Andy Robertson has offered a brutal review of Liverpool’s performance against Brentford and suggested they lost their ‘fight’ at times.
The defender admits that the Reds abandoned their structure, let the Bees off the hook, and deserved to lose.
Liverpool sank to their fourth consecutive league defeat on Saturday night as they were bested 3-2 by Brentford in London, leaving them sixth in the Premier League and below Manchester United.
Their form is blowing up into a crisis, with challenging fixtures against Crystal Palace, Aston Villa, Real Madrid, and Manchester City coming up before the next international break.
Robertson, came on in the second half, told LFC TV: ‘We didn’t do enough off the ball. On the ball, first half I thought we created a couple of moments, kept the ball quite nice.
‘But you can’t come to Brentford away and just expect to play them off the park because they are always going to be ready to fight.
‘They’re always going to be ready to put bodies in the box when it comes to set-pieces, put the balls in behind, pick up second balls. You know what you’re going to come to, here. They’re always the same and they’re so good at it.
‘It felt to me like we were just a yard off it in terms of that. They picked up so many second balls, and then the balls in behind.
‘Our backline are running back to try and head the ball, which is so difficult as it is. We know how difficult… how good a set-piece team they are.
‘We’ve worked on the long-throw and everything, and five minutes in you concede three long throw-ins. One of them you concede from.
‘It’s not good enough, you play into their hands and have got an uphill battle from there. Kept fighting but nowhere near good enough.
‘You have to fight for the control. No team in the Premier League, nobody’s going to go, “On you go, you take the ball, we’ll try and defend.” Nobody does that.
‘They always have a gameplan, against us and every team. All the managers in the Premier League are so talented, especially the teams that have got a full week to prepare. They would have had a clear gameplan and I think they played theirs perfectly.
‘We didn’t play ours at all. That makes it so difficult. If you just think you’re going to show up and all of a sudden they’re going to drop off, we’re going to have control and we’ll just wait until we score. It never, ever happens.
‘This is my ninth season, I think maybe it’s only happened once or twice. If we expect that, then we’re in big bother.
‘You have to fight for that control, you have to fight first of all. You have to fight for the second balls, fight for the first balls, and try and feel your way into the game. And then the quality will come through.
‘I felt as if we never got a grip on the game at all today. Had moments but not enough moments to go and really put them under pressure.’
Liverpool went down within five minutes as they failed to deal with one of Michael Kayode’s killer long throws and Dango Ouattara put the hosts in front.
Kevin Schade doubled their lead in the 45h minute, but Milos Kerkez gave Liverpool a glimmer of hope with a strike in the fifth minute of added time – rather controversially so, as only three had been added on.
Igor Thiago converted a penalty on the hour to restore Brentford’s two-goal advantage, and though a half-volley from Mohamed Salah set up a nervy finish, Arne Slot’s side couldn’t find an equaliser.
Robertson continued: ‘Coming in at 2-1, we probably didn’t deserve it really. And you come in, ‘Okay, we’ve got a chance here. We can get back in the game. Good time to score a goal right on half-time.’
‘Come out for the second half and I thought they started the second half really well. They were the one pushing again, winning set-pieces, winning corners.
‘We didn’t push on from that. You just try and they get a penalty, whether it’s on the line, off the line, whatever.
‘But then you’re 3-1 down and it’s just about throwing bodies forward and it becomes chaotic. There’s no structure to it which is never good.
‘We get a goal, okay. We try and push and nearly score right at the end but, to be honest, if we got a draw today it would have probably flattered us.
‘We’ve got to work harder. In training, in games, recovering better. When you’re at this football club, people demand results.
‘In a difficult moment, the only way to get out of it is to work even harder, run that bit more and look after yourself that bit better. And that’s what we’ve got to do.
‘The results have been nowhere near good enough over the last five or six games. We’re the only ones who can get us out of it. We know that.
‘Starting Wednesday again, there’s no rest. There’s no time to re-group. We’ve got games, games, games. Sometimes it can be a good thing that you’ve got such a quick turnaround and we can go again.
‘But we need to start playing better and we need to start showing a lot more consistency in our game.’
