After all the talk this week about the various nefarious ways teams have played against Liverpool during their recent run, there would be a few things the more mischievous among us might have liked to see from a trip to Brentford and an attempt to avoid a fourth straight Premier League defeat.
One might look for the easy laughs of, say, Liverpool conceding from one of Michael Kayode’s already infamous long throws.
You might prefer the subtler charms of Brentford in fact scoring from a searing counter-attack in which a gorgeous and above all ground-level pass from Mikkel Damsgaard is coolly converted by Kevin Schade.
And if you wanted to really hammer home the big chuckles, you’d maybe ask for the game to end in a chaotic 11-minute spell of injury-time – always a notably lively period of any Liverpool game these days – with the increasingly chaotic champions desperately trying and failing to scramble a solitary point by aiming long balls at the head of makeshift striker Virgil van Dijk rather than any of the assorted members of their shiny new £200m attack.
But you’d have had to be beyond greedy to hope to see all of the above in the most extraordinary game yet of Liverpool’s increasingly extraordinary – for both good and ill – season.
This game had all of those things and so, so much more. Brentford were magnificent, and Liverpool were rotten. Again. This run is starting to look more and more like the season-scuppering antics last season’s defending champions Manchester City were themselves embarking on around this time last year.
Liverpool just look lost, constantly finding themselves in the grip of panic and uncertainty, entirely unable to bring any semblance of control to seemingly any game of football.
Van Dijk’s struggles continue after last week’s unpleasantness against Manchester United. He seems these days perpetually mystified by the chaos unfolding around him, doubly so when such chaos involved Milos Kerkez, yet entirely blind to his own part in it.
His wild kick at Dango Ouattara to hand Brentford the chance to restore their two-goal lead from the penalty spot early in the second half was the kind of witless mistake that you just didn’t see from him. He was lucky to escape conceding another penalty, and with it the potential for further sanction, for an apparent elbow in that frantic and frenetic finish to the game.
And it’s worth adding just for completeness at this point that we only got a wild and dramatic conclusion because Mo Salah, on an evening spent otherwise entirely within the funk that has engulfed him, scored one of the goals of the season.
It was the most spectacular individual moment of a spectacular game, bringing down an awkward high ball with one foot and then slamming a half-volley into the roof of the net with the other in one absurdly graceful movement entirely at odds with absolutely everything else he did. Including contorting himself into impossible positions trying to get his left foot to a late, late half-chance when all laws of physics and the known universe told you only a swing of the right boot had any hope at all.
The outcome of it all, though – and we’ve just realised at this point we haven’t even got round to mentioning Simon Hooper finding two minutes of added time to added time at the end of the first half for Kerkez (before and after that point the worst player on the pitch) to get Liverpool back in the game before half-time, and Hooper then injuring himself and not coming back out for the second half.
Like we said, there was a bit going on. The net result of it all, though, is indeed a fourth straight league defeat for Liverpool, who a month ago were five points clear at the top of the table but now find themselves sixth, a point below Manchester Actual United and facing the very real prospect of slipping right into the mid-table morass by close of play tomorrow. Any or all of Tottenham, Crystal Palace and Aston Villa could go past them, as Sunderland and United did today.
And Palace going past them might actually be the best they can hope for, because it would at least mean Arsenal losing. If Arsenal in fact win, Liverpool will be seven points adrift of the leaders. A full 12-point swing in four games.
It is an extraordinary state of affairs. Liverpool’s five straight wins at the start of the season might have been a bit too seat-of-the-pants for comfort, but we truly never dreamt they were as deceptive as they’ve turned out to be.
It’s not just that it’s going wrong, it’s that it’s going wrong in all of the ways. The new signings haven’t settled, the old reliable stars are struggling, the manager has started saying ridiculous things, which makes the things that subsequently happen on the pitch even funnier.
We all had our fun with it, but a manager of Arne Slots’s experience talking about how his team struggle when the ball is in the air ahead of a trip to Brentford was inviting trouble and subsequent derision in an entirely avoidable way.
At least after that opening goal he couldn’t complain about opponents changing up their tactics against his team.
And even now there remains obvious scope for the now astonishingly real crisis to deepen further. It’s Crystal Palace, a club that has already got the better of Liverpool twice this season, next in the Carabao, before a resurgent Aston Villa in the league and then a huge week that simply cannot possibly be approached with any relish at the moment in which a visit from Real Madrid is followed by a trip to Manchester City before the interlull.
Astonishing as it is to say after watching this latest jaw-dropping defeat, there is a high chance that things get even worse before they get better, if indeed they do get better at all.
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