Damp squib at Anfield as Liverpool fail to fire

The build-up to the latest instalment of Liverpool v Manchester United portrayed United as no-hopers, as though Erik Ten Hag’s side were captives being marched up a pyramid towards the sacrificial altar, rather than a mediocre football team hoping to get a result away to a slightly stronger football team.

The extraordinary scoreline in last year’s game made us all forget that the norm for this fixture is disappointment. Last night’s appalling game at Anfield was not some aberration, it was a return to tradition.

The only memorable moment of the game came deep into injury time when Michael Oliver sent off Diogo Dalot, who had been enjoying one of his best-ever Premier League games, getting the better of his personal battle with Liverpool’s talented winger Luis Diaz.

Oliver first booked Dalot for protesting Oliver’s incorrect decision to award a throw-in against United, then immediately booked him a second time for his incredulous protest at the first booking. That is Premier League refereeing in the age of Howard Webb, who has instructed his hapless officials to clamp down on open shows of dissent; not that tough on incompetence, incredibly tough on the results of incompetence.

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Klopp was asked afterwards if the prematch build-up which mainly consisted of a debate over whether Liverpool would win by more or less than last year’s 7-0 had affected his side.

“I think you overestimate your influence slightly. We couldn’t be bothered,” Klopp said.

This was unconvincing. Earlier in the week, Klopp himself had complained about the apparently general assumption that the game could have only one winner.

“I do not like all this talk around it,” he said. “It is always like this. The more bad things people say about them, the stronger they will show up. That is always the case.”

Actually, it wasn’t really the case. Manchester United did not show up strong. For the most part, they showed up weak – giving perhaps the worst performance of any visiting side at Anfield this season.

But Liverpool helped them out by delivering their own worst Anfield performance – a directionless mess littered with mistakes and misunderstandings. Of the starters only Alisson Becker, Virgil van Dijk and Ibrahima Konate could be said to have played well, and the latter two missed their side’s best chances of the game.

If you saw only the statistics and not the match, you might be misled into believing Liverpool had played well and deserved to win – they had 34 shots, the most by any side in a Premier League game this season.

But really this was like a boxing match when the favourite peppers the opponent’s guard with pitter-patter punches without ever threatening to do any real damage.

In fact it was Manchester United who created the best chance of the game, when stand-in captain Scott McTominay played in Rasmus Højlund, only for the struggling young striker to shoot straight at the body of Alisson and flub the rebound.

That chance – like most of United’s chances – came during a 15-minute spell in the second half that immediately followed the first round of changes Klopp made to try to win the game.

The Liverpool manager’s switch to an aggressive 4-2-4 was presumably designed to add a cutting edge but instead produced a stream of incisive United attacks. A game which had resembled a one-paced attack v defence training session had turned into a chaotic end-to-end scramble.

Klopp at least acted quickly to rectify his own mistake, repopulating his midfield by introducing Curtis Jones and Harvey Elliott for Luis Diaz and Darwin Nuñez. Liverpool re-established control and the last 15 minutes were probably their most convincing spell of the match, but they had left it too late.

Both Jones and Elliott might have considered themselves unfortunate not to start. Elliott, who started the 7-0 last season, and whose intelligent promptings off the bench inspired a comeback win at Crystal Palace last week, certainly should have been involved earlier. The player preferred in Elliott’s position, Dominik Szoboszlai, had been a bag of nerves. The other 8, Ryan Gravenberch, was a sinuous irrelevance.

For years, picking Liverpool’s midfield was easy: Fabinho, Henderson, Wijnaldum. The wholesale replacement of the midfield in the summer has brought new energy and new possibilities but also new problems and dilemmas. Klopp doesn’t know his best midfield combination, or even his best midfield shape.

Szoboszlai is the midfielder who has played the most minutes, followed by Alexis Mac Allister, then Elliott, then Wataru Endo, then Gravenberch, then Jones.

But the picture is complicated by the fact that Trent Alexander-Arnold – third in squad minutes after Mohamed Salah and Szoboszlai – has spent most of that time in midfield, while Cody Gakpo has played both in midfield and attack.

Last week Klopp spoke at an event to open the redeveloped Anfield Road Stand, and allowed himself to share the pleasure of a snigger at Chelsea with his fans: “The summer we had, we had a few strange things happen in the transfer market but here, between us, I can say, ‘My god, were we lucky, eh?’ . . . We obviously realised that other central defensive midfielders don’t want to join Liverpool – you see what happens – and then we found Endo. He’s an exceptional player.”

No doubt Liverpool were wise to withdraw from that crazy bidding war against Todd Boehly for Moises Caicedo and particularly Romeo Lavia, who has not yet kicked a ball for Chelsea since joining them in August. That doesn’t change the fact that Caicedo would be an automatic first XI pick in the current Liverpool squad, while Endo is a decent player but far from exceptional.

While Klopp juggles his midfield options trying to hit on the right balance, it would help him a lot if his €75 million centre forward could end a scoring drought that has now stretched to 10 Liverpool games. Darwin Nuñez’s biggest achievement on Sunday was to avoid becoming a victim of Michael Oliver’s two-for-the-price-of-one yellow card fetish when he barged Jonny Evans to the ground, then kicked the ball away in annoyance at a foul being called.

The hope with Darwin was that, having adapted to his move to the Premier League he would catch fire in his second season, as he had done at Benfica.

We have now reached nearly the halfway point of his second season, and in the league he is scoring at a slightly lower rate than he did in the first. How long can Liverpool realistically wait for the “real” Darwin to show up? The worrying thought is that he might already be here.