A performance that left nobody with anything nice to say

There are bad days at Anfield, and then there are days like this. A goalless draw at home to a Fulham side who had not won a match all season is the kind of result that stops conversations dead. Liverpool were disjointed, error-prone and, by most accounts, genuinely difficult to watch. The groans inside the ground grew louder as the afternoon wore on, supporters filtered out before the final whistle, and the national media were left with plenty of material to work with.

Paul Joyce in The Times captured the mood precisely. Noting a moment in the first half when Dominik Szoboszlai stood with his arms outstretched, apparently pleading for guidance from the dugout, Joyce wrote that it was that sort of afternoon, "no one on the same page, wavelengths scrambled, a £364million attack rendered impotent and struggling to make any impression amid a collective malaise." He also flagged a statistic that will make uncomfortable reading for those inside the club: Liverpool have won only four of their last 12 top-flight home matches. For a side with genuine ambitions, that is a number that demands attention.

The midweek winners and the weekend impostors

James Sharpe of the Daily Mail drew the sharpest contrast between the side that beat Atlético Madrid in the Champions League on Wednesday evening and the one that shuffled through ninety minutes against Fulham three days later. His verdict was blunt: "This was a leggy, sloppy, uncertain Liverpool. Error-strewn and unsure of themselves." He pointed to Florian Wirtz and Szoboszlai passing the ball out of play or straight to opposition players, and highlighted a moment when Alisson played the ball to Ryan Gravenberch inside the Liverpool box despite him being surrounded by two Fulham players, with Jeremy Jacquet ultimately required to clear Gonzalo Garcia's goal-bound strike off the line.

Sharpe also reached for a quote from the terraces that summed up the afternoon rather neatly. As one supporter made his way out at full time, he offered a two-word verdict to nobody in particular: "Absolute garbage." Hard to argue. Dominic King, writing in The Telegraph, was similarly candid, suggesting that on another day Liverpool would not even have taken a point home, and that the relief on the Fulham side was palpable. The locals had arrived expecting one of those free-flowing afternoons, he noted, but the grumbling at half-time told its own story.

Iraola's draw problem is becoming a pattern

Richard Jolly of The Independent identified what is fast becoming the most pressing concern of Liverpool's early season. Liverpool drew their last two Premier League home matches under Arne Slot, and they have now drawn their first two under Iraola as well. A new manager, a familiar story. But Jolly went further, unearthing a statistic about Iraola himself that gives real pause for thought: the head coach has drawn half of his last 42 league matches.

More specifically, all three of Liverpool's most recent draws have come against sides that finished in the bottom half of the table last season, Newcastle, Nottingham Forest, and now Fulham. That is not a quirk or a coincidence; that is a trend. Iraola is still waiting for his first Premier League win at Anfield, and if the pattern of dropped points against lesser opposition continues, the pressure will build quickly. The Champions League form offers genuine encouragement, but a title challenge is built on grinding out results on afternoons exactly like the one Anfield endured on Saturday. The next home fixture cannot come soon enough, and it cannot come soon enough for the right reasons.