Arne Slot is going through a difficult patch here. But if he's not to blame for it, it must be one other man.
Liverpool dropped points at home to Tottenham Hotspur on Sunday and they fully deserved to. The Reds were awful against an opponents where three points should have been routine.
Spurs, after all, are a rotten team. Just about everything that could go wrong with them has done but Liverpool made them look like a fair match.
So what does that say?
The pressure is on Arne Slot, naturally, as he's the one in charge of how the team plays. Liverpool have been poor all season long, in truth, and some patches have been even worse than this.
There's a real danger of falling into the UEFA Conference League the way things are going, as Dominik Szoboszlai pointed out post-match. And yet, many remain convinced that Slot isn't the problem.
Well if he's not, we know who is.
Slot was given a group of players to work with this summer. It came after a mass overhaul as the club spent more money than at any other point in its history.
But that spend hasn't worked. It means two things are possible: Slot isn't able to get enough from this squad, or the squad built for him was not good enough.
And if it's the latter? Well, that's an extraordinary mishandling of £400m. It would truly be the most incompetent job of anyone in Liverpool's history.
Something has to give here. Perhaps the plan is to simply try again in the summer but the people involved haven't exactly given a reason to believe that it'll work this time around.
Liverpool are absolutely miles off where they should be. Even their league position is better than it probably should be, with them surviving on some swing results at the start of the campaign and an overall lack of quality at the top of the table.
We want to see serious change, one way or another. Because Sunday was genuinely shocking - but also expected.
