Published: 12:00, 27 October 2025 | Updated: 12:00, 27 October 2025

It's open season on the defending champions now and the manner of their loss at Brentford has alarms going off left, right and centre.

Wayne Rooney, speaking on his BBC podcast, has questioned the body language of Liverpool's totems, Virgil van Dijk and Mo Salah, and claimed if he was Arne Slot or a fan of the team, 'I'd be very worried' about what is currently playing out.

Certainly, the fact van Dijk has ended the last two Premier League matches deployed as a makeshift centre-forward gives the impression that Liverpool have run out of tactical ideas and that will hurt Slot, whose tactical tweaks and substitutions in his first year were a huge reason they won the title.

What should really concern everyone at Anfield now, though, is the fact the late goals the team scored at the beginning of the season now appear to be a mask. We lauded them at the time, hailed them as 'mentality monsters' but were they just lucky?

Frame it another way: without Federico Chiesa and...