Liverpool has been getting a bit sloppy as of late, rumors about it have begun to pile up, and their latest match has done nothing but add more fuel to the fire. The question now is what will the team’s leadership do to get the team back on track?
A humiliating defeat
What many have been calling a nightmarish match for Liverpool, their most recent fight against Napoli on Wednesday, September 7 was truly a sight that surely got many fans wondering, how could things go so bad? A 4-1 loss is what The Reds got on that day, Jürgen Klopp said that the club would have to “reinvent themselves” if they hoped to push forward and out of this rather humiliating situation. The manager urged the owners to allow him to take the needed re-adjustments to get things back on track.
Bad luck or something else?
What happened was most certainly not just a blunder and amongst the main reasons why things have been so rough for The Reds could be its most recent departures, some of which are pretty big, for starters Sadio Mane who was signed in a forty million pounds deal with Bayern Munich back in June with a three-year contract for the Senegalese player, which is certainly the biggest hole in the team’s forward and goals-scoring department; it was a one-sided decision from Mane which came after the defeat they suffered during the Champions League final against Real Madrid, which had the forward extremely displeased. Besides that, there is also the transfer of Neco Williams in July for seventeen million pounds and a five-year contract, after 15 years at Liverpool. It must have certainly affected team unity when a player who has been for so long in a club leaves.
Another possible reason that some speculate, is that members of the team have become somewhat complacent, especially after their victory against Manchester City during the Community Cup.
In any case, it’s not that they can’t deliver, a great example of this from their latest matches was the one between them and Bournemouth, where Liverpool scored 9 goals and conceded none at all; with Luis Diaz scoring the very first goal just 3 seconds into the match, thus giving The Reds an advantage for the entire match, which the Cherries simply couldn’t recover from. So, the real issue is that there needs to be a bigger sense of unity between the players, and never to forget that because you’ve had great victory recently, it doesn’t mean every foe you face will fall just as easy.
Besides all that, it has been remarked that Liverpool’s midfield requires to be strengthened, it might be easy to think these positions aren’t quite as important: if these positions allow opponents to slip in, then there’s no way those in the back can do much to prevent an all-out assault of players from scoring goal after goal.
Whatever measures are decided to be taken, they will have to happen fast, as the Champions League is not precisely the most forgiving environment, and those that get sloppy are often ousted quite as fast as they got in.