LIVERPOOL have had some bad press since losing to Manchester United on Monday night and that feels apt because some of their problems so far this season have come from a bad press, or at least one that isn’t as Premier League-dominating as it used to be. Jürgen Klopp’s heavy metal football has been quietened down to a footballing freeform jazz where all the constituent parts are certainly trying something, just not necessarily in a way that works smoothly. Liverpool’s inability to maintain standards across multiple seasons has been something that has affected the club for a number of decades – only once have they finished in the top two for two consecutive seasons since their dominance of English football waned in the early 1990s – but they have also been unfortunate to come up against the most relentless points harvesting machine the country has ever seen, in the form of Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City.

In the last four seasons Liverpool have recorded points totals of 97, 99, 69 and 92 points yet only have one Premier League title to show for it. That is unlucky, for sure, but football doesn’t hand out medals for misfortune. With no wins from their opening three league games, some observers have already made the comparison with the 2020-21 season, when, as reigning champions, Liverpool suffered a mid-season collapse in form, losing six league games in a row at Anfield for the first time in their entire history, before clawing their back up to third. But arguably the most memorable example of things being Not Quite Right, came early on that season in the fourth game at Aston Villa, when seemingly from nowhere, Liverpool let in seven goals in a league game for the first time since April 1963.

The back four in that Villa game – Robertson, van Dijk, Gomez, Alexander-Arnold – was exactly the same as the one fielded by Liverpool in last week’s game at Old Trafford. Yes, the performance against United was out of character in a general sense, but it didn’t exactly come from nowhere either.

So where are Liverpool in late August 2022, already five points behind the team they expect to be challenging for the Premier League title? The goalkeeping situation is fine, in Alisson Becker they have one of the top three goalkeepers in the world and, although he does have the propensity to miss a few games each season with injury, Caoimhín Kelleher is one of the better back-up glovesmen in the Premier League.

LIVERPOOL SPECIALS

The defence is not functioning as it should and is currently the biggest vindication of Joel Matip in the modern era. The most underrated defender in the Premier League? In Liverpool’s disastrous 2020-21 season Matip only featured 10 times, arguably as big a blow as van Dijk only featuring in five games.

The midfield situation has been heavily analysed this season. The all-English trio of Milner, Henderson and Elliott did not put in an all-action display at Old Trafford. James Milner has been providing Premier League assists since Harvey Elliott was two years old, which is impressive but possibly not the ideal situation for a major club in 2022.

That leaves the attack, a unit which has been shorn of Sadio Mane this season and is in its biggest state of flux for some time. Roberto Firmino’s once-industry leading press has now largely become a memory, Diogo Jota has been suffering with injury, Luis Diaz – his goal against Crystal Palace aside – is experiencing a to-be-expected levelling off after his superb start to life at the club earlier this year, Darwin Núñez is serving a three-match suspension for a red card collected in his second game and Mohamed Salah has been relatively isolated on the right flank, talk of the Egyptian linking up more centrally more of a theory than a reality thus far.

For years some people reflected on whether there was an intra-team rivalry between Salah and Mane, with nonsensical and easily disprovable theories about a lack of assists between them being cited. The reality is that Salah is arguably missing his former team-mate more than most, with the rolling two-flank threat Liverpool offered before this season significantly weakened. Both Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold have looked less effective this season and that can be witnessed in the high turnover data, where Liverpool have made only two that have led to shots this season — a Premier League joint-low – with both of those coming on the left flank. In 2021-22 not only did Liverpool’s press on the right hand side of the pitch serve up plenty of shots and goals, but overall 16.0% of the high turnovers Liverpool served up ended in efforts on goal. That figure, albeit in a small sample size, has fallen to only 7.7% this season.

There’s little doubt that Liverpool will return to something near their best in the weeks to come, they have too many good players and too many good players returning from injury for that not to happen. But reconstructing an ageing team shorn of one of the best forwards in Europe is more than an afternoon’s work, even for Jürgen Klopp. So expect more 2020-21-style inconsistency from Liverpool as the season progresses. The great managers can build multiple great sides at the same club but while they do so the results can suffer. Look at Manchester United in the mid-2000s, transitioning from the van Nistelrooy era to the Rooney and Ronaldo one. United finished bottom of their Champions League group in 2005-06, scoring only three goals in six games. The club and indeed the manager were finished, some said. What followed was four Premier League titles and three Champions League finals in the next five seasons. Sometimes you have to step sideways to find the correct path to take.