5 Conclusions from Liverpool 1-2 Man United: Panicking Liverpool rattle themselves into crisis

 Manchester United and Ruben Amorim edge away from crisis after a red-letter day at Anfield, while Liverpool plunge themselves deep into the mire

A damaging defeat for Liverpool in more ways than one has left Arsenal looking more compelling Premier League favourites than ever, and leaves Man City as for now their likeliest and potentially quite soon only rivals.

For Amorim, the gift of time. This was a win that dispels all sack talk, for at least a week.

Let’s get into it.

1. And there, almost a year into the job, it is. Ruben Amorim wins back-to-back Premier League games for the first time.

Whimsy out of the way, let us now seriously consider what this means. At the start of this weekend Amorim was locked in a two-horse Sack Race with Ange Postecoglou. Postecoglou didn’t make it beyond Saturday afternoon, but Amorim has just bought himself considerable time.

This was a wild and ridiculous game, to the point that one could argue it doesn’t necessarily mean anything in the grand scheme. Not everything means anything. Sometimes it’s just a bunch of stuff that happened. And at Anfield, a great big bunch of stuff happened.

But in a frenzied and chaotic football match, United produced the majority of the composed and sane football and were good value for the win that looked to have escaped their grasp before Harry Maguire rose highest to head home the winner and leave Gary Neville and everyone else thoroughly spent.

United are now two points behind Liverpool and a whisker away from fully handing over the crisis club mantle after winning a game some (okay, we) had dubbed El Crisico. United still require a greater number of less emotional and outlandish victories to prove there is something sustainable here, but while this isn’t a result that buys Amorim three years it is one that buys him a significant amount of time in which to work. At least until next week’s inevitable back-to-earth-with-a-bump home defeat to Brighton, anyway.

2. For Liverpool, the crisis is no longer mini. If that sounds dramatic, it is nobody’s fault but theirs. They crisised themselves here with their frankly absurd approach to a second half of a game that remained very much there to be won – or at least not lost – by more conventional methods.

Liverpool gave the game away – in every sense – with their breakneck, chaos-strewn approach to the second half. Every single one of the last 30 minutes was played like it was the last, and while we suppose Liverpool’s record in injury-time means there is some logic to playing more of the game as if it was in fact injury-time, it did all just look a little bit mad.

Even if it had worked here – and had Cody Gakpo’s astonishingly interesting game in front of goal not ended with a header sent impossibly wide when a second equaliser appeared certain then it may well have done – it would still have ceded the title advantage further toward Arsenal.

While the Gunners go about their business for now in a composed and thoroughly sustainable manner, Liverpool have become a team for whom the Hail Mary has become too regular and too early a choice from the playbook.

3. There can be no doubt that Arne Slot is under pressure like never before at Liverpool after a third straight league defeat and fourth in all, and one in which his part can be significantly questioned. There was barely an hour on the clock when he went to a sh*t-or-bust 4-2-4 formation in which Florian Wirtz was, at least theoretically, one of the two central midfielders.

That is not a play a title-winning team is making when one goal down with 30 minutes remaining at home against a mid-table team that had conceded 11 goals in its first seven league games of the season.

If there was one word to describe Liverpool and their manager and their star players here it was this: rattled. From quite literally the very first minute.

It is not a word generally linked to serious title contenders.

4. And the worst thing for Liverpool is who the most rattled players were. It is not even particularly mischievous to suggest the two worst players on the pitch today were Virgil van Dijk and Mo Salah.

The two players more responsible than perhaps any others for the success the club has enjoyed over recent years both had absolute stinkers in the worst possible fixture.

5. Van Dijk’s day to forget began in the very first minute. He made not one, not two, but three individual errors in the immediate build-up to United’s opening goal. Four if you count colliding with team-mate Alexis Mac Allister.

A poor headed clearance and clattering of Bryan Mbeumo (and Mac Allister) was followed by a tackle attempt that registered as weak-to-non-existent on the tackle-ferocity-o-meter, and then a gentle jog back towards the escalating trouble in front of Liverpool’s goal as he let Mbeumo run beyond him while airily suggesting to Ibrahima Konate that he might like to deal with this unpleasantness, please.

It was a string of uncharacteristic errors from a man who has been the most reliable of all Liverpool players for so long now, but on whose 34-year-old shoulders Liverpool have placed a frankly irresponsible level of faith and expectation across this long and in theory multi-competition season.