Why Liverpool’s defence is rising above miserably mediocre past efforts

It’s a statistical Rorschach test. One the one hand, Liverpool have only kept three clean sheets all season, two of those against lower-division sides in the League Cup, and have the leakiest defence in the top six by a long shot. On the other, they’ve not let in more than one since their second game, have allowed the fewest shots on their goal of any side in the league, and haven’t conceded from open play since mid-September.

Depending on the sort of picture you wanted to paint of Liverpool’s defence – or your pre-existing perceptions of it – you could take your pick from the above facts and interpret away. The inkblot will resemble a troupe of clowns to some and the second coming of Hansen and Lawrenson to others.

But look beyond the numbers and towards the actual performances, and the simple truth is that Liverpool defence has been looking really rather good recently. Not exceptional, not impenetrable – but quietly, unfussily decent.

Vincent Janssen’s penalty last night, just like Gareth McAuley’s header three days earlier, added the appearance of unease to what was in fact a largely untroubled win. In each instance the defensive personnel was wholly different, but in both cases the unit played with maturity, calm and resilience.

This newfound sense of semi-solidity is all the more impressive given that three-fifths of Liverpool’s first-choice defence were parachuted in this summer. Loris Karius and Joel Matip arrived from Germany, while James Milner was shoehorned in at left-back after the season’s opening game, when Alberto Moreno’s brainlessness finally became more trouble than it was worth.

Matip’s displays have been largely splendid, his assuming ball-playing duties leaving Dejan Lovren free to play as a purer, uncomplicated centre-back in a way that wasn’t possible with Martin Skrtel around. And whisper it, but there’s a growing suspicion around Anfield that when he’s only got defending to worry about, Dejan Lovren might, in fact, be really rather good.

Either side of them are a pair of full-backs in the classically trusty mould. In some ways, it’s odd that James Milner has never been deployed there before, given how the position’s traditional demands of no-nonsense dependability align so perfectly with the qualities he’s become synonymous with.

Milner’s canny positional sense and two-footed crossing ability have meant that he’s taken to the position much like a duck to water, and his proclivity to pick out his squadron of buzzing forwards with firmly hit passes from deep has turned his playing on the "wrong" flank into a virtue. On the other side, Nathaniel Clyne’s inclination to hit the byline adds a healthy balance, as does his jet-heeled athleticism.

As for Karius, well, it’s early days and no-one quite knows. Some see the ultra-modern qualities of Manuel Neuer, others see only a throwback to Sander Westerveld, and a joke about vampires and crosses is never far from the conversation. But the ongoing nature of the debate is in itself telling, its many vagaries largely due to the fact that, five games into his Liverpool career, he’s not had the chance to make a notable save.

Of course, discussing Liverpool’s defence in terms of the team’s back five is to grandly miss the point of a Klopp team, which is that defending, attacking and everything else in between is carried out as a well-oiled 11-man unit. And that is indeed the case here: Liverpool’s shift into defensive assuredness owes as much to the manic harrying of Roberto Firmino, the diligent shuttling of Gini Wijnaldum, or the sudden reinvention of Jordan Henderson into a commanding midfield leader, as it does to the capable safeguarding of Lovren and Co.

And it should be said that a sharp improvement isn’t the same as a complete fix, especially when the starting point was so miserably mediocre. There are still a host of caveats that need to be tacked on to any praise being doled out – not least the fact that any set piece being hoisted into Liverpool’s box still seems to trigger widespread psychological meltdown.

But qualified progress is still progress, and it says a lot about how quickly perceptions change in football that, at the club whose trophy-winning sides of the modern era have been founded on the gloriously tight-fisted pairings of Hyypia-Henchoz and Carragher-Agger, there’s something disconcertingly unfamiliar about a Liverpool side that makes defending look so painless.

There’s still some crinkles to be ironed out, of course. But one or two more clean sheets, and that splodge of ink will start looking less like a nightmarish werewolf and more like a beautiful butterfly.