Lil’ Virg

I haven’t been able to watch games recently, so coming into this one I was both excited and filled with trepidation. Excited to see the lads again; worried about their psychology. And in every way, this game delivered on its promise. Liverpool can clearly play well, as much of this game showed. Leeds more or less didn’t exist in the first half, and like so many earlier games this season, I felt we were hard done by not scoring in the first half.

Ekitike then delivered on the promise with a rapid brace, the first off an awful error, the second – lovely as it was – largely due to momentum. Liverpool of yesteryear would have seized on that kind of moment and drilled a couple more into Perri’s net while the hosts were stunned. Liverpool of today simply started looking nervous. You could almost see the thought bubbles forming as the players seemed to take their foot off the gas.

“Are we actually going to win one? How do we manage this? Maybe get back a bit and protect this? Sure would be nice to win on the road again, wouldn’t it?”

The script was being written, and that lack of confidence turned into another tragicomedy as Konate lost his head and gave a cheap penalty, quickly followed by a soft equalizer. A few minutes later, a wonderful, very Liverpool kind of buildup gave us the lead again, but by then, you could practically see the big question mark floating over most of the players’ heads. As doubt set in, it was merely a matter of time before Leeds had a couple of set pieces, the self-fulfilling prophecy came true, and the Reds dropped two more points in a game they should have used to dramatically improve their goal differential.

This isn’t about this player or that. The entire team is essentially scared of success. You see it in their body language, in the way they become hesitant when things are going their way. A couple of players – Szoboszlai, Bradley, Ekitike – aren’t suffering from this malaise, at least not the same way, but the rest of the squad is, perhaps most notably skipper Van Dijk. He is the one whose job is to hold the team together and instill the belief that they can actually win a game. When he himself exhibits self-doubt, the rest have little hope of recovery.

Arne Slot is trying different things, but not enough. It’s good that he is starting Curtis Jones regularly now, who had a good game and is seemingly more confident than most of his peers. But not playing Chiesa, a player who is hungry for minutes and who, unlike the others, seems actually determined to win, over Gakpo, must surely be viewed as an error. Joe Gomez, another player who seems impervious to the mental rot, should surely play a more key role at this time, at least until Konate feels like he can breath again. I would say the same for Van Dijk, but he is captain, and so he is expected to pick himself up by his bootstraps, and then make sure the rest of the team follows.

Big Virg, right now, is as little as they come. He escapes criticism too easily, too often, so while I don’t normally assign ratings, I want make a point and so am awarding him a very special “1” for this game – even lower than Konate.

But back to Slot. Turning around a team in situations like this is an unenviable job, but one of the things that supposedly makes him special is that he doesn’t play favorites. Time to show that this reputation is earned. Benching Salah (who has been downright awful this season) is a good start, but it needed to happen much sooner, and the rot may have been prevented from spreading as deeply. Now the job is that much harder.

At the same time, turnarounds don’t happen on a dime, and a win and two draws in three games is an improvement, so perhaps we are watching one unfold. Still, I’m not convinced. Are you?