So there it is then. It had to come eventually and I can’t say I’m massively surprised that it came away at Watford. I was certainly shocked at the manner of it, but this was always the type of game that we could easily lose if we weren’t at it. And we weren’t at it. Not one player was.
The performance was just wretched from start to finish and Watford thoroughly deserved their win. We’ve had quite a few of these types of performances but usually we’ve turned it around in the second half. For once, the second half display was even worse than the first. Klopp said 3-0 was a bit harsh on us but I disagree. It could easily have been worse.
There was nothing acceptable about the performance. Every player performed badly and when that happens you’ve basically got no chance. Most teams struggle when they have five or six off the pace but we've been able to overcome that. Eleven though? The only way you can survive that is if the other team are as bad as you. Unfortunately Watford's players were terrific.
We had one shot on target, from Robbo in the first half. Other than that the only time we went close was a half volley from Lallana that hit the outside of the post. The defensive side of the game was just as bad. Watford scored three but could easily have had six, despite losing their best player to a horrible looking knee injury in the first half.
It was just a proper shite performance at both ends of the pitch and it was an unfitting way for the run to end. Going through the entire season unbeaten was always unlikely, even at this advanced stage with on;y eleven games to negotiate. Between Champions League and possibly FA Cup commitments (if we can get past Chelsea this week) it was going to get harder and harder to stay unbeaten because with the title wrapped up Klopp was going to have to do much more rotating to ensure his strongest line up was fresh for the other competitions.
So I thought going unbeaten was going to be a tall order, but equally I expected that if we did eventually lose it would be a blood and thunder, throwing everything at the opponent and just narrowly missing out type of loss. I didn’t imagine for one second that we’d get spanked, but spanked we were.
This had nothing to do with bad luck, contentious refereeing or anything else. We were just well beaten and were second best all over the park. Watford won every single individual battle. Every one. Not one of our players can say he had the better of his opposite number.
Of course on social media Lovren took the fall. He was the number one trend on Twitter on Saturday night. What a fucking joke that is. It didn’t help that my boy Troy said afterwards that Watford targeted him and that Dejan was distracted because he “just wanted to fight me”. I read all the headlines and thought Deeney must have savaged him, but what he actually said was completely fair.
“Van Dijk is a class act, for me one of the top five defenders in the world, and it’s tough to get anything from him—he’s 6’6”, he’s fast, he’s strong—so you try and pick on the weaker of the two. I don’t want to be disrespectful to Lovren and say he was the weaker of the two, but I knew he wanted to fight me and that’s my game. If you want to try and fight me, you’re going to have to be in for a tough night. And I think he did that for the first goal, trying to fight me from the throw-in, and we obviously rolled him and we score.”
Well that's mostly true, except you didn't "roll" him, you stayed wrapped in Lovren's arms and watched while your unmarked team-mates did the damage. That first goal isn’t on Lovren. He’s making sure Deeney doesn’t back him in and win the flick on. He stands his ground and the ball goes over both of them. It’s hardly Lovren’s fault that the rest of our players just stand there motionless and let Watford’s runners go.
Virgil does fuck all, Fabinho does fuck all and Robbo reacts too late. So you have Doucoure running in unopposed to pick up the loose ball and Sarr running in to turn home the cross. When you watch it again you can see Will Hughes also running completely unchecked into the six yard box.
But yeah, blame Lovren. While we’re at it, let’s blame him for the front three not mustering a single fucking shot between them too. That’s twice in three games and for the record, Lovren wasn’t even on the field for the first one.
Don’t get me wrong, I was far more pissed off than I had a right to be during and after this game. So I get the emotional reactions because I was fuming as well. Really we have no right to be mad at all, but I think it was just the meek way the unbeaten record finally went that got people riled up. That being said, the scapegoating of Lovren annoyed the fuck out of me far more than the defeat did.
Firstly, let me say right at the outset just to avoid any confusion here. Lovren was shite. His performance was nowhere near the level required or the level he’s set for himself. If anyone wants to point that out then it’s completely fair. He didn’t win his battle with Deeney and he had some ropey moments in possession too. Not a good day for him at all and pointing that out is fair.
