Liverpool fans look at the Premier League table and cannot believe their eyes: their magnificent team, the one that in recent years was regularly one of the two biggest in England, the one that reached the final of the Champions League in three of the previous five seasons - is simply collapsing.
No one is talking about the championship anymore.
The gap from the leader Arsenal cannot be closed, and the biggest fear is that Liverpool will finish outside the top four and will not play next season in the Champions League.
On Monday, Liverpool lost to lowly Brentford for the first time in 85 years.
It wasn't just the loss itself - Liverpool's fifth in 17 league rounds - but the disappointing ability.
The first half was a resounding display of weakness.
Liverpool went to the locker room trailing 2:0, and when they returned for the second half Jurgen Klopp made three substitutions, including the rare relegation of Virgil van Dijk to the bench.
The German coach explained at the end that the Dutch brakeman was replaced due to muscle pain and that he did not want to take risks, but not everyone bought his explanation.
Van Dijk was simply terrible and terrible, and not for the first time this season.
It's quite amazing, especially when you remember that Van Dijk was the outstanding player in Liverpool winning the championship in 2020 and the Champions League the year before, and that many believed he should have won the Ballon d'Or in 2019 instead of Leo Messi.
"Unable"
Liverpool's weakness is also mental.
Fact: in 13 of their 26 games this season, Liverpool conceded the first goal, and in more than half of them it ended in a loss.
Alongside this, the fact that the team possessed the ball 72 percent of the time against Brentford and still lost 3:1, also indicates a lot of problems, among them the defense, which did improve in the second half, but then Brian Amboamo easily beat Ibrahima Konata on the way to the third goal.
Nunes, photo: AFP
But it's not just the defense that looks bad, but the whole team.
The link is slow and lacks creativity, and in attack Darwin Nunes continues to miss wholesale.
Liverpool paid Benfica 85 million pounds for him, and so far he has scored only five league goals. Klopp is now hoping that Cody Gakpo, the new acquisition from Eindhoven, will deliver the goods - and quickly, otherwise Liverpool's season is lost. Another acquisition? The German manager has already made it clear that an expensive player Terry would not arrive, thus removing the signing of Jude Bellingham from the episode.
Liverpool's harshest critic is its former star, Jamie Carragher: "This is no longer Jurgen Klopp's team, and I want to know why. It may be the influence of Pep Linders, Klopp's Dutch assistant. Perhaps it is a Dutch mentality, which wants the players They will hold the ball more. Klopp's Liverpool have always been a team that runs all over the pitch, that presses non-stop. This is what gave them the edge over their opponents.
"Now the situation has turned around. As the intensity of the game increases, Liverpool can't keep up. They prefer slower football. Throughout the season they have a problem against teams that play physical football. It's quite amazing, but Liverpool has regretted its flag in recent years that intensity is its identity - and now they are unable to deal with intensity. The feeling is of an aging group that is reaching the end of its journey."
A curse and a legend
And maybe there is something else here.
It's not the first time Liverpool talk about the "curse of the seventh season", although Klopp strongly rejects the comparisons with what happened to him in his two previous teams.
He began his coaching career in 2001 in Mainz, which he promoted to the first division in Germany.
After seven seasons he left, when Mainz returned with him to the second division and he was unable to raise it again.
In 2008 he arrived at Dortmund, and within two years he marched it to two great championships and an appearance in the Champions League final.
But in the seventh season, everything collapsed.
Dortmund started the 2014-15 season with seven losses in the first 10 rounds and found themselves in 17th place.
She later recovered, but still finished the season only in 7th place, 33 points away from the champion Bayern Munich and without the ticket to the Champions League.
There were of course reasons for the collapse: the stars Robert Lewandowski and Mario Getze moved to Bayern Munich, and there were quite a few injuries.
But the main reason was the mental and physical exhaustion of the players, who in the previous years gave 120 percent in every game, as Klopp demanded of them.
There are many who claim that this is exactly what is happening to Liverpool now.
She won only 8 out of 17 league games this season, less than 50 percent.
She has already lost five times, while in all of last season she lost only twice.
The "Mighty Reds" have already lost 23 points at this point - compared to only 22 all last season (38 games).
Klopp has long since become a legend at Anfield.
However this season ends and however he ends up at the club, he is one of the greatest, alongside Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley.
But the feeling is that this is more than a crisis that will pass, more than a less successful season, but something that may accompany Liverpool for years.
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