An underlying issue cursing Liverpool's season

By their own standards, at least. The Reds are eighth in the Premier League table and placed second in their Champions League group.

Shortly after this article is published, Liverpool will travel to Amsterdam to face Ajax in the penultimate round of fixtures in the group stage of Europe's elite tournament.

In terms of form, the Reds are up-and-down week-by-week. The aforementioned results against Rangers and City offered fans some promise.

But their most recent loss - to Nottingham Forest - took the wind out of the sails for supporters, who thought their team had finally turned a corner.

Liverpool have played out 11 games in the Premier League this season, winning four, drawing four and losing three, a far cry from what we've come to expect from Jurgen Klopp's squad.

So, it begs the question - what is going wrong? Like with all things in sports and media, there is no single answer, but there is one factor that stands out.

Injuries

Darwin Nunez, Luis Diaz, Diogo Jota, Joel Matip, Ibrahima Konate and Arthur are all injured, at the time of writing.

Liverpool have also expressed fitness concerns for Thiago and Naby Keita recently.

Additionally, Jordan Henderson and Fabinho have been heavily rotated so far this season, suggesting they both could be carrying knocks - or it could just be fatigue.

Calvin Ramsay has recently recovered from an injury of his own, but is yet to be embedded into the starting eleven, while Trent Alexander-Arnold managed 28 minutes against Forest over the weekend and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain played just 14 minutes.

That's a total of 13 first-team players who may not be 100 per cent fit.

Further discussion

A follow-up question when talking about injury concerns - certainly when an unusually high number of cases are piled up - is: how does this happen?

As before, this is not easy to diagnose, especially as you nor I have direct access to exactly how Liverpool operate behind-the-scenes.

It would be unfair to pin a cacophony of injuries on the physio staff - or any of the staff, actually - certainly, not entirely.

Injuries are an unfortunate part of competitive sports, and sometimes clubs can get incredibly unlucky and have half of their first-team unavailable through injury.

Perhaps an argument could be made that Liverpool lack squad depth, but that opens a window to an entirely different conversation.