IT’S ALWAYS baffled me how a whole team can have a collective off-day.

Okay, Wigan fans get to see this every week, but when a half-decent team follows up a performance like the one Liverpool dished up at West Brom with such an unadulterated pile of bat droppings as we saw against Swansea, you have to wonder what forces are at work to wreak such an appalling transformation.

One or two players might normally dip in performance due to niggling injuries, minor illness or just the vagaries of form, but to see nearly all eleven suffer such a catastrophic decline over such a short period was genuinely shocking.

With no midweek trans-continental travelling, no dodgy shellfish served up before the match and, as far as I’m aware, no dwarf-throwing events to sap their energy, it’s hard to explain the lack-lustre, unimaginative and plodding display that produced our fourth home draw of the season.

At least in the other three we could blame profligate finishing; here our wings were comprehensively clipped by a wedge of diminutive Swans, albeit clearly playing out of their feathers.

Rather than stick together and battle their way out of trouble, our work ethic crumbled and it was every man for himself. There may be no ‘I’ in team, but there was certainly an ‘us’ in ‘useless’.

Such a performance this time last year would have had the bloggerati apoplectically calling for Roy Hodgson to be publicly flayed alive, and triggered a thousand insulting e-mails across the Atlantic.

The manager would have been presumed to have ‘lost the dressing room’, unable to motivate the players and have baffled them with unintelligible tactics.

Thankfully Kenny has enough credit in the bank to forestall such accusations, though already some fans are once again proving all too ready to dip their keyboards in vitriol and fill the blogosphere with charges of managerial incompetence. Such is the world we live in.

In searching to explain the conundrum posed in the opening paragraph, I can only surmise that the answer must lie in the ‘engine room’ of any side – central midfield. At West Brom, Lucas and Adam were in their element – a goal up early on, able to sit back and soak up any pressure while feeding a rampaging Suarez on the counter-attack.

At home in the middle of a 4-4-2 formation, they too often played as a pair, occupying similar positions on the field and failing to offer support to the forwards, either as recipients of lay-offs or cut-backs or, perish the thought, running past them into the box to pose a threat of their own.

With a yawning gap opening up between this pair and the forwards, the play began to fall apart like a clown’s car.

Oh how we need Steven Gerrard back in the side. Without him there is just not enough drive in the midfield to force the play when we need to, or indeed the goals to take the pressure off Suarez.

With Stevie we have a chance of making the top four; without him I fear the Europa Cup may be the height of our ambition.