16 Conclusions from Liverpool 1-2 Man United: Panicking Liverpool rattle themselves into crisis

Manchester United and Ruben Amorim edge away from crisis after a red-letter day at Anfield, while Liverpool plunge themselves deep into the mire

A damaging defeat for Liverpool in more ways than one has left Arsenal looking more compelling Premier League favourites than ever, and leaves Man City as for now their likeliest and potentially quite soon only rivals.

For Amorim, the gift of time. This was a win that dispels all sack talk, for at least a week.

Let’s get into it.

1. And there, almost a year into the job, it is. Ruben Amorim wins back-to-back Premier League games for the first time.

Whimsy out of the way, let us now seriously consider what this means. At the start of this weekend Amorim was locked in a two-horse Sack Race with Ange Postecoglou. Postecoglou didn’t make it beyond Saturday afternoon, but Amorim has just bought himself considerable time.

This was a wild and ridiculous game, to the point that one could argue it doesn’t necessarily mean anything in the grand scheme. Not everything means anything. Sometimes it’s just a bunch of stuff that happened. And at Anfield, a great big bunch of stuff happened.

But in a frenzied and chaotic football match, United produced the majority of the composed and sane football and were good value for the win that looked to have escaped their grasp before Harry Maguire rose highest to head home the winner and leave Gary Neville and everyone else thoroughly spent.

United are now two points behind Liverpool and a whisker away from fully handing over the crisis club mantle after winning a game some (okay, we) had dubbed El Crisico. United still require a greater number of less emotional and outlandish victories to prove there is something sustainable here, but while this isn’t a result that buys Amorim three years it is one that buys him a significant amount of time in which to work. At least until next week’s inevitable back-to-earth-with-a-bump home defeat to Brighton, anyway.

2. For Liverpool, the crisis is no longer mini. If that sounds dramatic, it is nobody’s fault but theirs. They crisised themselves here with their frankly absurd approach to a second half of a game that remained very much there to be won – or at least not lost – by more conventional methods.

Liverpool gave the game away – in every sense – with their breakneck, chaos-strewn approach to the second half. Every single one of the last 30 minutes was played like it was the last, and while we suppose Liverpool’s record in injury-time means there is some logic to playing more of the game as if it was in fact injury-time, it did all just look a little bit mad.

Even if it had worked here – and had Cody Gakpo’s astonishingly interesting game in front of goal not ended with a header sent impossibly wide when a second equaliser appeared certain then it may well have done – it would still have ceded the title advantage further toward Arsenal.

While the Gunners go about their business for now in a composed and thoroughly sustainable manner, Liverpool have become a team for whom the Hail Mary has become too regular and too early a choice from the playbook.

3. There can be no doubt that Arne Slot is under pressure like never before at Liverpool after a third straight league defeat and fourth in all, and one in which his part can be significantly questioned. There was barely an hour on the clock when he went to a sh*t-or-bust 4-2-4 formation in which Florian Wirtz was, at least theoretically, one of the two central midfielders.

That is not a play a title-winning team is making when one goal down with 30 minutes remaining at home against a mid-table team that had conceded 11 goals in its first seven league games of the season.

If there was one word to describe Liverpool and their manager and their star players here it was this: rattled. From quite literally the very first minute.

It is not a word generally linked to serious title contenders.

4. And the worst thing for Liverpool is who the most rattled players were. It is not even particularly mischievous to suggest the two worst players on the pitch today were Virgil van Dijk and Mo Salah.

The two players more responsible than perhaps any others for the success the club has enjoyed over recent years both had absolute stinkers in the worst possible fixture.

5. Van Dijk’s day to forget began in the very first minute. He made not one, not two, but three individual errors in the immediate build-up to United’s opening goal. Four if you count colliding with team-mate Alexis Mac Allister.

A poor headed clearance and clattering of Bryan Mbeumo (and Mac Allister) was followed by a tackle attempt that registered as weak-to-non-existent on the tackle-ferocity-o-meter, and then a gentle jog back towards the escalating trouble in front of Liverpool’s goal as he let Mbeumo run beyond him while airily suggesting to Ibrahima Konate that he might like to deal with this unpleasantness, please.

