In the Premier League crisis can neither be created nor destroyed, only transferred from one club to another. Ruben Amorim finally got his first back-to-back league wins as United manager and one-time global whipping boy Harry Maguire enjoyed a moment of glory that United fans will revel in for decades to come, and the clouds of dread and despair that swirled so long around United have engulfed the once-smiling face of Arne Slot.
Liverpool’s manager finds himself facing the kind of radical decisions that until now he’s been happy to avoid.
It was the first time in 11 years that Liverpool had lost four in a row: needless to say, it never happened under Jürgen Klopp. The last Liverpool team to achieve that anti-feat included players such as Mario Balotelli, Javier Manquillo, Fabio Borini and Ricky Lambert. The current four-in-a-row side includes the three most expensive players from the 2025 summer transfer window.
So this is a curious situation. Everyone knew why the Liverpool squad of autumn 2014 kept losing matches: they were awful. The current squad is full of good players – but they have no idea how they are supposed to fit together. Neither, it appears, does their coach.
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Last season Slot took over Klopp’s team, made a few tweaks to the build-up and made winning the title look easy. One problem he didn’t have was worrying about who should be in the team: it picked itself. The only new signing in the squad was Federico Chiesa, who didn’t start a league game until matchweek 37.
Slot picked pretty much the same 11 all season, to the extent that Liverpool’s February slump – when they lost the Carabao Cup final to Newcastle and got knocked out of Europe by PSG in the same week – was blamed on the lack of rotation.
Now things are more complicated. Since Liverpool’s unprecedented transfer spree in the summer, they’re like a python with indigestion after swallowing a couple of donkeys. The question of who belongs in the first XI has suddenly become both incredibly urgent and very difficult to answer. For the first time, Slot appears completely stumped.
Liverpool’s manager struck an odd tone before the game, when seeming to complain that United’s team selection wasn’t what he expected. “We’ve seen Sesko play the last three, four, five or six times, but they go to Liverpool they change the line-up. That’s not the first time where we’ve faced a team and they’ve done that.” And ... so what? Surely by now Slot knows that teams sometimes try to surprise their opponents with unexpected selections. Why moan about it?
Maybe United’s team selection annoyed Slot because he was feeling a bit angsty about his own.
He decided to leave out his top scorer, Hugo Ekitiké, and his lately-much-criticised but clearly brilliant number 10, Florian Wirtz, on the bench. (Amorim might have been surprised by that, but he certainly wasn’t complaining about it).
Slot had effectively announced that Alexander Isak would start in his press conference on Friday, when he said that Isak was now up to speed and 100 per cent fit: “we can judge him in a fair way from now on.”
Isak missed two chances in that first half that everyone would have expected the Newcastle Isak to score. The second of these – running on to a through-ball with the ball on his stronger right foot – was the kind he surely would have visualised before the game. In fact, it was eerily reminiscent of the chance he buried at Anfield for his debut goal for Newcastle, back in August 2022.
United’s new goalkeeper, Senne Lammens, surprisingly stood his ground when many or most keepers would have rushed forward to challenge for the ball or at least narrow the angle. That’s what Alisson did when Isak scored his first goal for Newcastle. Instead Lammens was challenging Isak to beat him – and Isak couldn’t do it.
Other than these misses he was completely anonymous, and there were a couple of remarkable moments when Liverpool attacked with several players and Isak, rather than being front and centre, was following up the play like a defensive midfielder, as though hiding from the possibility of missing again.
United had already made three substitutions by the time Slot made his first change. He wasn’t leaving the team to get on with it because things were going so well. Rather, he seemed unsure what to do.
The changes he proceeded to make were ones a robot could have scripted before the game, if the robot had been instructed that the changes should ruffle the least possible amount of important or expensive feathers.
Conor Bradley is the most junior member of the team: always an easy player to take off. Alexis MacAllister was just back from Argentina duty and had taken a heavy blow to the head: another easy choice. Then Bryan Mbeumo kicked Ryan Gravenberch in the ankle and the midfielder couldn’t continue.
Liverpool’s changes thus effectively meant that they had in one fell swoop removed their starting midfield three – with Dominik Szoboszlai going to right-back – and replaced them with Curtis Jones and Wirtz, a number 10. Isak was still part of a shapeless attack alongside Mo Salah, Gakpo and the third substitute, Ekitiké.
Slot’s tactics were reminiscent of Louis van Gaal at Lansdowne Road in 2001, throwing on striker after striker without any thought as to how they were going to play together or who was going to pass the ball to them. (Has that game somehow become a positive case study in Dutch coaching college?)
Isak was eventually taken off on 72 minutes, to be replaced by Chiesa, another forward. Jeremie Frimpong, notionally a right-back, watched from the bench while Liverpool’s best remaining central midfielder, Szoboszlai, covered the right-back position.
The midfieldless wonders did get an equaliser, then promptly threw the game away again by rushing out of defence before a corner had been properly cleared, leaving Maguire and a couple of team-mates unmarked at the far post to head in Bruno Fernandes’s cross.
“We needed to stay calm but we didn’t manage that,” Virgil van Dijk said after the game. He could equally have been talking about his coach.
While United celebrated, something big was happening on the home bench: with Liverpool needing a goal, Salah was being hooked. His most memorable moment had been a shocking miss at the far post when a simple sideways pass to Wirtz would have given him an unmissable chance. A normal player would have been substituted long before. Did Slot really believe Salah might be about to come up with a moment of magic, or was he just intimidated by his status?
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While Wirtz produced moments of quality that indicted Slot’s decision to leave him out, Cody Gakpo – whose miss at 2-1 was even worse than Salah’s – was the only one of Liverpool star attackers to play the entire game, a fact that deserves an inquest of its own.
There is an uncomfortable fact staring Liverpool in the face, which is that Salah no longer fits in the team. Not only is he not the future of the team, he’s no longer even the present. He knows it, and it’s affecting his performances. Liverpool’s attack is going to be Wirtz, Isak and Ekitiké, and Slot must now get on with the awkward task of making that a reality.
