The one trait that has stopped Liverpool’s season sliding into meltdown

Winning without playing well is supposed to be the mark of champions. Liverpool will not be champions for too much longer, but it could be a sign of a team who can at least reach the Champions League. Or, Arne Slot might say, a one-off.

Too often, in his opinion, good performances have not brought the right result this season. So Liverpool delivered the worst first half of his reign, in his own words, at Nottingham Forest, and still won.

An extreme case, and a game with its own idiosyncrasies, but part of a wider theme. Without always hitting the heights, Liverpool have become hard to beat and just as hard to rule out of contention for a top-five finish. They have only lost two of their last 20 games in all competitions. Those two defeats, which Slot felt were undeserved, required injury-time deciders. There was an immediate response to each: walloping Qarabag four days after being beaten by Bournemouth, triumphing at the Stadium of Light three after the darkness of losing to Manchester City.

City’s 2-1 triumph at Anfield left Liverpool staring at the prospect that the season of the £450m spend would end with them in the Europa League, perhaps even the Conference League. They are still sixth but, over the last two rounds of fixtures, they have closed a four-point gap to Chelsea when Liam Rosenior’s men, who faced Leeds and Burnley at home, might have imagined going seven or eight clear of Slot’s side, who had seemingly harder fixtures.

Liverpool have found different ways to win away: convincingly at Sunderland, unconvincingly at Forest. Those unaware of the respective sides’ workloads could have been forgiven for assuming in the first half that a labouring Liverpool were the team who had played in Istanbul three days earlier and a faster and seemingly fresher Forest had enjoyed a free midweek, not the other way around.

As the eventual scorer Alexis Mac Allister noted, they were poor in all aspects at the start on Sunday. “Positioning, intensity, pressing: nothing was good,” said the midfielder. “Well, maybe how we defended our box.”

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Slot arrowed in on that, too. It indicates how Liverpool have become more resilient. They have still had off-days defensively, still concede due to individual errors, but they have seven clean sheets in their last 13 games in all competitions, including each of their most recent three. In eight of their last 10 in the Premier League, they have restricted their opponents to an xG of under 1.0 (the two exceptions were the two they lost); even when Forest were dominant, it did not translate to huge numbers of clear-cut chances.

Which, like those blocked shots, indicates the improvement of Ibrahima Konate, who missed the Bournemouth loss on compassionate leave. His partnership with Virgil van Dijk has provided a platform, even amid instability elsewhere.

Slot used three players as right-backs against Forest, none a right-back by trade. Part of his problem is that Dominik Szoboszlai is his best available option both at right-back and in midfield: the tide started to turn against Forest when he put the Hungarian at the heart of his team.

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Liverpool’s resources are so fragile now that they feel one injury away from seeing their campaign derailed, should it bring a lengthy absence for any of Konate, Van Dijk, Szoboszlai or Hugo Ekitike. Thankfully for them, the two centre-backs and the versatile talisman can seem indestructible.

Big characters are a reason why Liverpool’s season has not gone into meltdown, as it threatened to when they lost nine times in a 12-game spell. Since then, there has been an air of unity, of striving for a common cause, which suggests his players are offering an endorsement of Slot, even when fluency is lacking.

There is a resolve and resourcefulness to this team, shown by the ubiquitous, indefatigable Szoboszlai, with his ability to shape every game, and from so many different positions. And yet the latest demonstration of Liverpool’s fighting spirit was required in part because of a lack of the kind of quality they were supposed to possess.

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For the first time in his Liverpool career, Mohamed Salah has gone nine league games without a goal. Forest was the first league match this season in which neither of the £100m men featured; Alexander Isak has missed the majority and been a negligible presence in some of those he has played while Florian Wirtz took time to settle, though he has at least excelled in the last couple of months.

His back injury should not sideline him for long. Without him, Liverpool lacked craft and class but they had the grit to grind it out. They have shown a staying power.

And if there are injury-time goals – by Bournemouth and City, by Leeds and Fulham – that could cost them at the end of the season, Mac Allister’s 97th-minute intervention at Forest offered the opposite possibility: that one will be a symbol of their fightback.