It was a string of uncharacteristic errors from a man who has been the most reliable of all Liverpool players for so long now, but on whose 34-year-old shoulders Liverpool have placed a frankly irresponsible level of faith and expectation across this long and in theory multi-competition season.

6. And he never really did regain his composure. Having had to nurse Konate through much of the first chunk of this season, today the roles were reversed to an alarming degree, with Konate clearly Liverpool’s most – and at times apparently only – accomplished defender on display.

Despite a role in the build-up to the equaliser, Van Dijk’s story was one of further errors and increasing rattle. Every close-up from the TV director appeared to be of Van Dijk walking away from some new unexpected unpleasantness shaking his head.

With United playing most of the game with no real number-nine, Van Dijk didn’t really seem to know what to do with himself or where to go. He was dragged out wide by Mbeumo and into midfield by Matheus Cunha, with Milos Kerkez outside him similar uncertain about who precisely should be his primary concern out of Mbeumo and an impish Amad Diallo.

The visible headloss reached its peak when Van Dijk shanked a clearance into Kerkez and set about berating his team-mate for the apparent crime of not being hologrammatic.

7. And then there was Salah. That was… very not good. Liverpool are missing Trent Alexander-Arnold desperately, but nobody more so than Salah, who has lost all confidence and appears to have forgotten who he is.

As can often happen to great players in a rut, his decision-making has gone out of the window. Passing when he should shoot, shooting when he should pass. Running at defenders in general is just something he probably shouldn’t be doing right now; he has still yet to complete a dribble this season and lost possession 16 times today.

The nadir came shortly after the hour, though, when his big chance came to bring Liverpool level as a cross arrived to him barely six yards from goal and with time to take a touch before finishing.

It was just bizarre. We are talking about one of the great players of the Premier League here, but he took that chance like someone who had only had football badly explained to him by someone who’d watched half a game several years earlier while not really paying attention.

We want to say he mishit his shot well wide of the target, but it wasn’t even that. It was like he couldn’t even work out which part of his boot he wanted or needed to use. He kicked it really bloody hard, in entirely the wrong direction. A slice would be bad, but it would be easier to explain than this apparent total failure to even realise what was required.

8. Salah was probably fortunate to stay on as long as he did given the performance, but such is his status here and across the league that it was nevertheless striking to note he was withdrawn when Liverpool went in forlorn pursuit of their second equaliser.

That new Salah contract is not looking the best piece of clear-eyed decision-making right now. Nor the starry-eyed decision to chase ever greater attacking coups in the transfer market while the more mundane but necessary business of sorting out the centre of that defence were left unfinished.

9. It also feels a bit of a worry that with the player of the year in their ranks and having spent hundreds of millions of pounds on new attacking talent, Liverpool’s most effective attacking player for most of the game was Cody Gakpo, and for the last few minutes of it was Jeremie Frimpong.

Gakpo had an extraordinary game really, hitting the woodwork three times, very nearly slicing an attempted clearance into his own net, scoring from a yard out while getting far too close to comfort to hitting the post with that effort as well, given the whole goal was available to him, and then heading badly wide when seeming certain to equalise again.

The first and third shots that hit the post were wonderful efforts, the second an attempted cross, but it is that missed header that will haunt his dreams tonight.

10. Liverpool’s best moments down the right-hand side came in the few minutes Frimpong spent out there rather than the 90-odd of Salah. It was his cross from which Gakpo really should have done so much better, with another dangerous delivery arriving soon after.

By this point Liverpool’s formation was barely even worth giving hypothetical consideration, but with this being not the first time we’ve seen Frimpong playing a more advanced role and Dominik Szoboszlai deployed at right-back, it all adds to the bizarroworld sensation that this is a Liverpool team where nothing is quite operating as it should, or very often where it should.

