Well that did not take long. The first shock of the new Premier League season took place at Craven Cottage where Liverpool had to come from behind twice to secure a 2-2 draw with newly-promoted Fulham.
Mohamed Salah’s late strike rescued Jurgen Klopp’s men, after the home side had twice led through Aleksandar Mitrovic.
Darwin Nunez marked his league debut with the Reds’ first equaliser, having come off the bench early in the second half, but Liverpool were far from their usual selves all afternoon and lost the influential Thiago Alcantara to injury to make matters worse.
Jordan Henderson almost won it for the Reds in stoppage time, but saw his 25-yard effort come back off the crossbar as Fulham began life in the top-flight with a deserved point.
Jurgen Klopp criticised his Liverpool side’s attitude after the game when speaking to BT Sport’s Des Kelly hw said:
“The best thing about the game is the result. We get a point from a really bad game from my side.
“Now it’s a question of ‘how can that happen?’ I said already to your colleagues that the attitude wasn’t right in the beginning. Then we wanted to fight back but it was not easy – the pitch was dry, stuff like this, and we played into their [hands].
“When we had a bit of direction then we ended up in front of their goal, and even when we were 1-0 down we had probably the bigger chances.
“The result is fine. I don’t think we deserved more than that, but the performance is massively improvable.”
Asked if he had delivered some stern words for his side at half-time, when they trailed 1-0 to Mitrovic’s back-post header, Klopp smiled:
“Yes! We cannot always hug the boys. We do that usually when they deserve it.
“The first half, we started the game opposite to how we wanted to. We didn’t find direction, and everybody was under pressure. We couldn’t break the lines.
“There was a clear message before the game, that what we have to do is take risks. We lost balls, and each challenge they won, each chance, each shot, is big for them.
“We never had momentum. We could have won the game, we had the bigger chances, but that probably would have been a bit too much.”
The result was not the only piece of bad news for Liverpool as they saw Liverpool influential midfielder Thiago Alcantara limp off early in the second half.
No news yet on how long Thiago will be out, but he joins a large Liverpool injury list that includes Diogo Jota, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Kostas Tsimikas, Ibrahima Konate, Caoimhin Kelleher, Curtis Jones and Calvin Ramsay, with Naby Keita only just returning to training after illness.
The Reds are next in action at home to Crystal Palace on Monday August 15.
