How low can Liverpool go?

London: The best thing that can be said about Liverpool's defeat in the Merseyside derby is that Roy Hodgson's side were better than they had been in their previous game, a loss at home to Blackpool.

That, though, is not saying much. Hodgson has been in football long enough to know that he will carry the can for everything that has gone wrong with Liverpool's start to the season.

Lying 19th in the Premier League, that is the nature of the game.

The problem, though, runs deeper than that. Liverpool are paying the price for relying so heavily for so long on two men: Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres.

For several years, they have turned to them to win games, to get them out of trouble. For years, they produced.

Suddenly, one of the two is proving ineffective.

It is Torres who is of concern. No player has ever become a superstar at Liverpool in such a short space of time.

Yet he has gone from being a world-beater to the sort of striker any defender would relish marking.

His game has always relied on pace and sharpness, and at the moment he has neither. Like Wayne Rooney, he looks as though he has never seen a football.

Catch 22

Hodgson is caught in a Catch-22 situation, because the only way to help Torres recapture the form with which he terrorised the rest of the Premier League for so long is to offer him the playing time he needs.

Every time he plays, though, he looks worse, loses a little bit more confidence and the problem becomes more entrenched.

There is an argument that Torres needs more help from his teammates, but he did not need that three years ago, when he was more than capable of picking the ball up and beating three men.

His confidence is so low now, though, that every time he received possession on Sunday, he looked to play it backwards. That is not the Fernando Torres of old.

And, because he has effectively been removed from the equation, Liverpool now find themselves looking to Gerrard to win games on his own.

Though he has played better than all his outfield teammates this season, he can no longer drag the club along by the force of his own will.

Yet there is nobody among the squad at Hodgson's disposal prepared to stand up and offer something extra, something different, when they stand on the edge of the abyss.

There are too many players who look good when things are going well, but seem resigned to being poor when everything is not so perfect.