The mechanisms of a football team are delicate. You win the league then add nearly £300m of talent and it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll win it again, doesn’t necessarily make you better, even if you’re not doing something as obviously likely to cause imbalance as adding Kylian Mbappé to a Real Madrid team already stacked with left-sided attackers.
Liverpool go into Sunday’s home game against Arsenal having won two out of two in the Premier League and scored a healthy seven goals. But those aren’t the statistics that tell the whole story. If you include the Community Shield, Liverpool have conceded two goals in each of their three games so far. The defensive problems are obvious and the return of Ryan Gravenberch at Newcastle on Monday did not magically solve them.
Just as telling, perhaps, is that Liverpool, despite letting in those six goals, are yet to go behind this season. That is remarkable for a team who last season made the uneventful 2-0 win a trademark. In fact, the largest single factor in their title success was their capacity to control a game having taken the lead, winning without drama, but also allowing players to get through games without expending absolutely all their energy, to remain fresh for longer, a factor – surely – in Liverpool’s positive injury record last season.
But Liverpool couldn’t hold Crystal Palace at arm’s length, and then against Bournemouth and Newcastle let the opposition back into the game having gone 2-0 up early in the second half, in both cases needing late strikes to regain the initiative. In both cases individual errors played their part, but the Newcastle game was striking for the way Liverpool simply couldn’t get the game under control – even against 10 men.
Perhaps it was simply the case that in an atmosphere so fevered, composure was impossible; with nothing to lose, Newcastle hurled themselves into a frenzied series of attacks that might have brought a draw but instead led to that oddest of things, a Pyrrhic defeat, a game from which they took great credit but no points, and also lost three players to injury and one to suspension.
The individual errors are a concern, but in a sense are less of a worry than structural problems in that they should be easier to put right. Milos Kerkez has had a difficult start to life at Liverpool. Ismaïla Sarr kept dragging him out of position in the Community Shield. He never got to grips with Antoine Semenyo in the Bournemouth game. And other than taking an inordinate amount of time over throw-ins, his main contribution to the game at Newcastle was to stoop out of the way as Bruno Guimarães outjumped him to head in a left-wing cross.
Although Slot has not lost his knack of facing opponents at just the right time – Kai Havertz, Bukayo Saka and Martin Ødegaard will all miss Sunday’s game through injury – Noni Madueke’s performances against Kerkez for Chelsea last season suggest he may relish coming in on the Arsenal right.
Kerkez may be the player most obviously struggling, but he’s not the only one. Ibrahima Konaté has looked shaky in all three games so far, although the fact he was outjumped by Dan Burn to flick on for William Osula to equalise on Monday was less to do with him than with a bafflingly high defensive line that allowed the free-kick to be clipped into vast meadows of attacking possibility. With Konaté backtracking and Burn moving on to the ball, there was only likely to be one winner.
Slot played down the issue, saying it had happened at only one free-kick, but the sense remains of a back four ill at ease with itself. To an extent that’s natural with changes in both full-back positions, and perhaps especially given the injury to Jeremie Frimpong that meant Dominik Szoboszlai having to fill in at right-back until Conor Bradley’s arrival from the bench.
But football teams are not made up of discrete units; at least part of the Liverpool defence’s discomfort has been changes in midfield. Perhaps it will settle down. Perhaps once Gravenberch has got a run of games together, playing alongside Alexis Mac Allister again at the back of midfield, they will adjust to functioning as a deep-lying two in a 4-2-3-1 rather than as two-thirds of a midfield three. Certainly they did not leave Virgil van Dijk and Konaté as Wataru Endo and Curtis Jones did for Bournemouth’s equaliser. But they are not comfortable yet.
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Slot impressed in his first season in the way he so often made a positive difference with tactical tweaks or changes in personnel and in that regard it’s not insignificant that substitutes – Federico Chiesa against Bournemouth and Rio Ngumoha against Newcastle – scored the goals that restored Liverpool’s leads. But equally it felt telling that he didn’t make a change at St James’ Park until the 80th minute, and that so much of their play, from the first whistle, seemed intended to preserve energy.
This was not the ferocious pressing of the Jürgen Klopp years, but it wasn’t even like last season, when Liverpool were very effective at applying periods of intense pressure. It may be that represents Slot’s unease with the depth of his squad – and it seems he would like at least two more signings before the window closes on Monday. Or more to do with an anxiety about how open the midfield appears in its new shape. Either way, it’s clear that Liverpool are vulnerable in a way they weren’t last season.
There was derision in certain quarters when Jamie Carragher suggested last season, as Liverpool cruised to the title, that they needed half a dozen new signings, but the past few weeks have highlighted just what an odd side they were, simultaneously highly effective and in need of refurbishment, largely Klopp with a dash of Slot.
The process of rejuvenation and conversion into a more Slot-oriented squad has now begun but inevitably, when so many new elements are introduced into a system which itself needs to be tweaked to accommodate them, there is a process of bedding in.
And then, of course, there is the shock of the death of Diogo Jota in July, the impact of which is unpredictable and continuing.
Arsenal’s injuries mean Liverpool may feel they are getting them at the right time, but Liverpool’s uncertainty could just as easily lead Arsenal to the same conclusion.