It’s the other shit that’s been flying around that is doing my head in. He is not the reason we lost. He’s one of MANY reasons why we lost and he’s far from being at the top of that list. Furthermore, he is not the reason everyone else played shite and the narrative that “he unsettled everyone” needs to stop. If you're peddling that line you're letting the others off the hook for no other reason that you don't like Lovren and would rather blame him.
On the one hand everyone talks about the ‘Mentality Monsters’ and how they can overcome anything. On the other, you’re trying to tell me that they all fell to pieces because they had to play with Big Bad Dejan instead of Joe Gomez? Ok, sure.
You know the funny thing? Lovren is actually the one player in that team who has a legitimate excuse for how he played. The fella has barely featured for months so he’s not in any kind of rhythm and he’s rusty as fuck. The last time we saw him he was stinking the place out along with Matip and Fabinho at Shrewsbury in the cup.
In contrast, the rest of the lads are playing every week and are sharp. This makes the notion that “Lovren unsettled them” even more nonsensical. Instead of being unsettled by the fella struggling because he’s rusty as fuck, how about they step up their game to help him out? That’s what should be happening here. They should be helping him through the game because he isn't match sharp.
Instead they all performed just as badly as he did, worse in some cases, yet it seems to me like it’s one man who is shouldering most of the blame. Of course the others have far more credit in the bank than he does but that shouldn’t really come into it when you’re assessing what went wrong in one particular game. They were all shite. Blame Lovren for him being shite, but don't pin the rest on him too.
The other thing that has annoyed me is people latching on to what Deeney said about him being more interested in battling him than playing the game. Has it not occurred to anyone that Lovren was battling with Deeney because that’s what he was told to do? Criticise him for not winning enough of his battles with Deeney, but don’t criticise him for wanting to battle him because that’s the whole reason why he was selected ahead of Matip.
Fun fact: Big Joel is the number three centre back, yet he was overlooked for the number four. Why would that be? Because it’s horses for courses. Had we been up against a different type of striker to Deeney then Matip would have played. Lovren was picked because he’s a more physical, aggressive type of defender and Klopp wanted him to go against Deeney.
The problem is he’s hardly played and he’s not in any kind of rhythm. It’s not easy for players to come in cold and perform to the level required to stay in this team. Gomez had his struggles earlier in the season and only hit top form after a run of games. Same with Matip last season. Lovren and Matip both looked utterly abject against Shrewsbury.
Over the last couple of years Lovren has played well when he’s had a run in the team but he’s not someone who can come in from the cold and immediately perform at his best. He’s not alone in that regard, but it does provide a problem when none of the centre backs who play alongside Virgil are any good unless they've got a run of half a dozen games behind them.
It just saddened me seeing how people reacted to us losing a game. The first loss in 14 months and instead of just shrugging it off as “one of those days” there was a rush by many to get the pitchforks out.
The truth is we’d have lost this game regardless of who partnered Van Dijk. Why am I so sure of that? Because literally every player in that team was fucking shite. Every one of them. Not a single player performed to an acceptable level.
Why was that? There are a lot of possible explanations but none of us know for sure. One thing it isn't is the absence of Henderson. I've seen that theory tossed around quite a bit but that's just as simplistic as the "It's all Lovren's fault" hot take.
Are we missing Hendo? Of course we are. He's important and we're a better team when he's in it. Is it his absence that caused everyone to stink it up at Watford? Nope. He may have helped with his leadership and drive, but we've won lots of games without Henderson before and we will do again.
So what was the cause of this loss then? Probably a culmination of things, but biggest of all is just that we've not been playing very well lately and it caught up with us. Why are we not playing well?
Complacency seems to be a popular theory. Maybe there's an element of that but I don’t think for one second the players went out there thinking “this is going to be easy”. Any complacency they felt will have been subconscious rather than conscious.
Tiredness then? Klopp dismissed that but then he would do. He's hardly going to use that as an excuse, especially after campaigning so hard for the winter break we just had. I wouldn't completely rule it out.
We certainly didn’t have the energy and spark you associate with this team, and Watford looked faster and stronger all over the park. It does concern me that the front three don’t get much rest and Trent and Robbo seem to play every single game these days. That’s bound to catch up with us at some point and all have been off the boil to varying degrees of late. The fatigue may be more mental than physical though.
To me it just looked like Watford wanted it more, because they probably did. They were first to everything and it just looked as though we went to the well one too many times and this time it was dry. We’ve been digging deep and pulling results out, only this time we just couldn’t do it.
