Neil Atkinson’s post-match review for The Anfield Wrap after Liverpool 0 Nottingham Forest 1 in the 2024-2025 Premier League season…
It’s the poorest Liverpool performance at Anfield in the league since October 2022 against Leeds Utd.
It takes two to tango. Leeds that day were a side on the march to relegation. Nottingham Forest are not that. They had a game plan and executed it to perfection.
But the truth of the whole thing is that aspects of the Nottingham Forest gameplan too easily matched Liverpool in the moment. Get to the hour mark and make attacking changes – check. Frustrate them, do their heads in, they’ll be in a hurry – check. Hurt them when it gets stretched – check. What they may not have planned for was “and when you do score the whole thing will fall to absolute pieces” but check, check, check.
There’s more than just the tactical way to set a football team and get a result. The mental and physical plays a part and Nuno deserves massive credit for anticipating Liverpool’s shortcomings on both counts.
Liverpool, for walking into rake after carefully laid rake, do not.
The side that deserved the points has them and there is no hiding from that.
Liverpool were poor for an hour. And then they made three changes and they were far, far worse. I don’t blame any of the three subs for that in and of themselves, though I think Cody Gakpo should take a yellow on Anthony Elanga in the run up to the goal. Part of the reason why I don’t blame the three subs is that in making them Liverpool actually make five changes to their outfield. They change 50% of their outfield.
The subs were clearly programmed with Tuesday in mind. And “with Tuesday in mind” is a massive part of why Liverpool have fallen at Obstacle 2 of the gauntlet that is this season. Obstacle 2 was how it works when it is two games in four days and here we can say – it works poorly.
Nuno anticipated it and built a plan that involved playing a 35 -minute game. Liverpool engaged in that 35-minute game by moving from being poor for an hour to being appalling for 35 minutes.
For every manager that comes into this league at the upper echelons, the question is what do you do when the fixtures intensify? What do you do when the 13th best team in the country have attackers capable of playing Champions League football in most others including, as squad players, this one? Because let’s be clear – Hudson-Odoi, Elanga, Gibbs-White and, yes, Chris Wood could play a role in Champions League squads across the continent.
And what do you do when those two states cross over? What is your move then? Obstacle 2, Sub-Obstacle 1 and Liverpool look like a 100-1 shot dealing with Becher’s Brook and The Chair.
There isn’t time for this. And there isn’t justification either. It is not Virgil van Dijk, Mo Salah or Trent Alexander-Arnold’s first rodeo. It isn’t the first rodeo of any of these players really but it is worth pointing out, as the manager did do in 2022, they couldn’t go on both fronts.
It is also worth pointing out though that the issue with a more patient style of play is that the upside is meant to be that you get in a groove and stay in it, but a downside is what happens when a grain of sand gets in the machinery – what happens to the groove then? Liverpool today eroded each other, ground against one another. Every ten minutes saw every outfield player play worse with the possibility of Ryan Gravenberch and Ibou Konate being exceptions.
In part because Nuno arranged a Nottingham Forest team to be that grain of sand. But in part because the crispness, coolness and sharpness of the previous 5 halves of football was replaced by a soggy, warm bluntness. Forest beat Liverpool but my god did Liverpool help.
The referee was terrible. Don’t care. The time-wasting was ridiculous. Don’t care. The scoreboard drove them mad. Don’t care. The job is the job. The irony of picking an unchanged eleven with pre-programmed subs which serves that performance up is that it suggests somewhere a decision has been made that Tuesday is the bigger game. Tuesday is not the bigger game. They are all big games and it is this to which we have signed up.
No transitional seasons, no hiding places, no hint of wanting it to be easy. This has been the job so far and has been the message. Like most swords actually are, that is double-edged.
Today wasn’t good enough. Not good enough in tactics and selection. Not good enough in terms of substitutions. Not good enough in terms of individual performances. Not good enough in terms of mentality. Not good enough on minute 30, worse on minute 60 and abysmal by minute 90.
Forest come away from it worthy of respect and praise but the truth is they will almost certainly finish in the bottom half. To be clear – the side that wins this league will win the most games against sides that will finish in the bottom half, home and away. The side that finishes second will win the second most. And third the third most. The challenge is partially Old Trafford and the San Siro. But the challenge is massively this and the challenge is believing everything can change when the scoreboard says 85 minutes.
You can have one of these. Liverpool have lashed theirs in early. Not again.
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It’s a worry that Slot made no changes given the international break, worrying that he was at a complete loss to work out how to respond to Forest’s game plan, and in the end made things worse with his substitutions. Early days of course but he needs to recover from this setback on Tuesday.
My young lad had a hurling match so I couldn’t follow what was going on but every report – and no doubt this one is bang on – paints a pretty grim picture. It’s only one game though. One thing that does mildly concern me is that while I don’t think Arne is arrogant, his very Dutch directness might need to be replaced with a little circumspection. Like everyone else I revelled in toasting Man U, but maybe he didn’t need to be quite so explicit afterwards about how we did it. A few non-answer answers post-match might be required.