Back to Basics: Making Sense of Liverpool

Liverpool Football Club have started the season in peculiar fashion. Five wins were followed by four losses in the league. On Saturday, they righted the ship with a win against Aston Villa. The eleven they used was pulled straight from last season with Hugo Ekitike and Giorgi Marmardashvili being the only new faces in the side. It wasn't a flawless performance by any means, but they were dominant in the second half. They looked like the champions of England for the first time in a while. It's hard to make sense about what's been going on at Liverpool or where they go from here, but I want to try to answer some of the hard questions being asked about them.

1. Can they compete for the title?

Liverpool of this season feels a lot like the Manchester City side we saw last year. City were breathtaking some weeks and underwhelming on others. They were clearly one of the top four sides but never actually challenged for the title. Teams were able to get at them in a way that they previously never could and it led to surprising results. The reason I think Liverpool could end up in the same boat as that City team is the utter lack of defensive cohesion. They have the same number of goals as league leaders Arsenal but have conceded eleven more goals. Saturday's clean sheet was just their third of season in all competitions. New boys Milos Kerkez and Jeremie Frimpong haven't played well, and Ibrahima Konate and Virgil Van Dijk have been shadows of themselves. Liverpool's forwards will kick on. They always do. Mohamed Salah has had people calling for his head after a four game goal drought in the league. He's had a drought of at least four games in each of the six prior seasons but never had less than 18 league goals. His quality will show and with a king's ransom worth of strikers up top, I back them to consistently score goals. My worry is the huge holes in the midfield and backline that keep leading to goals against them. They cannot be considered a title contender without serious defensive improvement.

2. Does Arne Slot's system not work?

To say Slot's vision has failed would be extremely harsh. Questioning his ability to manage would be equally harsh. Klopp made the skeleton of the team, but Slot made many adjustments to turn them into champions. Arne's Liverpool makeover has been ugly so far, but I wouldn't give up on it at this stage. Injuries and chemistry struggles have made it nearly impossible to put his plan into practice. The big attacking signings, Ekitike, Wirtz, and Isak, have played a total of 51 minutes together. Neither Slot nor anyone else really knows what the remodeled version of Liverpool looks like. The biggest fault I find in Slot's plan this year was his lack of patience. I think he underestimated the difficulty to adapt to a new team and new system. It's not just any team either, it's the reigning English champions. Wirtz and Frimpong has struggled with the physicality and Kerkez looks completely lost, especially in his positioning. Slot wouldn't benefitted from treating some of his new boys in the same way Jurgen Klopp treated Andy Robertson. He gave him a couple months with the team before giving him the reins at left back. He understood the system well before he was ever thrown into consistent game action. The gaffer's new system may yet work but not on the timetable he was shooting for.

3. Why has Liverpool fallen off?

Form is part of football and that's part of the issues at Liverpool but the main culprit for me is excessive turnover. Too many changes have happened all at once. Chemistry is still developing between the new group. Jurgen Klopp's midfield overhaul was not a revelation on day one. It took time for those guys to gel. Attempting to change four or five of your starters at once is no small task. Factor into that winning a title and the emotional overload of that. Then, consider the hardest part, this team lost their friend this summer. I know they're the champions, but they're humans too. Humans that publicly mourned Diogo Jota and have publicly voiced their struggle to develop chemistry with all the changes in the squad. It's extremely difficult to generate consistency when your surroundings all change.

I want to conclude with some perspective. We're a fourth of the way to the finish line in the Premier League. We're just at the first turn. Anything is possible at this stage. For the Reds to achieve their goals, serious improvement is needed. They've been riding the line all year. Somehow, they managed to find the right side of that line five times in a row before losing their lucky cricket. Those four losses include two last minute winners, three clangs of the post in a game, and one of weirdest VAR incidents I've seen in a while. I'm not trying to make excuses for them, but I hope you can see why it wouldn't be that weird for them to turn it around. For now, Liverpool might just need to go a game at a time. Going back to basics and fixing the defense are a good place to start. How to integrate $450 million worth of signings is a problem that I'll leave to Slot because I don't have the slightest clue.