11. And we’ve not even got to Isak yet. Or Wirtz. Sometimes even 16 Conclusions isn’t enough and we really do want to make at least a couple of these about what United did right rather than what Liverpool did wrong.

But it was another painful afternoon for both big-money summer arrivals, with Isak’s sole contribution being to tamely fail to score a one-on-one after being brilliantly found by Konate’s throughball, and doing so in precisely the kind of way that forces the entire punditocracy by strict co-commentary law to stroke their beards and ponder thoughtfully that a confident Newcastle Isak definitely scores there.

12. United, though. Let’s talk about them for a bit. Because this is a huge day for Manchester United. The performance was good, and in places excellent. But it still feels a lot like this was a day more about what Liverpool did wrong than what United did right.

It’s not to downplay United’s role in it all, just that Liverpool brought such uncontrolled chaos and wildness to proceedings that in a curious way their own total lack of control and composure meant United never really had any chance to introduce their own to the game.

What they did was produce a full-blooded effort all over the pitch for all 98 minutes or whatever it was in the end, and take the fullest advantage of Liverpool’s confusion.

13. And that was right from the off. There was one team switched on and aware of what was happening as that first moment of significance unravelled itself before them. Mbeumo was so smartly up off the canvas and back into play after being initially clattered by van Dijk, and expertly found by Amad who was excellent throughout.

His finish was more power than precision, but that was very much enough. It rattled Liverpool, and they never truly recovered.

There were further chances – most involving Bruno Fernandes and/or Amad in some capacity and, even when Liverpool were making some headway of their own, never any sense of a game spiralling out of United’s control. They surely can’t have predicted or expected Liverpool’s gameplan to become quite so wild quite so quickly, but they kept their heads admirably in the face of it all, especially given what was at stake.

14. But most impressive was their response to the equaliser when it finally came. It would have been so easy then for heads to drop, for the apparently inevitable to be accepted. Especially for a team that has had so many more bad days than good ones over the last year or so.

Gary Neville said just before Harry Maguire’s winner that he felt there was still a goal for United here, and while the speed with which that proved true was spectacular, it was also just a straightforwardly true observation.

Liverpool had chosen chaos so early and thoroughly that after the equaliser there was no way to get that toothpaste back in the tube. No way to revert to any semblance of a more measured approach.

And it was a delightful winning goal, with Bruno’s cushioned volleyed cross from a cleared corner a thing of beauty that arced inexorably onto the head of Maguire with an outcome that felt a certainty from long before it played out in apparent slow-motion.

And who was that marking absolutely nobody as it all played out? Mr Virgil van Dijk.

15. No, there was nothing particularly surprising about United’s second goal in a game long since handed over to chaos and where reason had left the building. What was surprising was that Maguire’s 84th-minute goal, despite having far more the feeling of a goal arriving in the 94th minute, would prove to be the last.

It just felt certain that this game, especially given this Liverpool team and its penchant for injury-time shenanigans, had one more nonsense in store. A Van Dijk equaliser, perhaps, for the narrative.

But no. Liverpool had already treated the last 30 minutes of this game like it was injury-time, to such extent that by the time eight minutes of actual injury time rolled around they had little of their usual energy for such moments to call upon.

Liverpool were beaten, United victorious, and with it a seismic shifting of the Premier League crisis plates.

16. This is not yet the end of Liverpool as title contenders this season. Having seen their own five-point lead swallowed up so quickly, they should know better than ever what could happen to the four-point deficit they now have to make up on an Arsenal side who in recent history have not made good pacesetters.

But it does feel now like Liverpool are back to their bit-part role in the title race, watching Manchester City duke it out with the Gunners.

They are not out of it, but absolutely could be by the time the November international break comes around if upcoming games against a rejuvenated Aston Villa and Manchester City go anything like this one, with Eintracht Frankfurt and Real Madrid providing the sort of opposition that could even see the Champions League, with its safety nets designed to protect big teams at all costs, now at risk of becoming dicey.

The speed with which the season finds itself in danger of collapse really is remarkable.