What goes up must come down.
Much of the talk among Liverpool fans this season centred around the improvement shown by Alberto Moreno.
Moreno, who had previously been seen as a perpetual liability, had looked like one of the Reds’ more composed defenders this term and manager Jurgen Klopp even spoke to the club’s official website this very week to claim that he’d “never had something like” Moreno’s recent upswing.
Well whether the pressure of Klopp’s compliments or the recent sleepless nights due to his newborn son got to Moreno, he certainly reverted to form on Tuesday night.
The left back, who’d recently been called up the Spanish squad for the first time in three years, had an evening to forget when Liverpool threw away a three-goal lead against Moreno’s former side Sevilla in the Champions League group stage.
The 25-year-old gave away the free kick which led to Wissam Ben Yedder finding a way back into the game for the La Liga outfit before Moreno found himself at sixes and sevens before Sevilla were awarded a penalty.
Klopp quickly removed Moreno from the fray but the pressure had already mounted at that point and the Reds conceded a 90th-minute equaliser.
And it will come as no surprise to anyone that Roy Keane, who was always a stickler for perfection when captain of Manchester United, has absolutely savaged the full back in his analysis of Liverpool’s capitulation.
“What he’s doing for the penalty, you wouldn’t see a child doing it. It’s pure madness for an international player to do that,” Keane said whilst on punditry duty for ITV.
“You look at the free kick he gave away, that’s nothing to do with the manager. This has nothing to do with team shape or mentality.
“I know it’s a team game, but sometimes you have to point the finger and say ‘you’re killing us, you’re costing us’.”
They'll win a lot of football matches, but when it comes to the big games they'll come up short." – Roy Keane discusses @LFC pic.twitter.com/WuSAyVhhtv
— ITV Football (@itvfootball) November 22, 2017
We’ve seen two sides to Liverpool this season – the scintillating attack and the leaky defence, and Keane went on to insist that the team simply doesn’t have what it takes to challenge for a trophy because of its shortcomings.
He said: “Liverpool will win a lot of football matches, but when it comes to the big games they’re going to come up short because they’ve got a couple of defenders who just aren’t good enough and they’ll always get found out.”
