Time for this
Winning five games on the trot in last-second fashion is fun. Such a run requires luck, whatever that is. And luck must run out – otherwise it isn’t luck, it’s that other thing – and you can only overachieve so long before you crash back to the mean.
And now, after the 5-0-0 in all competitions crashed into two straight defeats, I’m of the school that Liverpool Football Club would have squandered 2-0 leads much earlier – or much more likely, never had “the most dangerous lead in soccer” in the first place – if it weren’t for Alisson Becker, whose services we’ll now miss until at least November after he injured himself covering for (what else) an Ibrahima Konate mishap during Tuesday’s complete clunker in Istanbul.
So in this way, Giorgi Mamardashvili, Liverpool’s keeper of the future, will get his chance early and often. After Saturday’s visit to Chelsea, Manchester City, Manchester United, and Real Madrid will follow.
Losing your first-string keeper, maybe the world’s finest, is never a welcome development but at this point it’s expected. As The Athletic helpfully pointed out, injuries have kept Alisson out for long stretches for each of the past two years.
But the much bigger issue, the one that Jamie Carragher and Kenny Dalglish and other people who know ball all took on this week, is Florian Wirtz and what Arne Slot needs to do to get Liverpool’s onetime most-expensive signing into gear. Because before the attack could do absolutely nothing in Turkey, it was damn near useless against Crystal Palace.
Liverpool’s attack is just not working, is it? At all. It’s not working for Mohamed Salah, it’s not working for Cody Gakpo. It’s not working for Alexsander Isak and it’s not working for Wirtz.
The bagels next to Florian Wirtz’s name in the G/A categories make him an easy target for cheeky memes and cheaper banter. But following Tuesday, another statistic appeared that said, actually he’s good. He’s created as many chances as Jack Grealish! And yet. In the league, Liverpool has scored 12 and conceded 7 on an xG of 9.0 and xGA of 6.9.
So maybe the stats don’t lie. You will never see the flow of the game start to appear no matter how hard you stare at those numbers, but we are what those figures are: The defense is leaky and the attack is either very fortunate or, more often, absent.
Right about now is when you’ll hear how crap PSG was in the Champions League last year until they hung four goals on City and Stuttgart in the new league stage’s last two games, how Isak’s lack of a preseason and Alexis MacAllister’s nagging injury and Slot’s dilemma of how to make all these new parts fit together are what’s wrong and it’s not a bother.
That is, you’ll hear an objective fact and a subjective truth and a hope. It’s too early, things would be better if conditions were ideal and it’ll all gel eventually, which is soon. Overreacting is what the emotionally intense tend to do. If the Reds come back from their visit to Chelsea with a clean sheet and some numbers in Wirtz’s and Isak’s stat lines, everything is forgiven and forgotten. Slot’s a genius again.
Getting beat at Stamford Bridge is one thing. But if we can’t score at all, or things go really badly, when the banter goes up to 11…
And yet. Here we are, hedging and complaining about the best collection of players most of us have seen in a Liverpool shirt.
It was The Anfield Wrap crew who as usual presented the final analysis: the last time Liverpool Football Club went to Istanbul and played Galatasaray, the “Greek Scouser” was named Kyrgiakos, hard-luck Martin Kelly (a good Red) was in central defense and Andy Carroll, uh… had the team’s best hair.
The coach back then was Sir Kenny Dalglish, who appeared on the Overlap the other day to answer the barber shop debate – who is the best Liverpool center half, ever? And he said the obvious: Alan Hansen, who played more than 400 league games in red and won the league eight times, is who the old heads still prefer. But the best-ever pairing, the King said, is with current club captain Virgil van Dijk.
We say this to remind ourselves: these days, as much as we need and want them to improve, are still the best days. But they are also transition days. Alisson won’t be the keeper in a couple of years. Mohamed Salah is gone somewhere else once the contract is up.
Kenny Dalglish thinks Wirtz and Isak still just need time. Wirtz needs time to adjust to the Premier League, Isak needs time to make up for his summertime soap opera, the whole new crew needs time to figure out how to play together under Arne Slot. For now, we have that luxury.
