Could Alisson’s Liverpool admission see Andoni Iraola sacked in January again?

Any Liverpool fan watching their dire 0-0 draw with Fulham on Saturday will have had the same concerns that goalkeeper Alisson voiced after the game.

“It was a poor performance, in some moments even from myself, but from the team,” he said. “Collectively, we didn’t play well. Many things we tried to do, we couldn’t do it well. We couldn’t press them well.

“In the first half we spent too much energy trying to press them in a good way, but we couldn’t.”

An Andoni Iraola team being unable to press effectively is going to be a problem. It was at Bournemouth when he first arrived.

His first Premier League win came in his tenth game and they had no European football to contend with.

The period of adaptation under Iraola is lengthy and gruelling, and will arguably feel more intense at Liverpool as he succeeds a manager in Arne Slot who played relatively sedate football.

“Obviously, it’s a big challenge to play Wednesday night and Saturday evening, and you have another game Tuesday,” Alisson added. “But we need to get the right mentality to do that and I think it wasn’t the case (on Saturday).

“Deep inside we have it, we just need to put it out. The quality we have, we have so many top players, but we need to take and put more energy on the pitch for the next games. We have to improve for the next one.”

The worry will be over whether the poor performance is indeed down to mentality, or – as seems more likely – a case of a) fitness and b) time to embed Iraola’s philosophy on the training ground.

“It takes (it) out, but we recovered the best way we could,” said the goalkeeper when asked about the energy expended against Atletico Madrid on Wednesday. “This is the challenge (for) every big team who are playing in all competitions.

“If we want to do something special this season we have to cope with that: to play a big game on Wednesday night, another one on Saturday, then next Tuesday you have another one, then on Sunday again. It’s what we want.”

The Liverpool players are used to the schedule, but not when playing in this fashion.

“It can take some time for us to adapt to that, but we need to do that as quick as we can because we don’t have time to waste,” Alisson added.

Time that Iraola didn’t get when experiencing his only other season of European football, in his very first managerial role, in charge of AEK Larnaca in Cyprus.

Drafted in at the start of the 2018/19 season, Iraola led Larnaca through the Europa League qualifiers and into the group stage, but after that promising start one win in nine followed as the schedule became more congested and he was sacked in January 2019.

“It was only a matter of time before he found the right way,” said former Larnaca midfielder Vincent Laban. “I think that would have been the case at Larnaca.”

Ahh, time. All managers need it but few get what they desire or even deserve.

The problem for Iraola is that history suggests his methods require more than most and he will have less than in almost any of his other previous roles to get his team up to speed, literally and metaphorically.

Less than in all roles other than the one he lasted under six months in, that is.