Some collapses are more equal than others. Liverpool Football Club are, indeed, at it again: 3-1 up with fifteen minutes to go away to Bournemouth, they somehow contrived to lose 4-3. This was a peculiarly Liverpool collapse: the palpable comfort of the first-half disintegrating amid a few balls slung in their box when the realisation set in that the players had something to lose.
Jamie Carragher was on Sky Sports duty, and he has had a few too many of these absurd reversals to pick over: he was also on punditry duty for the 3-3 draw with Crystal Place in 2014.
Carragher was typically straight-talking. He pointed out the absurdity of Liverpool being so far forward with a two-goal lead late in the game.
It's a message to the rest of the Premier League that if you put Liverpool under pressure, they can't cope with it. To find yourself in this position, on the counter-attack, late on in a game, when you're 3-1 up, is absolutely madness. James Milner finds himself up the pitch.
He then criticised goalkeeper Loris Karius, who failed to prevent Fraser's shot from going through him.
That's nowhere near good enough from that goalkeeper. And this goalkeeper has yet to convince me in any game that he is of the required standard. Yeah, it's not a bad effort, but it's not right in the corner, so he's got to save that. And as I said, seven or eight games he's played, and it's early days, who's to know how he'll do over the next two or three years, but he has got to improve. He hasn't done anything yet in those games that has impressed me.
Karius was also at fault for Bournemouth's winner, spilling a simple ball to allow Nathan Ake prod the ball home. While Karius is not looking good enough for Liverpool at the moment, Carragher also pointed out that his deputy Simon Mignolet is not up to scratch either.
Every now and again, you need your goalkeeper to make a save. And yeah, I know he made a save a few minutes before, but when you come under pressure, you need your goalkeeper. It's no concidence that Liverpool have fallen apart over the past three or four years, because as I said before, Mignolet is not good enough.
Conceding goals in twos, threes, or fours is not a new thing for Liverpool: they conceded more than two goals in seven games last season.
