{"id":929568,"date":"2026-10-11T23:50:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-11T23:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/929568\/"},"modified":"2026-10-11T23:50:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-11T23:50:12","slug":"winless-and-an-easy-touch-whats-happened-to-the-anfield-fear-factor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/929568\/","title":{"rendered":"Winless and an ‘easy touch’ – what’s happened to the Anfield fear factor?"},"content":{"rendered":"

While Liverpool<\/a> have won twice on their travels this season, they now sit ninth in the league – and their main issue seems fairly clear.<\/p>\n

They have scored just seven goals this season – just twice at Anfield – and only seven teams have managed fewer.<\/p>\n

It was early on in the first half when the cameras panned to Alexander Isak, Cody Gakpo and Dominik Szoboszlai in the Main Stand at Anfield – all three of them were out with injuries.<\/p>\n

Among them, the trio have scored six of Liverpool<\/a>‘s seven league goals this season and on a day when Man City’s attack showed their class, Liverpool<\/a> didn’t show any quality in the final third.<\/p>\n

City (16) have scored more than double the goals Liverpool<\/a> (7) have scored this season in the top flight.<\/p>\n

Across three league games at Anfield this season, Liverpool<\/a> have failed to score in two of them. That must improve.<\/p>\n

In Isak’s absence, Lewis Koumas put in a great shift. However, the 21-year-old lacks that killer edge in front of goal at this level. <\/p>\n

The focus must fall on Florian Wirtz and Bradley Barcola. It is this kind of game where you need a match-winning moment and neither showed anywhere near the quality that is expected when you have a price tag of over \u00a3100m. <\/p>\n

There was one moment at 0-0 in the 55th minute when Wirtz had Milos Kerkez and Barcola in acres of space to his left, but chose to shoot and fired wide.<\/p>\n

“You learn a lot in games like today,” Iraola said. “I am very proud of my players. They put the work rate and everything in today. It’s a loss and we didn’t get anything from the performance but I liked it a lot.”<\/p>\n

But deep down, Iraola will know there is a lot of work to do and getting the big money signings to deliver will be high on his agenda.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While Liverpool have won twice on their travels this season, they now sit ninth in the league –…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":929569,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":["post-929568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=929568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929568\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/929569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=929568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=929568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=929568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}