‘Hard to watch’ – Lewis Steele highlights one stat which sums up Liverpool’s ‘truly sorry’ season | OneFootball

Lewis Steele has lamented Liverpool as ‘hard to watch’ this season and highlighted an alarming statistic which sums up how ‘sorry’ their Premier League title defence has been.

A year ago this weekend, the Reds secured a dramatic last-gasp win at Brentford to move onto 51 points, seven more than second-placed Arsenal at the time, en route to being crowned champions.

After today’s 1-1 draw at home to Burnley, Arne Slot’s side have accrued just 36 points and sit fourth in the table, 13 behind the table-topping Gunners as of 5pm this evening, and are mainly preoccupied with trying to salvage Champions League qualification.

Steele laments Liverpool as ‘hard to watch’

In reflecting on this afternoon’s pitiful result, with Liverpool held by the Clarets despite having 32 shots to the visitors’ seven, Steele drew a frightening comparison to highlight how much worse off the Reds are now compared to 12 months ago.

He posted on X: ‘Liverpool 17 points worse off than this time last season, and would need to win every game from here to match last season’s total points tally. A truly sorry title defence. Mitigating circumstances I know but Arne Slot’s football has been hard to watch for months now.’

(Photo by Dan Istitene/Getty Images)

Liverpool’s drop-off has been frightening

Incredibly, as Steele highlighted, the maximum number of points on which Liverpool can finish this term is 84, the tally with which they cruised to the Premier League title last year.

Obviously it’s unrealistic in the extreme to expect 16 successive wins from here, especially after drawing four matches in a row, and the Reds may yet be left praying that – as it was in 2025 – fifth place in the English top flight will be enough to qualify for next season’s Champions League.

League table aside, Slot’s style of play has come under severe scrutiny in recent weeks, with the Merseysiders all too often lacking a cutting edge in the final third. The absences of Mo Salah and Alexander Isak haven’t helped, but one goal from 32 shots today is simply embarrassing.

Even compared to the first few weeks of this campaign, when Liverpool frequently came up with decisive late goals to earn vital points, there was a sense of desperation rather than inevitability about the failure to net a winning goal this afternoon.

In the end, moments such as Dominik Szoboszlai’s missed penalty and Ibrahima Konate being unable to get across quicker to Marcus Edwards came back to haunt the Reds, who were greeted with pockets of boos at the final whistle today.

With Manchester United and Chelsea both winning, it’s been a horrific day all round for LFC, who can’t afford too many more of them if they’re to even finish inside the top five this season.