Liverpool Were So Poor in the First-Half Against Nottingham Forest | OneFootball

Anyone who watched the match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at the City Ground on Sunday will have been struck by just how poor the Reds were in the first 45 minutes. Although things improved slightly, which is why we were able to escape with a 1-0 win, if the home side had gone in 2-0 to the good at the break, few people would have been able to complain.

It isn’t the first time that Arne Slot’s men have looked off the pace come the half-time interval, but is it the first time that it’s happened when there has been at least a sense of a reason behind why it happened? Or was it a poor performance with no excuse?

Florian Wirtz’s Absence

In the buildup to kick-off at the City Ground, news emerged from the Liverpool dressing room that Florian Wirtz was going to have to be replaced in the starting XI. Curtis Jones was brought in to replace him, but the German’s absence was always going to be felt by those on the pitch. One of the major criticisms levelled at the Reds by many on social media was that they had had a week to prepare for the match, yet seemed to be taken by surprise by what happened. It is worth bearing in mind that the entire week will have seen the team prepping for the game to go through Wirtz, so his absence made said preparations redundant.

On the one hand, you would be entirely within your rights to suggest that depending so heavily on one man is not good news for a team that is looking to get into the Champions League places and, hopefully, get back to winning the title next season. Yet it is also worth pointing out that it wasn’t his absence alone that caused us problems, so much as it was the late notice that he wasn’t going to be able to play. He felt something in the warm-up that took place as kick-off approached, so it threw all plans into the bin. Jones, meanwhile, had played right-back in his last appearance, so it isn’t shocking that he didn’t seem his normal self either.

Forest Put Everything into the First-Half

One of the things that football fans so often seem to forget is that other teams have agency. For their part, Nottingham Forest knew that they would run out of gas the longer the match went on, thanks to the fact that they had played in Turkey on the Thursday night, winning 3-0 against Fenerbahçe in the Europa League. That, combined with the arrival of Vítor Pereira as manager and the desire of the players to prove themselves to the new manager, meant that they were always likely to come out of the blocks quickly. As much as Liverpool should’ve expected that, it didn’t help alongside Wirtz’s unplanned absence.

That is to say, they played really well in the opening 45 minutes at a time when the Reds were still trying to figure out how to get the best out of the team that actually took to the pitch. Should Jones or Alexis Mac Allister carry out the role that Wirtz had been earmarked for? How would we best get the ball to Hugo Ekitike in the absence of the German, with whom he has struck up an excellent relationship in recent weeks? None of which is to say that we played well, we definitely didn’t, but it might help to explain some of why the players seemed to be so out of sorts the more that the first-half wore on.

The Players Were Slow to Get Going

None of which is to suggest that Liverpool played well. The first-half of the game was up there with one of the worst of recent years, with only Virgil van Dijk and Ibrahima Konaté emerging with any real credit, perhaps alongside Milos Kerkez. It wouldn’t be a massive shock to learn that Arne Slot had suggested we just needed to take the sting out of the game in the opening period, which would have been the right approach. Yet, when players don’t seem to be able to make a basic pass, the idea of starting slow is one that can soon look to be entirely the wrong way to go about proceedings.

  View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Everton Daz Efc (@evertondaz)

Alisson Becker, who is having maybe his worst campaign to date, kicked the ball out of play once under no pressure, then straight to a Forest player the next minute, which just about summed up our start to the match. There are many Liverpool supporters who have decided that Arne Slot isn’t good enough, in spite of the fact that he won the Premier League title last season, so they laid the blame squarely at the manager’s door. Weirdly, those same people don’t seem to be all that keen to praise the Dutchman for the manner in which the Reds improved after the break, when he was able to issue them with some instructions.