Digging Deeper Into Liverpool’s 3-2 Bournemouth

Liverpool’s herky jerky season, it appears, continues apace. After the club put on a solid display in the Champions League against Marseille, fans were looking to this match as a spot for the club to finally begin to show that a corner has been turned in terms of the season. Unfortunately, courtesy of sloppy defensive play, wasted early chances, and a late goal conceded, the Arne Slot’s Reds leave the Vitality having dropped points and face ending the weekend in 6th instead of 4th. Let’s take a look at what happened on this rainy day in Bournemouth.

Talking Tactics

Liverpool trotted out a 4-2-2-2 in today’s match, which saw some time in that aforementioned Champions League tilt against Marseille. The results are, to be direct, mixed. In the early going of the match, Liverpool looked dangerous and were in a position to exploit space created behind Bournemouth’s fullbacks due to how high both Jeremie Frimpong and Milos Kerkez were played.

Tough to say those were chances made, even allowing that Mohamed Salah’s decision to play a square ball towards Cody Gakpo instead of taking a shot on will linger in my mind as one of the great what-ifs. Either way, though, Liverpool had a decent mix of possession and threat before the madness that led to Bournemouth jumping in front by two goals to nil.

Liverpool looked…fine. They looked fine. Which is to say that they didn’t look particularly incisive nor did they look particularly inept over the course of the match. But fine is what gets you dumped out of the Champions League spaces and, maybe, entirely out of Europe. And fine, simply put, is simply not the standard that Liverpool Football Club strives for.

I don’t know what this means in the short term – today’s match, in isolation, is one I could stomach. But on the back of so many lapses that, yes, led to dropped points/forced Liverpool into the position of accepting draws in lieu of winning, I think the team did itself no favors in terms of turning down the heat.

Dissecting the Narrative

The stock text for this section begins with “Liverpool can’t defend” and, honestly, what a world to live in when you consider that the spine of the defense includes Pantheon-level players at both center-back and goalkeeper with Virgil Van Dijk and Alisson Becker, and the crux of Liverpool’s ongoing problems center on the defense. The problems feel consistent: minimal switch-offs/lapses in focus and the Reds are punished in ways we haven’t in a while. And, today, it was Virgil Van Dijk who was involved in the first two goals.

I’m going to pause here to take a breath because I was quite upset at Virg at the time. Especially given his reaction looking at his other teammates and that his misplay led to the circumstance where Joe Gomez would end up injured.

Given some time and a nice walk I think I can walk this back a bit and maybe ask outloud a question I’ve been tinkering with over the past few months: is this what it looks like when your otherworldly players (think, Van Dijk and Ali in the back and Mo up top) return to earth?

I’m looking at the overall run of play here but also over the past few matches and we really should have taken more points from all of those instances. But almost all of them come down to these relatively freak moments. I’ve also noticed the number of times the number of shots on goal matches the number of goals conceded. On the other end, how often have we looked just a step off or maybe just a touch too shabby?

More pointedly, I can’t say that – looking at the tactics – the team’s balance looked off. We put ourselves in decent positions to challenge and really needed to rely on our players, individually, to try to come through on our behalf. And, in a rare set of circumstances given their historical contributions, our trio of all-time players came up short.

I don’t have hard numbers – nor do I know that there’s great sources of data to truly prove my hypothesis – but I do know that the Liverpool hierarchy’s transition planning and personnel identification has clearly been in motion with the purchases of Alexander Isak, Hugo Ekitike, Florian Wirtz, and Giorgi Mamardashvili as well as the pursuit of Marc Guehi.

Transition years are hard to watch and there are moments when those transitions perhaps look a little bit more ahead of the curve – think Brendan Rodgers in 2013-2014 as a more recent example. But what’s clear is that things will be a bit up and down and likely so for a little while.

All of this to say that there’s a lot of blame to go around the club for this defeat and some truly bizarre circumstances that add some wrinkles over this disappointing result. And if the hope was that the result here might prove to quell the angst among the fan base and the questions openly being asked by the media, we’re unfortunately simply not going to get that.

Hold on to your butts, then. I sense a rocky few weeks where folks will be looking to the team to be active authors of their narrative.

What Happens Next

Liverpool are going to need to cobble together a set of wins here not only to re-capture their hold on the Champions League places in the league, but also to advance as deep as possible in the current Champions League and FA Cup tournaments. More, it’s necessary to show that this collection of figures, from Arne Slot through the players themselves, is capable of what we expect.

I think that’s what’s most difficult as a fan: this group of players seems an inch away from making good on the potential and expectations. But over and over, we’ve seen that those inches really are the margins in top-level football.

I still believe that there’s a lot to get out of this season. But we’re running out of time and matches for that to still hold true. It begins with the match against Qarabag Fk and will need to sustain through another unbeaten run. It will need to be comprehensive in order to restore what I sense is a waning sense of belief.