Arne Slot hasn't coached Liverpool since May. He spent Wednesday night the way he's spent most of this autumn: watching from a distance as a UEFA technical observer, nowhere near a locker room or a lineup sheet. The man who sent Liverpool into Istanbul rotated and short of urgency is Andoni Iraola, and it's his name that belongs in this conversation.
⚡ Big upset:Fenerbahçe had a 17% chance before kickoff and beat Liverpool 3–2.
17%
Iraola's own words after the 3-2 defeat to Fenerbahçe did most of the prosecuting for me. "Cheap goals. Messy goals," he said. "We conceded from a free kick, a corner, a long throw and that has hurt us. We have gone in front twice, we conceded in situations we should have definitely done better [with]. It has cost us." He's correctly diagnosing the disease. He still hasn't explained why his team keeps catching it.
This wasn't a one-off. Liverpool had already shipped three goals against both LASK and Villarreal earlier in this Champions League campaign before doing it again in Istanbul. A back line that concedes three goals in three straight continental matches has a structural problem, and structural problems come from coaching. A free kick, a corner, a long throw undid Liverpool twice in the same match. That's a team that hasn't been drilled to defend the ball when it isn't moving, and it happened against a side that had been beaten 6-0 by Aston Villa only weeks earlier and was being run by interim coach Dirk Kuyt.
Steve McManaman put his finger on the part that should worry Liverpool most. The moment the team went 2-1 up through Alexander Isak, having already watched a Trey Nyoni opener get cancelled out once, there was no sense the lead was going to hold. "When it went 2-1, you thought Liverpool would see the game out, but it became disheveled," he said, naming Alisson directly for being "all at sea" for the second and third goals. A goalkeeper exposed twice in the same half means the team in front of him offered no protection.
Iraola has already been asked the obvious question, about whether wholesale changes to his XI for this trip explain the defending, and he waved it off: "I trust the squad to sustain the level." That's the sentence I'd push back on hardest. You don't get to rotate heavily into a Champions League away game, watch the back line concede from three dead-ball situations, and then tell the room your trust in the squad is unshaken. The result says the trust was misplaced on this particular night, in this particular XI, and the man who picked it doesn't get to opt out of that verdict by restating his faith in it.
None of this erases the quality of the goals Liverpool scored, or pretends Fenerbahçe weren't good enough to win it with a header in the closing stages. They were good enough. But good enough to win doesn't mean untouchable, and a side that had just been thumped 6-0 a month earlier isn't the standard against which Liverpool should be measuring acceptable defending. Isak's goal and Nyoni's earlier strike show the attacking talent is there. What's still missing is a coach who can stop this team unraveling the moment it's asked to see out a lead.
Iraola named the disease accurately on Wednesday night. He's the only one who can write the prescription, and three games into this pattern, he hasn't started it yet.
