Kenny Dalglish, increasingly under pressure after five Premier League defeats in six games, has expressed his "amazement" at suggestions that Liverpool have endured an underwhelming season, yet admitted his team needs to "change our philosophies a wee bit", by "not playing the lovely football that we have been".
Liverpool were widely expected to challenge for Champions League qualification this season after lavish investment in the summer but Saturday's anaemic home defeat by Wigan Athletic, which followed an extraordinary reverse to another team in the relegation zone, Queens Park Rangers, has left them seventh, 13 points adrift of fourth place, and intensified criticism towards Dalglish. The manager claimed those defeats were events of happenstance and that there is excessive gloom being directed towards a team that has won the Carling Cup and reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup, although he admitted all was not rosy for the Reds.
"It's amazing," said the manager of the criticism of his team. "You can pick out our league form and then you can look at someone else who has been knocked out of three cups, yet they take that as a good season for them. It depends how you depict it. We are not saying we were at our best [against QPR and Wigan] but there were circumstances, with three games in six days [seven in fact].
"We have got a problem winning games in the league. We have to educate ourselves and maybe we have to not play the lovely football that we have been." Asked whether that meant he was considering deploying a more direct style of play, he replied cryptically "maybe we have to change our philosophies a wee bit" and declined to elaborate.
Saturday's defeat was their first ever at home to Wigan. They have won only five of 15 league games at Anfield during this campaign and, although there were merely groans and curses from the stands on Saturday rather than calls for Dalglish to be replaced as manager, there is plenty of evidence on fans' websites and radio phone-ins that some fans have lost faith in the man who has enjoyed near-messiah status at the club for over three decades.
Dalglish points to the Carling Cup victory, Liverpool's first silverware in six years, as proof that the cub are making progress but the chairman, Tom Werner, made it clear after that triumph that the progress that matters most to him and the majority owner, John W Henry, is in the league, with Champions League qualification a priority.
Dalglish's judgment has been questioned on many levels. His handling of the Luis Suárez-Patrice Evra affair is widely believed to have damaged the club's image, with Dalglish himself even apologising for ill-considered remarks he made in a television interview on the subject following Liverpool's defeat at Manchester United in February.
Doubt has also been cast on his tactical acumen after more than a decade out of management before he took on the Liverpool job, while and his transfer dealings have raised much scepticism, with none of the players on whom he has spent over £100m, such as Andy Carroll, Jordan Henderson and Stewart Downing, proving surefire successes so far. "If we hadn't had as many injuries, we could have freshened it up a bit but we have not got that luxury at the moment and we have to get on with it," Dalglish said. "The body was willing but the mind just wouldn't take them there. We can look at every game and we can find valid reasons – and we are not looking for excuses, we are looking for reasons.
"That was [Jamie Carragher's] third game, Steven Gerrard's third game, there were a few of them had their third game in seven days and that is a long run, especially when you have travel in between. Maybe that is the price you have to pay for success but for us, if we want to be successful, we have to be able to handle it. The best way we can handle it is if we have more players to choose from but at the moment we are not blessed with that."