There’s a weird disconnect watching Liverpool at the moment. On the one hand, you look at the squad and you know there’s serious quality in it. On the other, the football can feel like it’s being held together by individual moments rather than a clear, repeatable plan.
And when you start leaning on brilliance too often, it becomes hard to shake the feeling that you’re surviving games rather than controlling them. That’s the bit that wears you down. Not one poor result, not a bad half, but the sense that the same issues are showing up week after week.
When it feels like there’s no shape, fans notice
From the outside, it can look like one of three things is happening: either there aren’t clear tactics being applied, or the players aren’t fully taking them in, or they’re not committing to them consistently. None of those options are comforting, and you don’t need to be drawing lines on a tactics board to spot it.
Liverpool sides at their best have always had something you can recognise. A rhythm. An edge. You knew what the press looked like, you knew what the midfield was trying to do, you knew why we were moving the opposition around. Even when it wasn’t perfect, you could usually see the idea underneath it.
Right now, too often it feels like we’re waiting for someone to do something special rather than building a platform for it to happen again and again. And that’s why it “kills” to watch sometimes, because you’re not watching a team impose itself, you’re watching a team hope it finds its way through.
Not Slot out, but the worry is the direction
I’m not in the camp of shouting for Arne Slot to go. Football doesn’t work like that, and Liverpool certainly shouldn’t. But you’re allowed to be concerned about whether the manager is going to adjust, because the Premier League doesn’t wait for anyone.
The most worrying feeling for a supporter isn’t even poor form, it’s thinking: are we actually going to improve from this? Is there something being learned, something being tightened up? Or is it just going to keep looking the same?
It’s meant to be worth staying up for
The overseas point hits home because it tells you how flat the experience has become. Loads of us have done it, staying up at ridiculous hours because Liverpool are Liverpool. You don’t do that because it’s convenient, you do it because it feels essential.
When a fan who’s watched since the 1974 cup final says it reminds them of the “wobbly” Roy Hodgson days, that isn’t thrown out lightly. That’s someone recognising a familiar discomfort: the sense of a team that doesn’t quite know what it is from week to week.
No one’s pretending there’s an easy answer. But the truth is, it shouldn’t feel like this with the quality we’ve got. The next step has to be turning moments into a method, because Liverpool can’t live on inspiration forever.
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Liverpool News Views offers daily Liverpool coverage including match reaction, transfer analysis, EFL context, tactical breakdowns and opinion-led articles written by supporters for supporters.
