Liverpool have thrown away a two-goal lead twice in a week, and fitness is only half the answer
Two up on Leeds in Chicago, two up on Monaco at Anfield, beaten both times. Andoni Iraola says his players do not have ninety minutes in them yet. The goals they conceded point at something else as well.
Aug 10, 2026
Twice in a week Liverpool have gone two goals up and lost. That is a strange thing to write about a side with this much money on the pitch, and stranger still that both collapses looked so similar.
Sunday at Anfield they were 2-0 up on Monaco inside half an hour. Alexander Isak finished after a one-two with Ryan Gravenberch on 16 minutes, Florian Wirtz turned in a scramble on 29, and for that half hour the thing everyone has been waiting eighteen months to see actually happened. Then Virgil van Dijk conceded a penalty just before the break, Aleksandr Golovin took it, Mika Biereth got the equaliser on 56 and Paris Brunner headed a corner in at the death. Andoni Iraola lost his first match at Anfield 3-2.
Seven days earlier, on 2 August at Soldier Field in Chicago, it was Leeds. Luke Chambers and Wirtz put Liverpool 2-0 up by half-time, and Leeds scored four without reply after it through Brenden Aaronson, Dominic Calvert-Lewin twice and Sean Longstaff.
Iraola’s answer is fitness
He was direct about it afterwards. His players do not yet have the energy for ninety minutes, he said, and Monaco “were much better in the second half and they deserved to turn around the game”. He made eleven changes at the interval, which is the sort of thing that turns a friendly into two different matches, and Víctor Muñoz got his debut in the process.
All of that is fair, and on 9 August it is probably even the main answer. Pre-season is for exactly this. A squad with players who went deep into a World Cup that only finished in July was never going to be at full running capacity by the second week of August, and reading much into the fitness of a team in friendlies is how people end up looking silly in October.
What fitness does not explain
Here is what nags at me anyway. Both losing goals against Leeds and the winner against Monaco came from the same category of problem, and it is not a cardiovascular one. Monaco’s winner was a header from a corner. The Leeds game exposed long throws and set pieces badly enough that Iraola called the defeat his most useful friendly of the summer, which is a generous way of saying he learned something he did not want to learn.
Set-piece defending is organisation and it is aggression, and it tends to be the first thing that goes when a team is being asked to press in a new way and is thinking too hard about the ball. Tired legs make it worse. They are not the cause of it.
The second thing is depth, and that one is structural rather than temporary. Mohamed Salah has gone, Andy Robertson has gone, and the incomings have not matched the outgoings in either number or profile. When Iraola changed his whole team at half-time on Sunday, the drop was visible. A squad that thin cannot press for ninety minutes across a Premier League season no matter how many running sessions it gets through in August, and I would be more worried about that than about anything the fitness data says this week.
Why it might be fine anyway
The counter-argument is strong and worth saying out loud. Iraola is 44, on a two-year deal, and he got Bournemouth to sixth and into Europe playing a version of this. He is not guessing. The front line worked on Sunday, and Isak and Wirtz, who cost somewhere around £225 million between them last summer, looked like a partnership rather than two expensive players occupying the same third of the pitch. That is the hardest part to buy and Liverpool appear to have it.
It also would not be the first time a manager used August to find out precisely which players cannot do what he wants, and then spent the last three weeks of the window fixing it. The window shuts on 1 September. There is time.
Newcastle away is a bad first exam
Liverpool open at St James’ Park on Sunday 23 August, 4.30pm. If the diagnosis really is fitness, that is close to the worst possible fixture to test it in, and if it is set pieces, worse still.
My guess is that Liverpool will be fine by about October and that this fortnight will look like nothing. But if they concede from a corner at Newcastle and fade after an hour, nobody at Anfield gets to call it pre-season any more.