Andoni Iraola spent Friday explaining what was wrong with his Liverpool side. They start slowly, they concede first, they spend the rest of the game chasing. On Saturday none of that happened, and Liverpool still could not beat the team that began the afternoon without a Premier League point. A 0-0 draw with Fulham makes it four league games without a win at Anfield, and four consecutive home draws for the first time since November 2011 under Kenny Dalglish.
The clearest chance of the match belonged to the visitors and arrived inside a quarter of an hour. Alisson's pass to Ryan Gravenberch was loose, Fulham won the ball, and Gonzalo García's shot needed Jérémy Jacquet on the line to keep it out. Victor Muñoz answered with a header against the crossbar from a corner, and that was as close as Liverpool came before half-time. Fulham led the expected-goals count at the break.
The full-time numbers explain the result better than any single moment. Liverpool had 56 per cent of the ball and 12 shots, but only three on target. Fulham managed four from ten, and seven corners to Liverpool's four. Iraola's side had scored exactly two goals in each of his first four matches in charge. This was the first time they failed to score at all.
Iraola did not hide from it. He said it was the first game since he arrived in which his team had struggled to create chances, and that the tiredness was real without being an excuse. Sixty hours had passed since the Champions League win over Atlético Madrid, a turnaround he called the worst kind and one that will keep happening. Most of his three changes were made for physical reasons. Bradley Barcola was given a first Premier League start, Kostas Tsimikas a first start of the season, and Cody Gakpo, a doubt on Friday, came off the bench on the hour. “There is a lack of freshness, definitely, we cannot hide it,” Iraola said.
Fulham had the better of the second half too. Josh King, 19 and the most dangerous player on the pitch for long spells, forced Alisson to tip a shot from distance over the bar. Rodrigo Muniz, played in by fellow substitute Kevin, failed to control when through. At the other end Alexander Isak glanced a stoppage-time header wide from Dominik Szoboszlai's corner, and the wait for a first home league win under Iraola went on.
Álvaro Arbeloa took a point from his first return to Anfield as a manager and said he was happier with the performance than the result. After the Crystal Palace defeat his players had understood where the problem was and fixed it, he said, adding that they had “controlled the counter-attacks of Liverpool”. The point comes with Fulham's first clean sheet of the season, after seven conceded in three, and it keeps them off a list they did not want to join. Only twice in their history have they lost their opening four top-flight games, and both seasons ended in relegation.
Liverpool have six points from four, three of them draws. Tottenham arrive in the Carabao Cup on Tuesday, then a trip to Bournemouth, Iraola's former club, before the international break. The fast start he asked for is still to come. So is the first home league win.
