The pressure on Premier League footballers is admittedly massive and, right now, Dejan Lovren is understandably struggling.
Lovren endured arguably the worst game of his career on Sunday afternoon at Wembley, when he was at fault for Spurs’ opening pair of goals against Liverpool.
A naive desire to play offside against Harry Kane and then an inability to compete with the Spurs forward for the ball on the halfway line resulted in the hosts going 2-0 up within the first 12 minutes.
A visibly uncomfortable Lovren was withdrawn from the fray after 30 minutes and while there was much more wrong with the Reds’ performance than one player’s errors, much of the blame was placed on the Croatian defender’s shoulders in the aftermath of the crushing defeat.
Gary Neville slaughtered him on commentary, Graeme Souness tore him asunder in his post-match analysis and even his manager, Jurgen Klopp, took a swipe by claiming that he would have dealt with Kane better than Lovren.
“If I am involved in this situation on the pitch, then Harry cannot get the ball,” Klopp said. “It wouldn’t happen if I was on the pitch – but I am in the middle of the technical area in trainers. Each job is clear but we couldn’t do it.”
Suggestions that Lovren’s struggles were a result of an ongoing issue with injuries were dismissed by the Reds boss.
Klopp on Lovren: "He wasn't injured. We just had to change something."
— James Pearce (@JamesPearceLFC) October 22, 2017
And, on Monday morning, Lovren took some drastic measures on social media by removing any mention of Liverpool from his Instagram bio.
The 28-year-old also changed his profile picture from an image of him in Liverpool’s away shirt to a blank avatar and has disabled comments on his account.
He’s definitely struggling…
