Liverpool's defensive CRISIS has sunk to a new low

Liverpool have been all over the place defensively this season, and normally you can point to some of the usual culprits and look at how open the midfield was for potential explanations.

In the 4-1 defeat to PSV on Wednesday night in the Champions League, the Reds were given another harsh reminder of just how far off the pace the team is compared to the team around them. In spite of the sheer amount of quality within Arne Slot's squad, the performances are far from good enough.

In the Dutchman's own words, it's really confusing to see why there's such an enormous disconnect.

The four goals from the visitors at Anfield made it 10 goals conceded in Liverpool's last three games, and it's impossible to not look at the defence as the major weak point in the side. Previously, we've put Milos Kerkez, Conor Bradley and Ibrahima Konate under the microscope for their mistakes; this time, Virgil Van Dijk delivered a performance to forget, which perfectly illustrated everything.

Van Dijk falls into the trap

While it's clear that Van Dijk hasn't been faultless in Liverpool's nine losses this season, he's normally delivering performances that you can take a lot of positives from. Yesterday, he didn't.

The stats suggest that he wasn't quite as bad as you might think - winning his only tackle, making five recoveries, and winning six of his 10 duels. He also created a chance, making eight accurate long balls, and hitting the woodwork once from one of his five shots. His efforts were admirable.

But the opening goal from PSV - which came in just six minutes - was entirely his fault, and the fact that he attempted to argue to the referee about his error, which led to the penalty, was shameless.

It's said that Van Dijk felt slight contact on him, which wasn't enough to lead to a foul, but the offence couldn't be more obvious. It's the text-book example of a handball. It's unimaginable that a defender would have their hand up in the air so blatantly as he did. It must've been a lack of awareness and focus about what he was doing. So early into the contest, it was a catastrophic error to have made.

Of course, a lot of the captains' performance was fine. But the mistake unfortunately set the tone.

When you're coming off the back of eight defeats in 11 games, and you've only comeback from 1-0 down in one of those games, then it's imperative that you start on the front foot. Within just a few minutes, that game plan had to be abandoned because of Van Dijk's error. And from that point, it's panic stations within the team and across the fanbase. There's a great fragility to the situation.

According to OptaJoe, the Reds' defeat to PSV sunk the team to the worst 12-game period the club has experienced since November 1953 to January 1954, also nine losses. More unwanted history.

It's incredibly admirable that Van Dijk speaks for his team in the media, and tries to rally the fanbase behind his teammates, but the myth of leading by example is now also starting to fade. We can all get over his performance tonight, because the Dutchman so rarely puts a foot wrong for his team.

And the team can, and will, do better in future. This run - albeit a long one - is just a period of bad form, but we've got to reflect on where each game went wrong. This time around, it was Van Dijk.

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