In losing to Bournemouth at the weekend, Liverpool offered a reminder of the fact that their biggest consistency this season has been their inconsistency.
Well, at least full highlights weren’t shown on the BBC. After the giddying high of putting seven goals past their biggest rivals without reply a week before, Liverpool returned to the ground with a bump on the Dorset coast on Saturday lunchtime.
A 1-0 defeat against Bournemouth, who’d started the weekend bottom of the Premier League, couldn’t quite undo the memories of the weekend before, but this defeat may serve as a timely reminder of the amount of work that Jurgen Klopp still has to do with a squad of players whose successes this season have been intermittent at best.
While Liverpool could hardly have been said to have been unlucky, they had chances, most notably when Mo Salah shanked a second-half penalty wide of the post after Adam Smith’s contentious ‘handball’. Salah’s miss felt like a summation of Liverpool’s afternoon. A golden opportunity spurned, a reminder of how brittle confidence can be when it hasn’t been working week in, week out for a while. After the game, Klopp seemed mystified at how his team could have gone from such an extreme to another in the space of less than six days. You and the rest of us, pal.
At the top of Klopp’s list of issues to fix seems to be Virgil van Dijk. The defender was criticised after the game over his reaction – or lack thereof – to Bournemouth’s goal, when he seemed to allow Bournemouth’s Dango Ouattara to drift past him to send over the cross from which Philip Billing scored the only goal of the game before throwing his arms in the air as the ball hit the back of the net in frustration. An understandable reaction in one sense, but hardly the sort of display that a manager will want to see from their captain.
Van Dijk will be 32 by the start of next season, and it is beginning to look as though Liverpool have had the best years of his career. He’s been with the club for just over five years now and has racked up more than 200 appearances, but he isn’t getting any younger. While changes in diet and fitness training are managing to extend the careers of many players, some will simply plateau at a certain age and then start to tail off.
Having been a strong contender for the best defender in the world at times over that five years, Van Dijk may well be falling into that category. There comes a point at which slips in…
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