‘You can’t deny it’: Rio Ferdinand wants people to consider one problem at Liverpool right now

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Rio Ferdinand says ‘you can’t deny’ one fact about the injury crisis at Liverpool right now. The Reds are seriously struggling.

Rio Ferdinand weighted in on Liverpool’s form this season and their serious struggles in the Premier League. The Reds can’t string wins together and continue to falter away from home.

In fact, Liverpool haven’t won away from Anfield in the Premier League. It’s a worrying statistic and one that came to the forefront after the 1-0 defeat at Nottingham Forest on Saturday.

But Ferdinand thinks people should cut Liverpool some slack. They’re going through an injury crisis that would affect anyone, he says. Except maybe Manchester City.

“One thing I would say in defence of Liverpool, is that their squad has been decimated by injuries,” he told his FIVE YouTube channel. “They’ve got a lot of players injured, you can’t deny it.

“Trent [Alexander-Arnold] would have played [at the weekend], Thiago would have played, [Ibou] Konaté or [Joel] Matip would have played, [Jordan] Henderson would have played, [Darwin] Nunez would play, [Luis] Diaz would have played.

“Any other team has five of their first-team and, by the way, probably another four subs as well, out. Every other team, probably bar Man City, are probably limping.”

The injury crisis at Liverpool

Liverpool aren’t performing even with their best XI at the moment. This is a squad built around Jurgen Klopp’s 4-3-3 system but poor results forced the boss to abandon it.

And so the real problem is that Klopp can’t build anything new. Every time he tries something new, someone drops out and makes finding a new plan almost impossible.

You take the new 4-4-2 for instance. The original idea was for pace all over the place, with a deeper striker playing behind pace up top and wide players who wanted to run in behind.

Diogo Jota, Luis Diaz and Darwin Nunez all missed the game at the weekend with injuries. It meant Mohamed Salah was really the only pace in the team – a completely different situation than Klopp intended with the system. He couldn’t quite get it to work with the players he had.

That pace problem continues even with Nunez’s return, but we do think there’s a fix. It’s a fix that, along with everything else, only works if players can stay fit, however.