Jamie Carragher has been telling anyone who'll listen since July that Liverpool's midfield doesn't work, and he's right. He was right on the Overlap a fortnight ago when he said the space in there hadn't gone away. He was right again at St James' Park on Sunday, when Newcastle walked through it twice. Wirtz isn't the only problem. Szoboszlai and Gravenberch do not help at all.
None of that is what he did on Monday Night Football.
What he did on Monday was stop talking about the system and start talking about two men. Wirtz is a neat and tidy footballer, he said, worth £50m or £60m rather than £110m. The idea that a player needs a year to settle in the Premier League is a myth. He doesn't see where Wirtz fits in at all. He threw in that last summer might turn out to be the worst transfer window in Premier League history, with Isak among the names that hadn't justified the money.
One game. Away at Newcastle. Under a manager who'd been in charge for ninety minutes.
Here's the thing about that game. In the eighteenth minute, Kerkez's cross was half-cleared and Wirtz got hold of the loose ball, and Hornicek made a very good save. If that goes in, Wirtz has a goal in his first game under Iraola and the whole week reads differently. Would Carragher have said it on Monday night? Only he knows that.
Later on there was a cross from Kerkez that Isak should have been finishing from three yards. I was shouting at the television. It was a poor delivery and it never got there, so you won't find it in any highlights package, but it happened. On another day both of them score and Liverpool win 3-2 and none of us are having this conversation.
That's football. It's a game of fine margins, and Monday's verdict didn't leave any room for them.
He's paid as an analyst, and an analyst should treat everybody the same. He doesn't. He goes all in on Liverpool. It's like he goes the other way and gives them even more criticism to try and show he isn't biased. Chelsea have spent over £1bn in four years. I've yet to hear "the worst window in Premier League history" aimed at Stamford Bridge with the same relish.
This is the pattern, not a one-off. In December, on the same show, he called Salah's outburst a disgrace and said the mixed-zone appearance was choreographed with his agent to cause maximum damage. Salah had named him first, so he was entitled to answer. He didn't stop at answering. He said Salah had thrown every Liverpool right-back under the bus for eight years, and told him he hadn't won much with Egypt anyway. Eight months on it's a twenty-three-year-old German and a striker who cost us a fortune, and the show is the same, and so is the escalation — from what a player did on the pitch to what a player is worth.
It's not that other Liverpool men in the media go easy. McManaman tore into Szoboszlai on TNT in January and told Salah, Van Dijk and Wirtz to take their criticism after Brentford last autumn. The difference is what they go after. McManaman goes at a performance. Carragher put a price on a player and said he can't see where he fits, which is a verdict a man carries around with him. And McManaman has argued the opposite of Carragher on the thing that matters most here — he's said of Núñez that you need to give a player time to settle, that you can't judge him at eighteen months. Carragher called that a myth on Monday night.
The obvious answer to all this is that Carragher's job is to say what he sees, and that going soft on Liverpool because he played for Liverpool would make him useless. That's a fair point and I'd defend his right to make the structural argument all day. He's been making it since pre-season and he's been correct.
But there's a difference between saying a midfield doesn't function and putting a price tag on a player's head on the country's biggest football show. The first is analysis. The second is a verdict, delivered before the evidence is in.
And the strange part is that he didn't need to rush it. If Isak keeps not scoring and Wirtz keeps not getting involved in goals and assists, Carragher's argument looks more right every week. By October he could have made exactly the same points with two months' worth of evidence behind him, at least and nobody, me included, could have said a word. He'd have won the argument properly.
Instead he made it on the back of one away draw, and the only thing it's achieved is to load two players up with pressure they didn't need.
Forest at Anfield, 12.30 on Saturday. Wirtz and Isak walk out in front of a crowd that has spent all week being told by a man in a red shirt on Sky that one of them is worth half what we paid and the other can't be found in the building. They need to deliver.
If they don't, Carragher gets to say he told us. Just remember he told us early, and loudly, and it cost them.