Liverpool running out of wriggle room and Salah’s struggles are not helping

Form is a very fragile thing. Last autumn Mohamed Salah was playing perhaps as well as he ever had. His goal at Chelsea on 2 January was his 23rd in the Premier League and Champions League combined. Since when he has scored just 10 times, only seven of them from open play. It’s true that on Saturday he nearly won the Merseyside derby late on, his shot coming back off Jordan Pickford’s near post, but for him this was another disappointing afternoon. In isolation, perhaps, it wouldn’t draw the attention, but the pattern is clear.

It’s not just Salah. Liverpool as a whole have been short of their familiar level. None of Virgil van Dijk, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Jordan Henderson and Fabinho have been anywhere near their best. Van Dijk especially, a player who for a time had seemed almost invincible, impossible to dribble past, seems not to have recovered from the chasing Aleksandar Mitrovic gave him on the opening Saturday of the season, and could easily have been sent off against Everton for his foul on Amadou Onana.

Context, as ever, is required. This may be Liverpool’s worst start to a Premier League campaign under Jürgen Klopp, but they have still lost only once, and they did win the Community Shield. They are the joint-second highest scorers in the division (although ideally you wouldn’t be bundling 60% of those goals into one game against Bournemouth). They have still lost only three times this year – one of those a second leg when they still advanced, and another the Champions League final. If this is a crisis, it’s the sort of crisis most clubs would dream of.

But recent history suggests that title winners achieve a points total in the mid-90s. How many points can you afford to drop? 15? 18? 20? Liverpool have already