Arne Slot has failed to treat the twin imposters of triumph and disaster just the same

The top of the current Premier League Sack Race betting is pretty interesting.

You’ve got two clear favourites. One is in the middle of relegating a team that has been a Premier League club in all but four of its seasons, and the other is desperately trying to do the same with an actual ever-present Premier League club while chatting awful sh*t about fences and windmills and sipping coffee from a cup featuring the badge of their bitterest and most successful rivals .

Next is the current manager of the team 19th in the league. And then you’ve got the manager of the team in fourth.

Arne Slot and Liverpool are having a deeply peculiar season. Liverpool aren’t having a particularly good one, but we’d argue Slot personally is having a far worse campaign.

As far as Liverpool as a collective go, our current working theory is that fourth is about right . That they have, over the course of the season, played the fourth-best (or, if one were so inclined in this particular oddity of a campaign, 17th least bad) football of any Premier League club this season.

There are two things to note about that. One, it’s still not really good enough. Not when so much has been spent on theoretically improving a team and squad that last season were very much number one.

And two, that broadly and despite the obvious results-driven narratives under which we all inevitably operate, their level hasn’t really fluctuated that much. They’ve been okay but not great pretty much all season.

It’s just that at the start of the season that okay-but-not-great manifested itself in a string of absurd and unlikely late wins, and then after that for ages and ages a run of equally absurd – and also again often quite late – defeats.

Yet their results remain absurdly streaky. They won their first five league games, then lost six of the next seven, then won four of the next six and have now drawn three in a row. We really don’t think there’s a particularly convincing case to be made that the actual standard of their play was conspicuously better or worse at any time in that run.

Apart, possibly, from the 2-1 home defeat to Manchester United in which the sheer scale of their headloss and panic was genuinely alarming. That was a game in which they spent the entire second half in 94th-minute goal-chasing mode.

And that’s where Slot comes in. He really hasn’t handled the slings and arrows of Our League’s outrageous fortune particularly well this season. And that’s in marked contrast to the cool, level-headed way in which he spent last season merely polishing some of the rough edges off Jurgen Klopp’s heavy-metallers with such devastatingly profound effect.

This season just seems to have rattled him entirely. As ever with any discussion of Liverpool this season, it feels unfair not to at least acknowledge the unique and harrowing circumstances in which they found themselves following the death of Diogo Jota. There is ample mitigation for heads not being right anywhere in the club.

But at some point the manager needs to be in charge. To take charge. It was the most impressive thing about Slot’s first season at Anfield. The seemingly gargantuan, arguably impossible, job of carrying enough authority with what was, famously almost exclusively, Jurgen Klopp’s old squad was handled with such casual aplomb.

Yet now, with a Liverpool squad far more his own, he seems to have less authority and control than ever. This feels like a season that is simply happening to Liverpool, and happening to Slot.

Slot’s failure to treat the twin imposters of triumph and disaster just the same in those early months of the season really do feel more and more like tone-setters for the uncertainty of what was to come.

Let’s be honest, we all got carried away with both the start Liverpool’s reigning champions made and the collapse that followed. But we’re not all Liverpool’s actual manager. He’s not supposed to get as lost in the noise as the rest of us. He’s not supposed to basically accuse Man United of cheating because they deployed the darkest art in the game: squad rotation.

He’s supposed to be above that. And now we must face the baffling but entirely genuine possibility that he really could become the third Big Six manager this season to be outlasted by the desperately windmilling Thomas Frank.