THERE seemed to be a wave of opinion before the start of the season that keeping hold of Fernando Torres and Steven Gerrard would be key to Liverpool getting their Champions League place back.

Unfortunately, those who thought that were failing to look at the bigger picture.

Which is that Liverpool still have some very ordinary players and it’s going to be a long, hard struggle to finish anywhere near the top four.

I, for one, can’t see it happening. In fact, if you look at the Premier League’s top five now, I reckon there’s a good chance they will be the top five at the end of the season too.

Liverpool just don’t have the quality at the moment to match those sides.

The likes of Joe Cole, Raul Meireles and Milan Jovanovic are clearly good players who have all featured in World Cups.

But they need time to settle in and get used to each other and a system that will bring the best out of them.

At the moment, it’s simply not there and until Roy Hodgson finds it, Liverpool will continue to struggle to find the right formula.

The early season optimism I referred to was also based on the fact that Torres and Gerrard would be firing on all cylinders and leading Liverpool’s assault on the top four.

There is, of course, no problem with Gerrard and he proved at Old Trafford on Sunday that he still has the ability to drive the team on and pick them up by their bootlaces when things aren’t going well.

But things aren’t going quite as well for Torres and the fact that Liverpool aren’t bringing the best out of him and playing to his strengths is, for me, the biggest problem they have at the moment.

And it’s the lack of width that is causing it.

When you consider that Dimitar Berbatov, a forward who has nowhere near as good a record as Torres, can notch a hat-trick, all form crosses form out wide, then it’s obvious to see where Liverpool are lacking.

Manchester United made the pitch bigger by spreading play out to Giggs and Nani and that’s how they broke down a Liverpool defence which rarely concedes three goals.

But when you try to play down the middle against tight defences then you’re not giving Torres the service he needs.

He did get through a couple of times against United and this led to the tow goals, which shows how dangerous he can be and how much discomfort he can cause defenders.

But when you’re so narrow that kind of opportunity isn’t going to come too often because the opposition just isn’t stretched out enough.

When you’re lacking form, touch and fitness, the last thing you want to be is isolated.

A lot has been said of Torres’s demeanour in recent games but he needs all the help he can get to get his scoring boots back and at the moment he’s simply not getting it.

So in those circumstances, you’d be looking pretty fed up too.