It’s Make-Or-Break Time For Liverpool

 From Daily Mirror

After Sunday’s humbling to Spurs, it is now painfully obvious for Liverpool fans that their club is in real trouble. Liverpool had been previously praised for their great record against the league’s top teams; where they had been unbeaten against any team who finished in last season’s top six.

But already within the last six of Liverpool’s games, they have suffered heavy defeats to Man City and now Tottenham and since beating Arsenal at the end of August, Liverpool have only picked up 2 wins in all competitions.

Liverpool’s 7-0 thrashing of Maribor last Tuesday had appeared to be a confident-booster as the team had been threatening to do damage like this to a team for some time now. But the manner in which Liverpool had capitulated in their next game to an in-form Spurs team only highlighted the distance between Liverpool and their opponents who are in search of silverware.

Much of Liverpool’s well-documented problems had seemingly been related to their poor defending in which the club have already conceded 16 goals in the league; 2 more than they have managed to score. No other team in the top half of the table has conceded more except for Watford (17) and only West Ham, Stoke, Everton and Crystal Palace have conceded more than Liverpool. Keep in mind the last 4 clubs mentioned make up 4 or the league’s bottom 5 clubs in the table. Worrying, worrying signs.

But now Liverpool have been offensively below-par too. Which is especially shocking as Liverpool looked so promising to score many goals at the start of the season, with the addition of Mohamed Salah to the line-up. But thus far in the Premier league this season, Liverpool have only managed a shot conversion rate of 8.33 goals after 9 match days. There are 13 teams with better conversion rate than Liverpool which is particularly strange as only Manchester City have attempted more shots than Liverpool this season. But yet City's conversion rate is 18.82 goals. The difference really cannot be any clearer than this.

And if Liverpool’s team performances have been bad enough, it’s really the individual melt-downs that have put the Reds in this mess. Dejan Lovren has been exceptionally poor this season and that’s just me putting it lightly. His howler of a clearance attempt against Sevilla over a month ago in the Champions League looked more like an effort to completely dodge the ball rather than getting booting it away. Since then it hasn’t gotten much better but his performance in containing Lukaku against Man United recently looked like he had turned a corner.

 From Daily Mirror

Then he went up against Harry Kane. In his defence, there are very few defenders if any at all, that have a comfortable game against Kane anyway. The English hit-man has been in scintillating form all year long and now has 45 goals for club and country in 2017. But Liverpool really did make it too easy for him and his team-mates. Lovren had 2 absolutely conspicuous errors in the game at Wembley and it really cannot be overlooked that Klopp felt the he had seen enough and consequently subbed him off after just 32 minutes on the field.

Jurgen Klopp had said in his post-match conference that “If I was on the pitch in trainers their first goal wouldn’t have happened”. Klopp is well-known for his passion but such words cannot be dismissed as banter. He recognises Liverpool have got fundamental, long standing issues but the question is what will he do about it?

Whether this signals time out of the team for Lovren is unclear. But a bigger problem is that having sold Sakho and failing to land Virgil Van Dijk in the summer, there is no clear better centre-back option to go into Liverpool’s line up to patch up the goals they’be been letting in. There isn’t even any guarantee that Klopp will go for a centre-back replacement when the January window comes round as he had previously made obvious in the summer: if Van Dijk cannot be brought in then no one else will be.

 From Daily Mirror

But even for all the faith Klopp has in his side, the leakiness of Liverpool’s defence for numerous matches can only beg the question: Is Klopp still convinced he has the right defenders to go forward? Klopp can’t afford to throw away silverware chances just to prove his point and it does seem like that unless Liverpool outscore the goals they concede, then they won’t win any games they play.

With talisman Sadio Mane still out of the attack too and not due back from injury for another few weeks, the time is ticking for Liverpool to get their league campaign back on track. Whether they do it in time to still be in the title race however, is very difficult to see.