Virgil van Dijk screaming and Arne Slot berating the referee just as baselessly, Mohamed Salah gazing skyward as rain lashed down—the closing moments at the Vitality Stadium on Saturday told its own story.
Bournemouth had struck at the death, and Liverpool’s season lurched back down the hill. A game that began with hope ended in chaos, and the symbolism was hard to ignore: a team once defined by certainty now looks brittle, predictable, and short of answers.
The Game That Exposed Liverpool’s Fault Lines
This was no ordinary defeat. It was Liverpool’s first in 11 league matches, in 14 in all competitions, but the manner of it—the defensive frailty, the lack of attacking imagination, the exhaustion—felt like a warning siren. For all the optimism generated by a polished Champions League win in Marseille days earlier, this was a sobering reminder that there is plenty wrong at Arne Slot’s Liverpool. And the problems run deeper than one bad afternoon.
Bournemouth were everything Liverpool were not: energetic, inventive, and fearless. Andoni Iraola’s side absorbed early pressure, then sliced through Liverpool with long passes that exposed a fragile left flank. Milos Kerkez looked lost, Van Dijk looked leggy, and Joe Gomez—making his first league start at centre-back since December 2024—was undone by misfortune and hesitation.
Evanilson’s opener came after Van Dijk’s lazy leg failed to cut out a lofted ball. Álex Jiménez doubled the lead during a chaotic spell when Liverpool played seven minutes with ten men because Gomez, injured in a collision with Alisson, couldn’t be substituted quickly enough, and that was strange in itself as Slot screamed for his unhearing players to kick the ball out of play.
Van Dijk’s header before half-time offered hope, and Salah’s clever backheel to Dominik Szoboszlai for a stunning free-kick equalizer in the 80th minute seemed to flip the script. At 2-2, the Liverpool of old would have surged to victory. Instead, they wilted.
The winner, deep into stoppage time, was a calamity of errors: a long throw, a scramble, a rebound off the post, and Amine Adli squeezing the ball home….
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