Jurgen Klopp concedes Mohamed Salah is ‘suffering’ in Liverpool’s front line.
Salah remains the Anfield club’s leading scorer this season, with 17 in all competitions, but has been noticeably off-key since the turn of the new year.
Compounding the Egyptian’s malaise is a lack of cohesion with Luis Diaz and Darwin Nunez, with the trio playing only 343 combined minutes together.
The Reds are also still awaiting the returns of fellow forwards Roberto Firmino and Diogo Jota, both expected to join training again in the next fortnight.
And Klopp believes that the current disruption to a previously fluid attack is an inevitable consequence of the disruption it has faced in the past few months.
He said: “Of course they’re suffering. It was a well-drilled machine, the front three. With everything, it was clear what we were doing.
“I didn’t know [how many] minutes they had together. Diogo was not even in that combination and Bobby so not helpful. Everybody suffers from it.
“The offensive play is individual quality but it’s [also] a lot of work, a lot of information, how to move and not obvious information.
“You create a feeling about the things, where your teammate is and where you can pass the ball, no-look or whatever. Yes, of course that’s not cool.
“But that’s why I say we cannot expect to just be back to our best, win 5-0 and go to the next game. We have to work hard.
“Nobody wants to hear it but we have to do it. In two, three weeks, a couple of other options are back again so there are more options and we can mix it up.
“With Cody [Gakpo] obviously we have a really important asset, like a connector. He can play on the wing but he can play in the centre as well.
“When Darwin is playing there he’s obviously more high up, going in behind, so all different things. It was clear that we never played with a no.9 before.
“Even when Sadio [Mane] played on the position, he was dropping in these moments – but that’s not Darwin’s game.
“It’s all good if they would all be in and you could build something but we couldn’t do that yet.”