Just tell me what's wrong with Liverpool, please

I was pretty excited to see this from Jonathan Wilson on the Twitter machine this morning:

A piece for the Guardian on Liverpool's start to the season. http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2012/sep/27/question-liverpool-bad-start?CMP=twt_gu … Note: it's not as negative as the subhead suggests.

I like reading Wilson's stuff, even though as a relative newcomer to soccer, it's sometimes doctoral-level work for someone who have never taken a class in a particular subject. (I know. I did it in grad school and lived to tell about it.)

So I clicked on the link and got ...

... statistics about passes completed, chance conversion, tackles won and save percentage. All this courtesy  of Opta, which apparently studies this stuff.

I'm not anti-statistic, certainly not at the level of my father-in-law. I may argue what statistics may hold value, particularly in baseball, but the actual use of statistics does not offend me.

What I learned from reading the Opta numbers was:

* Liverpool completes a lot of passes.

* Liverpool is not so good at turning all those completed passes into goals.

* Liverpool's tackling is somewhat sketchy.

* Pepe Reina is not quite right in goal.

All of which I could have determined not by consulting the numbers ... but by watching the game with my own two eyes. Again, I'm barely a novice soccer fan, but even I can tell that when Liverpool seemingly dominates possession every game and doesn't score goals, it's kind of a thing.

What I wanted from Wilson was something I didn't already know.

* Are Brendan Rodgers' tactics not right for this group of players? Given that Wilson literally wrote the book on soccer tactics, this one should have been pretty easy.

* Did they make the wrong moves (jettisoning Andy Carroll without replacing him, letting Dirk Kuyt and Craig Bellamy go) or non-moves (not signing Clint Dempsey) in the transfer window? Are there opportunities for January?

* Are the current players (I'm looking at a lot of you, but especially Stewart Downing and Jordan Henderson) really bad?

* Will Luis Suarez be more than a player who looks great dribbling through seven players and then misses a shot? Can Liverpool play in such a way that Suarez doesn't have to dribble through seven players all the time?

* Is Steven Gerrard slipping a bit? Is Reina?

* Are the owners spending too much time worrying about the Red Sox?

There are probably other questions, but those were the ones I came up with off the top of my head.

Instead, I got statistics, not the opinions I was hoping for.

Frankly, I was disappointed.