Forget Isak, forget Wirtz, forget Salah: only one thing about Liverpool's disastrous form nosedive is obvious

What, exactly, constitutes a crisis? On the one hand, Liverpool have lost four matches on the bounce. Premier League titles have been lost by less. Looking at the flip side of the coin, however, they’re still just four points behind Arsenal with plenty of time to play with, and none of the obvious contenders for this year’s crown have been completely convincing as of yet. Still – if Arne Slot doesn’t sort this out soon, it will get ugly.

Perhaps that’s enough to make Liverpool’s 2-1 defeat to Manchester United on Sunday the moment at which we officially rubber stamp this as a crisis. It certainly looks like a crisis of confidence within the squad – and many of the fans in the Kop are getting rather rattled, too. The search for scapegoats has begun in earnest. Knives are being sharpened. But who or what has really caused Liverpool’s rough run, and what can Slot do to turn it around?

Should Alexander Isak, Florian Wirtz or Mohamed Salah take the blame for Liverpool’s bad form?

The surface-level of reading of Liverpool’s struggles is this: The £450m worth of new talent signed over the summer has done more harm than good, and players like Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz are underperforming. On top of all that, Mohamed Salah has finally grown old and can’t carry the attack on his shoulders any more.

None of that is inaccurate, per se. Wirtz and Isak have been deeply disappointing so far, as have Milos Kerkez and Jeremie Frimpong. Salah looks like a shadow of himself, as neatly evinced by the flustered, unconfident manner with which he took on a golden chance at the far post in the second half against United on Sunday. Salah, at his peak, may not have put that opportunity away every time but he surely wouldn’t have prodded it innocuously wide.

Then again, almost all of the new signings are having to adjust not just to a new team and environment but to new tactical roles as well – or, as is the case with Isak, they’re perhaps paying the price for scuppering their own pre-season and painting a layer of rust over their own legs.

Wirtz didn’t really play as a number ten at Bayer Leverkusen but as a supporting forward whose role was broadly similar to that played by Bryan Mbeumo at United – a player who contributed to the completion of moves rather than their creation. At Liverpool he is more central, slightly deeper, expected to be the playmaker rather than the cutting edge. He hasn’t quite worked it out yet.

Kerkez has held up reasonably well defensively so far (he’s actually making more tackles and interceptions per game than he did at Bournemouth and shut down Noni Madueke very impressively in the 1-0 win over Arsenal) but the ways in which he’s asked to contribute to the attack have been different – far less dribbling, far more passing and crossing. It’s not quite his natural game, and he’s producing around half as many shooting chances for his team-mates so far as he did at Dean Court last year.

The same applies to Frimpong, an enterprising wing-back who is very different from Trent Alexander-Arnold and whose passing game is relatively poor compared to his ball-carrying. He’s also had to get over an injury.

When Slot first arrived at Anfield, his best decision was to change as little as possible. He didn’t try to impose his favoured back three, he didn’t make major adjustments to the style of play – he simply kept everything that worked and provided the entire squad with continuity. Now, he’s asking his new signings to reinvent large parts of their game in order to fit the existing tactical template.

Continuity has been replaced by something slightly more chaotic, and it shows in the way they are playing. There is positional uncertainty and tactical indiscipline from front to back.

That doesn’t mean that individuals aren’t to blame at all, of course. Salah has been poor by his stratospheric standards and that one non-finish against United alone was worrying. Isak probably should have been phased in more gradually given that he looks like a player that hardly trained for over a month while he patiently forced his move. A different role shouldn’t stop Wirtz from being able to beat his man one-on-one.

And so on - but last season, the baseline for the entire team was that everything was made easy for everyone. Now, the goalposts have been moved. Sadly, given Cody Gakpo’s late miss at Anfield on Sunday, not literally.

All Liverpool need is the one thing they don’t have - time

So the problem isn’t necessarily just the individual players, but also the strategic environment – too many players just aren’t quite comfortable with their role or with the way they fit into the broader system.

Yet the system is actually working, at least to an extent. Liverpool haven’t been at their best and were far too reliant on late winners before the recent run of defeats, but they are still among the best in the Premier League by virtually every meaningful statistical metric.

They are join first in the league for shots on goal, fifth for expected goals, sixth for expected goals allowed, second for total passes, fourth for pass completion percentage and first in total team possession. A few more ‘firsts’ might be nice, but Liverpool are not actually doing much wrong when looked at from a team-wide perspective.

Even in their recent defeats, Liverpool have generally been the better team, at least in terms of the bigger picture. Only Crystal Palace, for instance, have actually created more or better shooting chances against them this season, while only Chelsea have had more possession in a game (and even then only by a small margin).

In short, the system works, and is being let down by its constituent parts – Isak, Salah, Wirtz and all the rest – who are missing their chances or final passes. But a good system only works if its players are on form, comfortable and confident, and that’s not the environment that has been created.

None of this means that the season is going to be any kind of disaster. The players who are making mistakes are all world class, and most (perhaps all) of them will get it figured out eventually. The mistake has been asking for too much adaptation, too quickly. Signing a large number of players all at once isn’t always the correct call, no matter how good they are.

The stats all essentially say the same thing – Liverpool are a perfectly good team who are tripping over their own feet at critical moments. The individual players are to blame, because they’re the ones missing the chances created by a good system, but the system is also to blame because those same players are also off the boil because they’re being asked to answer unfamiliar questions.

In short – it’s complicated. The solution? Probably just patience. Patience, and the belief that Isak will shake that rust off, that Salah will rediscover his form, that Gakpo won’t miss every open goal he gets, and that Wirtz, Kerkez, Frimpong and the rest are brilliant players who will crack the code eventually - a belief which would be backed up by years of hard evidence. The problem, of course, is that patience requires the time and grace to make mistakes, and Liverpool have now used almost all of their reserves up, at least in the Premier League.

Still, Slot would probably be making a mistake if he tried to chop and change too much. All those expensive players will only grow into their roles if they’re given the opportunity to do so, and dismantling the system to ask them more familiar questions risks replacing a winning scheme with something which may not work. Liverpool are good on a team level, and good on an individual level.

But right now, there’s a disconnect between the two which is making the total less than the sum of its parts. It’s too late to go back and change the root cause – this is something Liverpool need to ride out. For the sake of their title challenge, they just have to hope it doesn’t take too long.