Andy Robertson admits Liverpool have lost their way and says all players need to look in the mirror as Jurgen Klopp’s side try to figure out what is wrong.
After winning two trophies and finishing runners-up in the Premier League and Champions League last season while seeking an unprecedented quadruple, few could have foreseen the Reds’ downfall.
Liverpool also impressed in July’s Community Shield victory over Manchester City, but the opening curtain turned out to be a false dawn given that they have only won two of their first six Premier League games.
That challenging start was compounded by an embarrassing 4-1 loss at Napoli in Wednesday’s Champions League group opener, prompting Klopp to speak about needing to “reinvent himself” and Robertson to call the introspection.
“We have to point it out,” the left-back said after a night in which Piotr Zielinski’s brace was complemented by strikes from Andre-Frank Zambo Anguissa and Giovanni Simeone before Luis Diaz saved one.
“We have to find out why that is happening.
“I can’t point it out right now because if we had, it would have been fixed. But we have to get back to it.
“Our intensity over the years has been incredible, the way we work together, the way we put pressure on teams, the way we put them under pressure. And right now that is not happening, that is evident. It’s not happening.
“The fans are not fools, they can also see it on the pitch. We have to do it fast.
“We need to strengthen our relationships, we have to keep working on the left side, the right side, the midfield, the forwards have to be closer to all of us, we have to be compact again.
“We also need to keep clean sheets again; We haven’t maintained enough this season and we have to do it again because that’s the basis of a good game.
“When you keep the sheets clean, you know they can’t beat you, it’s as simple as that. We have conceded four (against Napoli), we probably deserved it. They probably could have had more, Ali has saved a penalty.
“We could have scored a couple of goals, but that doesn’t interest us. We deserved to be beaten and we need to be much better.”
Liverpool were three goals down at half-time at the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona and luckily things were no worse.
Klopp struggled with calculating aspects of the chaotic screen, but highlighted the lack of compactness and said he couldn’t remember that being an issue for very long.
“It all starts because we weren’t compact enough,” Robertson told the club’s website as attention turns to Saturday’s Premier League clash against Wolves.
“You come here, we haven’t won here as a group, obviously we’ve always had it tough and you just think: go ahead and keep it tight.
“Obviously we are a team that presses and when your teammate doesn’t win the ball you have to have someone to support him; we didn’t have that, people would fly into the challenges, they would turn pretty easily and then there was no one there to back it up and then they had acres of space to run.
“We left our two centre-backs exposed and we left Ali exposed.
“When you happen to do that and they were clinical, they take a risk, then you find yourself in the position that you are in.
“Nothing good enough, we can’t deal with it any other way than that, it would be foolish of us.
“Liverpool fans deserve better than that. We deserve better than that as a team; we have to look at ourselves. We have to look individually before looking collectively.
“Are we doing enough for the team? Are we playing how we want to play? Are we doing exactly what we should be doing? Because it didn’t seem like it.
“We are a team that presses, we like to be at the forefront, we like to put teams under pressure and right now we go in groups of one and two, but we don’t go in groups of three, four and five, and that’s when we have very good games. And we have to get back to that very quickly.”
