Jamie Carragher insists Liverpool should have beaten Chelsea given their absences at Stamford Bridge on Saturday – nevermind lost to them. The Reds have suffered back-to-back Premier League defeats, causing them to slip from the top of the table going into the international break. The reigning champions have appeared vulnerable defensively even during their seven-match winning run to start the season, and those frailties are now proving costly.
Arne Slot’s side squandered two-goal leads against both Bournemouth and Newcastle in their opening fixtures, before salvaging victories with late strikes in each match. The Reds claimed maximum points from their opening five league fixtures, but then conceded a stoppage-time winner at Crystal Palace before suffering the same fate against Chelsea. Sandwiched between those league losses, Slot’s men were beaten by Galatasaray in the Champions League, displaying similar defensive vulnerabilities.
Carragher criticised the club for playing basketball rather than football during that Turkish trip, and reiterated those concerns following the weekend’s defeat at Stamford Bridge.
“My criticism of Liverpool being almost like a basketball team, again it has come back to haunt them,” Carragher said on Super Sunday Extra Time.
“This thing about it being end to end in a game of football, Liverpool should be dominating a game like this with the changes of personnel Chelsea have got.”
Carragher criticised Liverpool for being “too easy to play through”, a problem he believes persists even during their victories.
He argued that this issue hindered them from capitalising on Cody Gakpo’s equaliser against Chelsea, before they conceded a late goal to Estevao.
In Istanbul earlier this week, Victor Osimhen’s penalty proved to be the only goal of the match, but Galatasaray had numerous other scoring opportunities. Carragher voiced similar concerns while covering the game for CBS.
“I expressed those [concerns] to the manager early on, he’ll know that a lot better than me,” the pundit stated. “He is obviously a fantastic manager.
“But right now Liverpool went from, I would call them a top team, workmanlike team last season and they have sprinkled a little bit of star dust on it in terms of the transfers that they have brought in. And they haven’t gained anything going forward but they have lost a lot defensively.”
Despite Liverpool losing three consecutive matches in all competitions, manager Slot chose to focus on the positives.
“After we scored 1-1 it went our way and I think I was waiting for us to score the second. Decision making could’ve been better, last 10-15 minutes was end-to-end,” he told Match of the Day.
“We arrived in their 18-yard box with [Andy] Robertson, we couldn’t control the ball but again it’s fine margins like it’s been for as long as I’ve been here. Last week, same as this week two difficult away games, the fine margins haven’t been in our favour.
“In both games we’ve created more chances than the team we have faced – Palace and Chelsea – but the truth is that we have only scored once in both games and our opponent has scored twice.”