It was in a strange atmosphere that we left Anfield after Saturday’s insane 3-3 draw with an all too often troubled Brighton.
There was no anger, no overwhelming frustration, just a sense of resignation that the result was just what we deserved for our efforts and misadventures.
Down two goals in 18 minutes, up 3-2 just over an hour, this was a game where success came out of the jaws of calamity, before the olive branch of equalization was offered to our visitors.
Nobody had the nerve to suggest that he had stolen Leandro Trossard’s hat-trick from us in the 83rd minute.
I came into this game having decided I would keep a brief following of Trent Alexander-Arnold, with the scope to dedicate this article to him, his role in Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool and Gareth Southgate’s inability to integrate him into a surprisingly dull game. England settled.
However, there was so much going on all over the field that it was impossible to enjoy an in-person version of the player’s camera.
This was about sporadic collective malfunctioning versus occasional group cohesion. We babble together, correct ourselves together, and give away two points together.
Yes, some elements are having a harder time than others, but everything has a chain reaction when trust is delicate.
Every mistake is currently escalated, every granted goal is forensically deconstructed and reconstructed to suit any given agenda. That’s football.
For the first two months of the season, it looks like we’ve been dusting off the face planted from the final seven days of the 2021/22 season.
International breakups and the death of a monarch are past and gone; it seems that the scheduled and forced breaks have not removed the cobwebs, and the end of this maddening habit of conceding first shows no signs of evaporating any time soon.
Against Brighton, for good measure, given the dearth of football available to Liverpool supporters of late, they threw in that bonus of two conceded unanswered in 18 minutes.
If I were a politician, I could present a very manipulated picture, where this was the first time since the end of August that we had conceded first place in a Premier League match.
However, we have only played once in the league since that last-gasp comeback win at home to a Machiavellian Newcastle, that game was the Merseyside derby at Goodison Park, where of course we conceded first just for the VAR be kind to us.
This fractured match list and the fact that we had been able to take the tools offline for the last two and a half weeks, presented us with the opportunity to perform a sort of factory reset, and Klopp had spoken of what a great job that had been done. in the training field.
For full-time Saturday, he might have been better off wearing them for a week in the Mediterranean sun. Maybe even go-karting, paintballing, or the kind of weekend where overweight, middle-aged salesmen from Daventry named Martin and Derek stack boxes and abseil.
Klopp has so much good karma racked up at Anfield that if this is to be his Liverpool equivalent of ‘that season’ he had at Borussia Dortmund, then perhaps we should all sit back and take the ride.
trent clock
Our current problems are not reduced to the form of a player. Klopp will be ridiculed for his defense of Trent ahead of Brighton’s visit, but all that has been said still holds true.
We’re not talking about a textbook right back. In the 10 minutes or so that I spent solely watching Trent on Saturday, he filled positions you’d recognize on a whiteboard as the right-wing component of a three-man central defence, the central playmaker midfield pivot circle, and an Orthodox right winger, as well as dropping into a traditional right back area when called upon.
He really could play anywhere in a formation as rigid as the one Southgate deploys for England.
There are other players who are working as we have been repeatedly exposed in central defense no matter which teammate Virgil van Dijk has been handed over to, while both Jordan Henderson and Thiago, who have had an injury-interrupted start to the campaign, struggled. sometimes. against Brighton.
Fabinho has also struggled to find the higher levels that we know he is capable of. Later, Mo Salah works tirelessly for little reward, while Darwin Núñez remains an expensive ornament.
The form of Bobby Firmino and Luis Diaz has been vital, instances that defy suggestions that we are struggling to cope up front without the input of Sadio Mane. That said, Liverpool’s current problems are one of collective accumulation, and will be remedied together.
We are now 11 points behind a pace-setting Arsenal, the team we travel to face next Sunday in our next Premier League assignment, and beyond that it gets much simpler with Man’s visit to Anfield. City, games that will be separated by the second part of our two-header encounters with Rangers.
We have a month and a half ahead of us that will represent the most sinister of sliding doors. Which version of Liverpool lives up to the chances in front of us is open to conjecture.
Up the reds.