I’m not saying our lads weren’t up for the game and didn’t want it enough but Watford just had more hunger about them than we did, which when you take everything into account is understandable. Watford are fighting for their lives. We were fighting to protect an unbeaten record. The game mattered more to them and it showed.
This is not a criticism of our boys, if anything it’s a compliment as it shows just how remarkable their efforts have been so far. There have been so many occasions when it would have been easy for them to just say “not our day, never mind, onto the next game”. They never have though. They’ve fought for everything and shown incredible levels of mental resilience in games when they haven’t been playing well.
There will always come a time when you try to dig deep and find there’s just nothing in the tank. That’s what happened. In every other game when we haven’t been playing well, they found a way. This time they couldn’t. Shit happens.
Every great team loses games from time to time, and sometimes when they do it will be a spanking like this one. It happened to all of our great teams of the past at some point (the one that sticks with me is Terry Gibson and Coventry absolutely destroying Joe Fagan’s European Champions) and it happened to the great United teams under Ferguson too.
Mourinho’s first Chelsea team were an absolute fucking machine but they suffered a heavy beating at Middlesbrough. Losing is just an occupational hazard. Thankfully it doesn’t happen to us very often these days but you can’t avoid it completely, even though often there’s no real logical explanation for it when it happens.
Realistically, Watford should not have been able to do this to the best team in the country but that’s football. Even the greatest teams in history occasionally have an off day because it’s impossible to play well every single week, game after game.
We’ve had loads of games where we haven’t played well and when you look back through history this is why almost every team that has won the league suffers four, five, six defeats along the way while often drawing between eight to twelve. What this team has done has bucked that trend. Those days when you’d normally draw or lose, they dug in and ensured it didn’t happen.
You can’t do that indefinitely though. It must be mentally exhausting. Going out there every week trying to maintain a winning run even though there are no challengers to us at the top. It has to be tough to keep that intensity going but they’ve done an incredible job with it until now.
What makes it even more difficult is they get the opponent’s best effort every week. There’s a huge bullseye on our back and everyone wanted to be the ones to take points off us or end the unbeaten run. The likes of Norwich and West Ham in recent weeks for example. Absolute shite before they played us and then all of a sudden they’re running through brick walls trying to knock us over.
Watford hadn’t won in six games before this but they come out and put in a performance like THAT? This is how it is. We get everyone’s maximum effort and therefore we always have to be right at it mentally. Our lads have been playing under that pressure all season and it’s taken until now for someone to finally overcome us.
I’ve often commented how it’s almost impossible to beat us because you need to be at your absolute best and you need us to be at our worst. Even then it’s not always enough, but it was for Watford. Credit to them, they performed brilliantly from front to back while we were wretched in every position.
When that happens you don’t really have a chance but it was always going to happen at some point because that’s football. I had hoped (but not expected) that we could get through the entire season unbeaten just to take Arsenal’s record from them, but sadly that is not to be.
What Arsenal did might never be beaten because it takes a staggering amount of luck to get through a season unbeaten. They were a fantastic side and I’m taking nothing away from them, but they drew 15 games or something, which means there were 15 occasions where they were one unlucky bounce or bad refereeing decision away from their run being ended.
Going unbeaten was an incredible achievement but it doesn’t make them better than this Liverpool team because we’ll absolutely smash their points tally. With the possibility of matching Arsenal’s undefeated season now gone, for me it’s all about beating City’s record points total now. I badly want that, because with it comes the undisputed bragging rights to being the best ever, particularly if we could add another European Cup to it.
As disappointed as the lads will be about losing, I bet subconsciously there’s an extra spring in their step now because they no longer have that unbeaten run to protect. Klopp himself said as much afterwards. We’ve been tight lately, we’re not playing free and loose and it’s all just been a massive grind. Has the record contributed to that? Who knows, but I expect they feel like a weight has been lifted now.
I’ve been saying for weeks how stressed out I am watching these games even though we’re twenty odd points clear and the title is a formality. It shouldn’t be stressful but it is, because of that record. Despite everything they’ve said publicly it has to have been on the players’ minds too, and secretly they’re probably feeling a sense of relief in with the disappointment.
