Klopp makes tough Liverpool afternoon tougher as Salah leads the line for a set piece team

Alisson conceded a foul in Nottingham Forest’s six-yard box in the 93rd minute. Joe Gomez was hurling throw-ins into the area in the 95th. Liverpool were panicking at the end of a game in which they appeared to have an incredibly flawed plan against the Premier League’s worst side. 

Liverpool were looking up the table after consecutive 1-0 wins in the Premier League against Manchester City and West Ham. ‘Form is temporary and class is permanent’ will have been the phrase, probably not in such a cliched form, bouncing around the training ground in the last couple of weeks.

But this display against Forest, similar to many of their games this season, suggests good displays are now the anomalies.

Injuries to Darwin Nunez, Diogo Jota and Luis Diaz left Jurgen Klopp with little choice but to select Roberto Firmino, Mohamed Salah and Fabio Carvalho as his front three. But Klopp did have the choice of where to play them, made what very quickly looked to be an error in playing Salah down the middle and refused to change that plan.

Liverpool had 76 per cent possession and Salah had 22 touches in 90 minutes. Forest sat very deep, allowing him no space to run into, with all the space out wide, where Salah has terrorised defenders in the Premier League for the last five seasons. His hair seemingly more unkempt than usual, Salah looked as baffled as a teenager woken before midday as he ploughed a lone furrow up front.

Roberto Firmino meanwhile, an outstanding false nine, was forced to false from wide positions, where he made very little impact. Sometimes the less you think about things the better, as Pep Guardiola well knows, and Liverpool may well have won this game had Klopp played his forward players in the positions they have excelled in throughout his time at Anfield.

“I never saw a game where one team has four or five no-brainers from a set piece where we have to finish it off,” Jurgen Klopp said after the game. He’s right, they had the chances to win, but then again, we’ve never seen a Klopp Liverpool side so reliant on set pieces. All of their opportunities came from decent deliveries, either from James Milner or Trent Alexander-Arnold, and headers from the big lads. It’s certainly not much to look at.

There was a feeling they may nick one at the end, but that replaced a feeling of their own defensive fallibility throughout the game. One bad pass, and there were a lot of them, seemed to result in a chance for Nottingham Forest, or at…