Before this game Arne Slot had announced that he was “almost confused”. Which does at least raise some tantalising questions. Mainly, what is this Liverpool team going to look like when he gets there, when a state of full confusion is finally attained, when even Slot’s confusion stops being confusing and reveals its diamond-cut final form.
A 4-1 home defeat, Liverpool’s ninth in the past 12 games, felt like a step towards that promised end. Or at least confirmation their season has now reached the gallows humour phase – one of those periods where events haven’t just run away from you, but appear to be openly mocking your best efforts to catch up.
Virgil van Dijk had called for a back-to-basics clarity against PSV Eindhoven, doing the simple stuff, paring it all back. Cue an extraordinary overhead netball‑style Van Dijk handball five minutes in, followed by a bafflingly entitled whinge at the referee over the ensuing penalty kick.
He has always been the barometer of this team’s good health. Less Van Dijk is always more. Ideally, he is not playing at all, just chugging about in a vaguely supervisory role.
He was all over the place, booked for a poor challenge, whirling around like a broken robot for PSV’s third goal. Even his breezily carefree half-time TV advert for a holiday booking app felt jarringly off message. At least do something back-to-basics, Virg. Do an advert for hammers, or gruel, or quadruple-ply incontinence pants.
Slot still seemed confused at the final whistle, albeit fluently and discursively consumed, like the captain of an irreversibly sinking ship who seems interested above all in certain key engineering oddities.
But confusion still does not seem the right response to all this because Liverpool are nothing if not predictable right now. They get overpowered and outrun in every game.
The second and third goals were so familiar in their frailties it feels unfair to accuse, say, Arsenal, of relying on predictable routes to goal. What exactly was this then, this re-run, this set move, as Mo Salah went to challenge for a loose ball on the left and watched as Anass Salah-Eddine swished past like a man absent-mindedly dodging a high street traffic cone before producing an alarmingly simple scoring pass for Couhaib Driouech.
Was this really confusing? Because it felt quite a lot like deja vu, a direct consequence of refusing to drop your non‑combatant star attacker; and another clear case of cause and effect on Liverpool’s right, where playing behind Salah has become an exercise in pure footballing pain for whoever is unfortunate enough to inherit the role that week.
The third goal involved the repeat spectacle of Ibrahima Konaté trying to turn and chase back, on one of those days where he appears to have put his legs on back to front. Here is a footballer who has lost form, confidence and physical edge, but has to stay in the team because a summer of Gatsby-style spending also involved not having enough centre-backs by the time August came around. It can only be assumed that Real Madrid do not watch the telly much.
Apart from a good period before half-time, Liverpool found opponents with the perfect strengths to expose their own weaknesses, a vigorous press, unceasing energy and quick breaks.
It is not hard to work out what has happened here in its most basic form. Liverpool’s success under Jürgen Klopp was based around always being more intense. Now they are always less intense. The only real questions now are where has this come from and is it fixable? Both of which speak to whether there is any real point in persevering with their title‑winning manager, caught now in a startling state of turnaround.
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But it is also important not to confuse outcomes with causes. The final form, the most visible endgame, is a confused, jaded underpowered team. To talk about standards and players doing more, about easy notions of cowardice and character flaws. But there are obvious root causes.
Selling Jarell Quansah, who helped keep Erling Haaland quiet on Tuesday and spending a record fee on a centre-forward you don’t need. Well, here’s what that looks like.
New players have come in, too many of them, a dilution of the collective will. But this comes from the manager too, whose entire job is to preserve the culture.
It looks if not irreversible, then in need of a hard re-set. There is no method, no actual team, just a Frankenstein’s monster of off-cuts.
Slot’s Liverpool are nice to play against. All their games look losable. Can he really fix the malaise he has overseen, which he apparently didn’t see coming? Which is still a source of such confusion? There is enough talent in the squad to build any kind of team you like, but this seems to be a major part of the problem. And this felt like a moment, possibly, of no return.