I know I am, although I wasn’t on Saturday as I was in foul form. I was gutted the run had come to an end and even more gutted at the manner of it. But now, having had time to reflect, I’m not angry or upset about it. I’m grateful for the 14 months of Herculean effort put in by the players to ensure they didn’t lose any league games in that period.
Losing a game like that happens to everyone at some point because despite the nonsense being spouted about the standard this season it’s really fucking hard winning games in the Premier League. If it was easy, you wouldn’t be seeing so many of the big name teams struggling. It’s as competitive as it’s ever been because the teams at the bottom are not pushovers. We’ve won virtually every game but how many would you describe as being easy? There have been loads of tough ones in there, because like I say, winning games in this league is not as easy as it’s being made out to be.
Watford were in the bottom three both times they played against us yet they could easily have taken six points rather than just three. Only for some Benny Hill style comedy finishing at Anfield they could have ended our run that day. Sadly they were sharper in front of goal this time and made us pay.
Of course they were helped by our kamikaze defending. The first goal was schoolboy stuff, the second wasn’t much better (the two centre backs should not be allowing Sarr to run in behind them so easily) and the third…. well the third was just sloppy as fuck, but summed up Trent’s entire evening. He needs a rest because he just wasn’t there.
Mind you, I didn’t think that goal should have stood because Deeney blatantly fouled Lovren in the build up. He took him out while he was off the ground trying to head the ball away. Definite foul but I can’t say I’m particularly bothered about it because we were well beaten anyway. It did annoy me the way Shearer sneered “Get up Lovren, you’ve been pushed around by Deeney all day”.
That’s as maybe, Alan, but when you’ve got both feet off the ground jumping and you get shoved, you’re going to end up on the floor regardless of whether you’re shoved by Troy Deeney or a fucking ten year old. That’s why it’s normally a fucking free-kick, you baked bean headed tit.
So yeah, having an off day and losing badly is completely normal. What isn’t normal is going 14 months without defeat. We may well see one or two more of these type of performances and results between now and the end of the season because players are only human and we’re so far ahead it’s going to be really hard to maintain the intensity that got us there.
I’d be lying if I said I’m not a little worried. Not because we lost, but because we’re just not playing well. It seems to always happen at this time of year and any time we have an extended break we come back looking disjointed and stagnant. Usually it’s because we’ve been knocked out of the cup and had a week’s ‘warm weather training’. This time we actually had an official winter break, but the net result was the same. We’ve come back looking flat.
We’ll snap out of it and regain our form, we always do, but we’ve got that Atletico game on the horizon and we need to be at our best for that otherwise they’ll just frustrate us and it will be a long night.
What we do have going for us right now is that any wobble isn’t going to cost us in the league and we have Bournemouth at home coming up next. I’m not suggesting that will be easy or that it’s a certain three points, I’m just pointing out that if you had to hand pick our next fixture then Eddie Howe's men at Anfield would be pretty high on the list.
It’s a perfect game for us to get back on track and for me the main thing is we need to see the front three looking sharp again. Their form is worrying me more than anything else right now as it’s just not looking right. As great as they are, there are always going to be spells in a season where they did, and unfortunately it seems like they’ve all dipped at the same time because they were shite against Atletico as well.
It’s going to be interesting what happens in the cup now. A lot of fans will want to go full strength. I get that point of view but I don’t share it for a couple of reasons. Firstly, have you seen how our first eleven has been playing lately? Chelsea have problems of their own, but there’s no guarantee our regular line up goes there and wins.
Secondly, if anything some of those players look like they need to play less games, not more. I don’t want Trent or Robbo playing another ninety minutes and I’d be wary about sending out the front three again too. This is a game for Lallana, Origi, Keita, Matip, Minamino etc. Maybe one or two regulars, plus the kids like Jones, Elliott and Williams who’ve gotten us this far in the cup.
Winning the cup would be nice, but getting back on track and spanking Bournemouth is more important to me at this point because everything now needs to be geared towards being at our maximum when we face Atletico.
There’s no star man as they were all shite. Robbo was probably the least shite, but he was still shite so I can’t give him the star man. If the award is ‘least shit man’ then I guess that would be Robbo.
Team: Alisson; Alexander-Arnold, Lovren, Van Dijk, Robertson; Fabinho, Wijnaldum (Lallana), Oxlade-Chamberlain (Origi); Salah, Firmino (Minamno), Mané:
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