Supporters lined the streets outside Anfield on Sunday to welcome Andoni Iraola and his squad for his first home match in charge, and for forty-five minutes they got exactly what they had been promised. Alexander Isak turned and rolled a finish into the bottom corner on 16 minutes after a slick exchange between Ryan Gravenberch and Dominik Szoboszlai. Florian Wirtz poked in a second from a goalmouth scramble on 29. Then Liverpool lost 3-2 to Monaco, and for the second match running they had thrown away a two-goal lead.
"We won the first two pre-season games, but the last two we cannot sustain the level we want for all of the game," Iraola said afterwards. "As soon as we made some changes, players start to get tired and we cannot sustain that level. So, we have work to do."
What he was hired to do
Iraola replaced Arne Slot a season after Slot had won the title, and he was hired to make Liverpool feel like themselves again. On that count the evidence of five weeks is unambiguous. His side have averaged 60.6% possession in pre-season, a jump of 12.9% on what his Bournemouth teams averaged in the league last season, and they have used it in a recognisably Basque way: short build-up with the goalkeeper, two deep midfielders dropping to invite pressure, then a fast forward pass the moment an opponent commits. The wide triangles that Marcelo Bielsa, who coached Iraola at Athletic Club, built his sides around are already visible down the left, with full-backs pushing into the final third alongside the winger and Wirtz drifting over from the number 10 position as a third option. "The intensity we need is here now, what we have been missing is back," Szoboszlai has said of his new manager.