For the first-time in five-and-a-half years Liverpool players stood shoulders slumped, hands on hips, staring at the turf in front of a full Anfield crowd as their opponents danced wildly before a delirious away end celebrating a Premier League victory.
Leeds United deservedly snatched all three points just before full-time on Saturday night, inflicting the Reds’ first home league defeat with fans in attendance since April 2017. The end of such stellar records is inevitable, but the feeble manner of this loss to a team which was in the bottom three before kick-off and whose manager had been roundly derided by his own supporters for weeks on end was nothing short of embarrassing.
Liverpool did not finally succumb to a home league defeat because they were beaten by a team simply better than them. They did so because they believed in themselves to nowhere near the same extent as the opposition.
Where Leeds pressed every man on his first touch, Liverpool players waited for somebody else to do it for them. When a Leeds player broke forward his team-mates followed, while Liverpool left their colleagues stuck in corners surrounded by two or three opponents with no support. While the away end smelled blood, the home crowd seemed desperate to be put out of its misery from minute one.
Throughout the 90 minutes, Liverpool players appeared surprised that their Leeds counterparts wanted to tackle them, or wanted to run, or were willing to back one another up.
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But more than anything, Liverpool look like a team which is completely spent physically, mentally, and emotionally, unable to push themselves any further after squeezing every last drop of energy and desire from their minds and bodies from January onwards last season. They have played well on only rare occasions since the summer, in odd matches where enough players seem able to get themselves up to a level of energy and belief approaching something near “normal”.
You can understand it. These are human beings who have given everything relentlessly for five years with barely time to stop and take a breath. If plenty of supporters still feel drained after the mammoth 63-match campaign came to an end in May, then it’s reasonable to believe those who put the effort in on the pitch do so too. But such a profound level of exhaustion in a group of players is extremely difficult to resolve.
Jurgen Klopp is trying to do so, of course. “So many things are unlike us in this moment,” the Liverpool manager said after full-time. “I am sorry it is like this, but that is the situation. I am not sure how deep you can dig, but we will. It is like it is and we will work on solutions.”
Liverpool’s Premier League results so far in 2022-23
- Fulham 2-2 Liverpool
- Liverpool 1-1 Crystal Palace
- Manchester United 2-1 Liverpool
- Liverpool 9-0 Bournemouth
- Liverpool 2-1 Newcastle United
- Liverpool 0-0 Everton
- Liverpool 3-3 Brighton & Hove Albion
- Arsenal 3-2 Liverpool
- Liverpool 1-0 Manchester City
- Liverpool 1-0 West Ham United
- Nottingham Forest 1-0 Liverpool
- Liverpool 1-2 Leeds United
The issue with that is that Klopp has already tried various solutions and not found anything which struck. If a thoroughly deserved win over Manchester City in which every player was excellent, a change of system to something quite drastically different, an almost full month off from playing following the Queen’s death, and clear-the-air training ground talks after the wretched loss in Napoli have all proven insufficient, then what really is left to try?
The signing of multiple new players in January would undoubtedly be helpful, particularly in midfield and attack. Liverpool and Klopp have gone from (rightly) believing that their squad is full of world-class players to now being confronted by the fact you could reasonably argue that the team would benefit from a new signing in any position aside from in goal.
But new signings, if they are on the horizon, are months away at least and will not by themselves solve the multitude of problems which leave Liverpool looking unlikely to qualify for any European competition, never mind the Champions League, as things stand.
The only thing Klopp has control over right now is his current playing squad – that is where he must somehow find his way forward. But with only a few games remaining before the mid-season break for the World Cup, and a group seemingly drained of all energy and self-belief, those solutions seem a very long way off indeed.
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