It is not the first time Liverpool have come to Istanbul looking for unlikely salvation. There is not a final on the line as there was 21 years ago, but a last-16 tie against Galatasaray feels almost as decisive for their season and possibly for the long-term future of Arne Slot, even as he marks his 100th game as manager.
It’s not even the first time Liverpool have come to Istanbul this season: their 1-0 reverse against Galatasaray in September was their second loss in a run of nine defeats in 12 games from which their season has never recovered. They are in much better form now, but will be without Alisson after he suffered a minor problem in training.
“He felt something towards the end of the session,” said Slot. “We looked at it and we decided it wasn’t good enough to play tomorrow so no use in travelling.” Giorgi Mamardashvili will deputise, with Freddie Woodman on the bench.
This has been a muted defence of their Premier League title but, as Liverpool found last season, how you play in the group stage of the Champions League doesn’t necessarily mean all that much when it comes to the real business of the knockouts. Istanbul may outrank every foreign city other than perhaps Rome in Liverpool’s mythology but, despite lifting two trophies, they have never actually won a match here (at least without recourse to penalties).
Their only win in Turkey in nine attempts came against Trabzonspor in a Europa League playoff in August 2010. And while Galatasaray’s second-half collapse against a 10-man Juventus in the playoff round showed their vulnerability, the 5-2 win in the first leg was an indication of just how dangerous they can be going forward.
Victor Osimhen, in particular, will provide just the sort of physical test for Virgil van Dijk and Ibrahima Konaté that they have struggled against this season. As well as the penalty against Liverpool in the league phase, the Nigeria striker has scored 11 league goals this season, but his game is about far more than that; he’s also a great leader of the line, holding the ball up and creating space for others and, as Slot said, represents a serious threat on the break. “We know how good he is,” said Slot. “But Osimhen is not the only one who is a really good player and our centre-backs have already played against him.”
At 27, the reason he’s not playing at a higher level has little to do with football: his wage demands were seen as excessive, particularly for a player with a history of fitness problems who, thanks to his acrimonious departure from Napoli, has a reputation, perhaps not entirely justified, for being high maintenance.
The atmosphere will be a factor, with Slot admitting he had been taken aback by the noise in September. “We’ve experienced it already once now,” he said. “For us it was new. When you have the ball, the whistling is so loud, so loud, that was new for me and even for all of my experienced players.”
That game was the archetype of the sort of performance that has become troublingly familiar for Liverpool since. The biggest change Slot made after replacing Jürgen Klopp was to slow the game down, protecting the ball a little more, not pressing with quite the same ferocity. Under Klopp, Liverpool’s average number of possessions in each game never dropped below 90; under Slot they’re in the low 80s. That’s not a judgment of quality but of style.
Slot’s search for control last season allowed Liverpool to sit on two-goal leads. This season, though, the more patient approach seems often to have brought indecisiveness. The problem seems entwined with summer recruitment; a team that had played regularly together could still interact quickly enough to threaten despite the desire to retain possession a little more; a raft of newcomers feeling their way could not – a problem acknowledged by Alexis Mac Allister.
Add in diminished confidence and the result is the sort of hesitancy that undermined Liverpool in their league defeat by Wolves last Tuesday.
“We have a lot of ball possession but don’t create so many chances,” Slot said. “Creating chances is not something that’s happening a lot these days. It’s also a trend in football. Teams are organised more and more in a similar style, whether man-to-man all over the pitch or dropping into a low block, not with seven or eight but with 11. We’ve been working on it; we’re scoring from set pieces. One way to break sides down is to generate a lot of set pieces.”
Liverpool are still in the FA Cup, where they face a daunting trip to Manchester City in the quarter-finals. They still have the battle to finish in the top five of the Premier League, and so qualification for next season’s Champions League to deal with. But the only way to rescue this season from a profound sense of anticlimax is to make a proper challenge in the Champions League. And that begins in Istanbul on Tuesday.
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