Jamie Carragher doubles down on Liverpool 'basketball team' criticism after Chelsea defeat

A second successive Premier League defeat saw Liverpool drop off the top of the table as we head into the international break and former Reds star Jamie Carragher has seen the same problems for a while. The reigning league champions have looked porous at the back even when picking up points, and that now looks like catching up with them.

Liverpool threw away two-goal leads against both Bournemouth and Newcastle in their first two outings, only to respond with late goals to seal victory in each game. Arne Slot led his team to maximum points from their first five matches, but they conceded a last-gasp winner at Crystal Palace and then did the same against Chelsea on Saturday.

In between those two league matches, Slot's Reds lost to Galatasaray in the Champions League and showed some of the same leaks. Carragher accused the club of playing basketball rather than football in that trip to Turkey, and repeated the same claims after the weekend reverse at Stamford Bridge.

"My criticism of Liverpool being almost like a basketball team, again it has come back to haunt them," Carragher said on Super Sunday Extra Time. "This thing about it being end to end in a game of football, Liverpool should be dominating a game like this with the changes of personnel Chelsea have got."

Carragher said Liverpool are "too easy to play through", and suggested that was true even when they were winning games. Against Chelsea, he argued, that stopped them being able to build on Cody Gakpo's equaliser to complete a turnaround before conceding to Estevao in stoppage time.

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In Istanbul in midweek, Victor Osimhen's penalty ended up being the only goal of the game but Galatasaray had plenty of other opportunities to score. During his work for CBS covering that game, Carragher expressesed similar complaints.

"I expressed that [concerns] to the manager early on, he'll know that a lot better than me," the pundit said. "He is obviously a fantastic manager. But right now Liverpool went from, I would call them a top team, workmanlike team last season and they have sprinkled a little bit of star dust on it terms of the transfers that they have brought in. And they haven't gained anything going forward but they have lost a lot defensively."

Liverpool boss Slot aimed to take the positives despite his team losing three on the spin in all competitions. "After we scored 1-1 it went our way and I think I was waiting for us to score the second. Decision making could've been better, last 10-15 minutes was end-to-end," he told Match of the Day.

"We arrived in their 18-yard box with [Andy] Robertson, we couldn't control the ball but again it's fine margins like it's been for as long as I've been here. Last week, same as this week two difficult away games, the fine margins haven't been in our favour.

"In both games we've created more chances than the team we have faced - Palace and Chelsea - but the truth is that we have only scored once in both games and our opponent has scored twice."

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