Two hundred miles south, Arsène Wenger’s Arsenal reign is disintegrating into chaos. Back-to-back defeats against Watford and Chelsea ended their title hopes, bar the maths. The Gunners slipped to twelve points behind the runaway Premier League leaders and find themselves mired in a fight for a top four spot.
With Hull City visiting the Emirates this weekend, the Frenchman could be forgiven for offering a prayer of thanks. Arsenal need to get back to winning ways as they head to Munich for the Champions League and the Tigers, despite the recent perkiness of their form, are little more than cannon fodder.
As Arsenal collapse in on themselves with a mutinous atmosphere in the fanbase spilling into the back pages, Liverpool’s disintegration is seemingly of little interest.
2017 has been an appalling year for the Reds. After limping past Plymouth in a replay at Home Park, they fell to Paul Lambert’s determined and well-organised Wolverhampton Wanderers. A late goal added respectability to the score, but there could have been few complaints if the Championship side had won by a larger margin than 2 – 1.
Southampton provided the template for victory in the second leg of the EFL Cup semi-final. The Saints held a 1 – 0 lead from their meeting at St Mary’s but went to Anfield and punished Liverpool on the counter-attack. Two home cup-ties; two defeats. No silverware would garnish the trophy cabinet in Jürgen Klopp’s first full season in charge.
The Premier League has been little better. Second, at the turn of the year, the Reds slumped to fifth, gathering just three points from fifteen. The run culminated in a 0 – 2 defeat to Hull last weekend. Klopp’s magic touch has deserted him.
Wenger’s defenders among the Arsenal support are revelling in Liverpool and more specifically, Klopp’s, fall from grace but ponder whether the preponderance of former Liverpool players in the mainstream media is saving the German from a mauling in the back pages.
The gaps in Liverpool’s squad are obvious to see. Of most concern is the goalkeeping situation. Simon Mignolet and Loris Karius are both one shot away from a mistake; Klopp’s problem is that he can never be sure which shot it is. A good goalkeeper is worth a dozen points a season; it’s no stretch to say that Liverpool’s have probably cost them a dozen points already. Neither is good enough to be the first-choice goalkeeper for a team which has title aspirations. However, Klopp is stuck with both until the summer at least.
The German can point to the absence of Sadio Mane at the Africa Cup of Nations as a significant factor in the inconsistency Liverpool has recently shown. While the Senegalese international was with his country, the Reds averaged less than a goal per game in all competitions. Conceding nearly two per game during the same period underlines the reason for their fall from grace.
He’s hardly noted as a prolific goalscorer. Yes, Mane leads Liverpool’s list of goalscorers in the Premier League but with just nine goals in 20 appearances, he is still six goals behind the likes of Alexis Sanchez and Diego Costa.
Problems at both ends of the pitch are magnified when other players can’t perform the basics of the game properly. Liverpool’s full backs are proving to be as big a headache as the strikers.
When they have the ball, both Clyne and Milner are content to attack at will. There isn’t a sense that they are doing so as part of a coordinated game plan. Routinely exposed on the counter-attack, Liverpool supporters are rightly questioning why it has all gone wrong? Before Christmas, the Reds were beating opponents for fun in the Premier League; now they can barely buy a point.
Disturbingly, Klopp appears baffled by the loss of form. He took the blame for the recent defeat against Wolves but is as perplexed as everyone else why the team is dropping away from the Champions League places.
Those who recall his departure from Borussia Dortmund are inclined to remember a team which plummeted in down the Bundesliga table. Klopp took time to find the answers then, and the concern must be that the same pattern is repeating itself at Anfield.
The upcoming fixtures are unforgiving. In the next six matches, they face top four rivals Tottenham, Arsenal and Manchester City while travelling to relegation-threatened Leicester City, rounding it all off with the Merseyside derby.
In their current form of one win in ten games, they could slip out of the European places altogether.
All this from the man who was the poster boy for Arsenal supporters when they thought Wenger was leaving three years ago.
Arsenal’s board and media acolytes now push the message “be careful what you wish for” in an attempt to improve their manager’s popularity. In reality, they only need point to the north west of England to recognise that a successful career elsewhere does not always mean a new manager will bring a return of the glory days.
