result solely down to Manchester United’s surprisingly high energy levels is a tad misleading.

Liverpool have now fallen behind in their last seven consecutive Premier League matches, and while the fact that they didn’t lose any of the previous six prior to their trip to Old Trafford could be interpreted – as Jurgen Klopp has done before – as them being ‘mentality monsters’, to do so does rather gloss over the fact that league title contenders probably shouldn’t be falling behind in seven consecutive matches.

That Liverpool should have finally ended this statistical anomaly by losing at Old Trafford may be considered unfortunate, but it can hardly be considered unexpected that if you keep on falling a goal behind in league matches you will most likely stop winning them, even if you don’t lose them all.

Liverpool’s style of football under Jurgen Klopp has been all about shock and awe, overrunning midfields and a constant high press that wears opponents out. That feeling that opponents are living in terror from the moment that first whistle blows has been palpably absent from Liverpool’s Premier League performances so far this season. And the concern for Jurgen Klopp is that getting that energy back isn’t necessarily straightforward, especially off the back of a performance that seemed to visibly sap the confidence from their players.

2) Injuries at this time of the season are a concern
Liverpool were missing nine players to injury and one to suspension at Old Trafford, but an injury list of this size at this time of year is a double-edged sword. To what extent are injuries an explanation for Liverpool’s uncharacteristically timid start to the Premier League season, to what extent are they an excuse, and to what extent might they even be a problem exacerbated by something going wrong within the club?

Questions like these aren’t necessarily easy to answer, but it is certainly striking that Liverpool have so many players out injured so early in the season.

The August after a summer with no major men’s tournament certainly shouldn’t be a time for nine players to be out injured. If there’s any point in the entire football calendar when everybody should be ready, fit and able, that time should be now. Training methods, both over the short and long term, could be reviewed in the cold light of day to see if they’re actually getting players into peak condition, or whether they’ve now gone past that point.

This is an even greater worry this season due to the timing of the World Cup, and the stresses that this winter tournament will take on players who have only just had their first proper break in a couple of years after the pandemic. If they’re dropping like flies now, what might the position be by the end of the year?

3) Sadio Mane is still missed by Liverpool, and possibly more than anyone realised
It feels counter-intuitive to say this in an era when squad depth is considered the next stage in the evolution of the game, but the arrival or departure of one player can have a severe effect on the way that team functions. Liverpool seem to be missing Sadio Mane considerably more than many believed they would, and when we consider just how much their form has tailed off without him, those who underestimated this may turn out to include a lot of people within Liverpool Football Club itself.

Luis Diaz arrived in January, but he spends as much time being drawn toward wide positions as he does in the middle. This isn’t a criticism of Diaz, but Darwin Nunez seemed very much missed against Manchester United, Roberto Firmino is past his peak, and the attacking shape that served them so well last season hasn’t yet been fully recreated this time around.

4) The midfield has been allowed to wither on the vine
A quick look at Liverpool’s substitutes’ bench confirms why Jurgen Klopp only made three of his five available substitutes at Old Trafford despite the evidence of his own eyes. For all that was going wrong on the pitch, he didn’t have a great deal available at his disposal on the bench to make the changes that he might have wanted to make.

But playing Jordan Henderson alongside James Milner in central midfield was an obvious mistake. With a combined age of 68, these two players hardly fit the bill for the sort of gegenpressing, ‘heavy metal football’ for which Klopp’s teams have become renowned over the years.

There are players due to return – oh, what the manager might have given for the steadying influence of Thiago Alcantara against Manchester United’s hustle and bustle – but with only just over a week until the transfer window closes, the manager may even have to consider whether to strengthen that midfield while the opportunity is still there.

And considering that Liverpool are not a club who usually get involved in last-minute hunts for players, this puts Klopp in a tricky position. If he started the new season with a plan in place and everything settled, then changing things around now carries the risk of being disruptive. But at the same time, he can’t afford too many more performances like this one.

5) The vibes from within the squad are all wrong
More than once during the Manchester United game, the television cameras on James Milner and Virgil Van Dijk having a spirited debate  about each other’s positional play. It should go without saying that players on the same team arguing amongst themselves is an almost painfully on-the-nose visible metaphor for a football team with problems among their personnel, and while it was hardly surprising that the nature of Liverpool’s performance might test the patience of those on the pitch, to see two very senior players going at each other in this way was a surprise, to say the very least.

There are other issues. Andy Robertson has seemed off his game, and statistical analysis has shown that he hasn’t been hitting the heights of the previous couple of seasons. Virgil Van Dijk was the best defender in the Premier League two years ago, but this certainly hasn’t been the case so far this season, and if he is playing with some complacency, then that needs to stop with immediate effect.

That he was left so exposed by the Liverpool midfield’s anti-press against Manchester United wasn’t his fault, but there have been other issues with his performances this season which may require a long, hard look in the cold light of day. Milner would presumably agree.

6) A chance to close the gap on Manchester City has been wasted
And this is where we move from cause to effect.

The assumption all summer has been that this season’s Premier League title race will be a two-horse affair between Manchester City and Liverpool, and the trend over the last few years has been for the points requirement to stay in touch near the top of the table to get higher and higher. It’s obviously too early to say what the final required points tally will be to lift the Premier League this season, but the mid-to-high 90s doesn’t feel like an over-exaggeration.

The reality is that this is where Manchester City have set the bar, and if anything the surprise has been that Liverpool, a club without infinite money resources of oil money behind them, have been able to stay in touch and push them as close as they have over the last couple of seasons. The biggest problem with having fewer resources is that you can’t afford to make mistakes in the transfer market and that you have to run harder just to keep standing still.

Manchester City started their season with two routine wins, but (slightly unexpectedly, though people from Tyneside may choose to disagree) unexpectedly dropped two points at Newcastle. With Liverpool having dropped four points over their first two games themselves, the trip to Old Trafford presented them with an opportunity to halve the deficit.

It’s too early to say that the title race is over – quite beside anything else, Arsenal’s strong start to the season suggests that it might not even be a two-horse race – but when a team can only afford to drop perhaps 20 points over the course of a 38-game league season to have a realistic chance of winning the title, to have dropped seven in their first three games is a red flag.

Psychologically, a win at Old Trafford would have gone a long way towards wiping clean the memory of those first two underwhelming performances. But Liverpool’s failure to do so has left them with a lot of work to do, both on the pitch and in their own heads. What happens next may even be more important than losing this one match. Liverpool have to bounce back, and they have to do so quickly.