Van Dijk, Salah and Isak all awful as Manchester United plunge Liverpool into crisis

Virgil van Dijk was labelled a “baby” by Jamie Carragher, Mohamed Salah looked more like a toddler and Alexander Isak doesn’t look worth £25m let alone £125m. The Liverpool trio were awful in defeat to Manchester United.

The narrative this season surrounding Liverpool’s defensive woes has been that Ibrahima Konate’s downturn – amid a contract standoff and interest from Real Madrid which is now cooling as a result of his slump – has been too dramatic for the brilliance of Van Dijk to nullify.

But after an extraordinary passage of play in the first minute at Anfield which saw Manchester United take the lead, we were forced to consider the possibility that Konate’s decline and Liverpool’s collective malaise is in part down to their captain not quite being ‘at it’ this season.

Either that or Van Dijk’s mind and body hadn’t yet woken up – and never really did – to a game against Liverpool’s fiercest rivals in which nothing short of victory would put paid to doubts over their ability to stay the course with Arsenal in the title race. Neither reflects well on him.

He goes games, weeks, months, often seemingly full seasons without making mistakes, but made three – four if you count the head injury he inflicted on Alexis Mac Allister – in less than ten seconds at the start of this game, and spent the rest of the it, as Gary Neville said on commentary, “not knowing whether to stick or twist”.

After clattering into the back of Bryan Mbeumo while failing to deal with a long ball, nailing Mac Allister with an elbow in the process, Van Dijk then dangled a leg in an almost comically weak effort to block Bruno Fernandes’ pass to Amad Diallo, before Mbeumo ran off the back of him to score.

We’ve seen him jog back into position thousands of times, but typically in an ‘I’m far better than you so don’t need to break a sweat’ sort of way, rather than with the air of negligence we saw here, exacerbated by him vaguely pointing Mbeumo out to Konate rather than marking him himself.

Milos Kerkez was having another nightmare alongside him and we must also ask questions as to what Arne Slot has done since their 2-1 defeat to Crystal Palace to coach Liverpool to play against the 3-4-3 formation given their evident problems with dealing with it again here.

Without a true No.9 to play against, Van Dijk was continually dragged out of position and looked genuinely uncomfortable no matter if he was out wide being faced up by Mbeumo or pulled into midfield, with those moments scrambling his brain to such an extent that by half time he was losing a physical battle to Matheus Cunha.

Slicing a cross into the face of Kerkez before shouting at the full-back for failing to talk to him combined his new-found defensive inadequacy and the all too familiar Van Dijk quirk of blaming anyone else for his own mistakes. And while the Van Dijk aura returned briefly to create Liverpool’s equaliser through a fine tackle to prevent a United counter-attack, he was then seen marking no-one as Harry Maguire scored the Red Devils’ winner, with Matthijs de Ligt also free at the back post.

“For most of the season Van Dijk’s been looking after a baby in Konate; it’s now the other way around,” Carragher said on commentary. But short of his much-maligned centre-back as a scapegoat, Liverpool did have two other very willing, highly respected patsies to draw focus from the entirely rattled captain.

Alexander Isak missed a golden opportunity having been sent through beautifully by Konate, but hit his shot straight at Senne Lammens. He dragged another one wide, and could have played Mohamed Salah in when well place on another occasion. Slot said this week that Isak has now completed his delayed pre-season, so this is now just bad football from the £125m man.

Not quite as bad as Salah though, who was as poor as we’ve ever seen him for Liverpool against the team he loves playing against most, with the nadir evidenced by him kicking the ball with the wrong part of his boot, like he was a toddler lining up the effort at the back post, when granted a golden chance to make it 17 goals in 18 games against United.

The surprise wasn’t that Salah was replaced by Jeremie Frimpong in the 85th minute when chasing the game but that it took Slot that long to realise that the Egyptian was proving a hindrance to Liverpool, now in attack as well as defence.

And on the back of a first United win at Anfield for a decade, after which Ruben Amorim and his players obviously deserve huge credit (which you will find in 16 Conclusions later), although the visitors played their part in the mini-crisis becoming a full-blown one, the upgrade is mainly Liverpool’s doing.

Thanks to Slot for treating the last 30+ minutes as though it was the last, to two Liverpool legends in Salah and Van Dijk for shrinking when they really needed them and to the summer signing who was supposed to take this brilliant team to the next level rather than ushering in this dramatic fall from grace.