Andy Robertson has apologised to Liverpool supporters and admitted they have been getting worse in recent weeks.
The Reds’ season of struggles continued on Sunday as they were beaten 2-1 by Brighton, ending their defence of the FA Cup. Jurgen Klopp’s side had only reached the fourth round virtue of some contentious officiating against Wolves earlier this month.
And despite getting the rub of the green again at the Amex, they suffered defeat after Kaoru Mitoma scored an injury-time winner. Liverpool were thrashed by the Seagulls in the Premier League a fortnight ago, and though they did put a sterner challenge this time around, few could argue they deserved a victory.
Speaking after their elimination from both domestic cup competitions was confirmed, Robertson pulled no punches in his assessment. The Scottish defender said they were having issues at both ends of the pitch, issues which have only worsened since the turn of the year.
“We need to start winning games,” he told ITV Sport. “It’s easy to say, but harder to fix and it’s proven that way. This season has been nowhere near good enough, at the turn of the year we wanted a new start. But it’s not got off to that…it’s probably been worse.
“In the league we’ve not been good enough, we lost in the League Cup to Man City by one goal and now we’re out of both cups. It’s really disappointing. You can’t put your finger on one thing because it’s more than that and it’s about putting a performance together where all these things click.
He added: “You can tell we aren’t as confident in front of goal and you can tell that defensively we are too open. We need to get the confidence back, but it’s easier said than done. The only way we pick up results is you have to score goals and you have to be able to keep clean sheets and we’re not managing that.
“We’re not managing to do that and we need to do it quickly. But we keep saying that and that doesn’t help the fans. I feel sorry for them, we aren’t putting a show on them at the moment.”
Liverpool actually took the lead against Brighton with Harvey Elliott adding to his goal against Wolves in last week’s replay. But that advantage lasted less than 10 minutes when Tariq Lamptey’s strike found the bottom corner, via a Lewis Dunk deflection.
Both sides then had chances after the break, before Ibrahima Konate and Fabinho were both fortunate to avoid red cards. Konate escaped further punishment despite appearing to stop a goalscoring opportunity, whilst Fabinho was only given a yellow for an ugly challenge on Evan Ferguson.
But the hosts had the last laugh in stoppage time when Mitoma expertly took down a cross before firing past Alisson. I thought it was a proper cup tie, end to end and both sides had chances,” Robertson said.
“I thought we were more competitive than we were two weeks ago, but that didn’t take much - we were nowhere near it two weeks ago.
“Slightly better today, we had some chances and were a bit more compact, but we’re going out of the cup and that’s hard to take when you’re at a club like Liverpool. The fans expect us to go far in competitions and we’ve not managed it.”
