We may still be in November, and December is stacked. But it is January which has got Liverpool fans most concerned.
Traditionally, the first month of the year has not been especially kind to Jurgen Klopp and his side. It is where title bids have run off course and where cup dreams have evaporated, where injuries have gripped and form has dipped.
Is history set to repeat itself in 2022?
That’s the fear. The Reds may have started the season well enough — they are only four points off the top of the Premier League and have breezed through a tough-looking Champions League group — but big tests lie in wait. Lots of them.
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Over the course of the next 12 weeks, from now until Feb. 5, Liverpool will play at least 18 games, with the potential for three more should they beat Leicester City in the Carabao Cup quarterfinal next month and win their FA Cup third-round tie at the start of January.
Klopp’s squad is already creaking, and it will now be tested like never before, especially with the Africa Cup of Nations set to deny him the services of Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mane and Naby Keita.
Salah’s Egypt and Mane’s Senegal are among the pre-tournament favourites, meaning they could be missing for up to six weeks at the turn of the year. Liverpool still hopes they will be available to face both Leicester City (Dec. 28) and Chelsea (Jan. 2), but even that is yet to be confirmed, with uncertainty surrounding players’ release dates for the tournament.
What we do know is that there will be no Mane and no Salah, or Keita, against Brentford on Jan. 15, or at Crystal Palace eight days later. They will miss the FA Cup third-round tie, and would be absent for both legs of the Carabao Cup semifinal, should Liverpool get that far.
Sure, it could be worse, but that’s still a significant problem in a season in which Klopp’s side is taking on not one, but two juggernauts in Manchester City and Chelsea at the top of the Premier League. Liverpool has already dropped 11 points this season, including seven in its last five league fixtures, so it can ill-afford another dry January on top of that.
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Last season proved a lesson: Liverpool was top of the table on Christmas Day, but won only three of its next 14 league games to slide out of contention. In the end, only a spirited, at times ugly, late-season surge saw the club snatch a Champions League qualification spot.
It was injuries, above everything else, which cost them. “A season like no other,” Klopp called it, as his squad crumbled amid a series of pulls and strains, ruptures and tears.
Liverpool had no luck at all, but it also made plenty of mistakes during that period. Klopp’s rotation, particularly during the autumn months, was questionable (remember Diogo Jota in Midtjylland?), while the club’s attempts to stem the bleeding in January came way too late.
Klopp should have signed a defender on the first day of the winter transfer window, but instead waited until the last. By the time Ben Davies and Ozan Kabak — stopgap signings at best — arrived, the Reds were already out of the title race, out of the FA Cup and had lost a third center back to a season-ending injury. The hesitancy proved costly.
Will the same scenario unfold in January? Liverpool needs an attacker and it needs one at the start of the month, not the end.
Klopp may argue that, in Divock Origi and Takumi Minamino, he has sufficient cover. The evidence of the past two seasons, however, suggests otherwise.
Minamino has scored three times in the Carabao Cup this season, but he has played 13 minutes of Premier League football for the Reds since last December, while Origi’s late consolation goal at West Ham before the international break was his first in the league for more than 15 months.
Both would have been sold in the summer had a suitable offer been received, but both will be needed in the coming weeks. Both have done well with what little opportunities they have had this season, but come January they could be asked to keep the club’s silverware hopes alive on one, two or even three fronts.
It feels too big a stretch, as does asking a midfielder — Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain or Curtis Jones — or a youngster from the Under-23 side — Kaide Gordon perhaps — to step up and deliver.
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Of course, Liverpool still have Diogo Jota and Roberto Firmino – though the latter is currently recovering from a hamstring injury – but to lose one of Salah or Mane, never mind both, will hit them hard. The club will miss their speed, physicality and goal threat. It will miss the sense of fear those two can instill in opponents.
Origi and Minamino, even Jota and Firmino to a degree, don’t have that. Liverpool probably needed a forward in the summer anyway, but the AFCON means plans should probably be brought forward.
If they are not, then it could cost them. Just like it did last season.