Liverpool 0-0 Fulham: Four Big Chances, Zero Goals, and a Very Real Problem for Iraola
Liverpool created four clear-cut chances against Fulham. They scored none of them. That single fact explains more about this goalless draw than the scoreline ever could.
Andoni Iraola has now taken charge of four Premier League games at Anfield and won precisely none of them. On paper, that sentence should belong to a manager whose team can't create anything. In practice, Liverpool out-shot Fulham 14 to 10, out-xG'd them 1.13 to 0.71, and manufactured four big chances to Fulham's one. They just didn't take any of them.
That contradiction — control without conversion — is the entire story of this match. And it's a more uncomfortable story for Liverpool than a straightforward defeat would have been, because there's no obvious villain. No individual mistake. No red card. Just four gilt-edged opportunities, and four times the ball didn't go in.
Liverpool created 4 big chances against Fulham. They converted 0. It's the kind of statistic that either gets fixed by mid-October, or becomes the defining problem of Iraola's opening months at Anfield.
How the 90 Minutes Actually Played Out
Liverpool gave Bradley Barcola his first Premier League start, and the early signs were promising when Alexander Isak was slipped in by the Frenchman — only for the Swede to drag his effort wide across goal. It was a preview of the afternoon: a decent chance, a wasteful finish.
Fulham, under new manager Álvaro Arbeloa, were the braver side for large stretches of the first half. Ryan Gravenberch was dispossessed after a short pass from Alisson, Josh King had a penalty shout waved away, and Gonzalo García's follow-up shot was hacked off the line by Jérémy Jacquet — a moment that, in hindsight, set the tone for the Frenchman's entire evening. Bernd Leno also had to get down well to keep out a Víctor Muñoz header, while Florian Wirtz twice found the wrong side of the post.
The second half told a different story territorially. Liverpool's possession rose from 53% to 60%, their xG output nearly doubled to 0.75, and Iraola's changes — Milos Kerkez, Cody Gakpo and Alexis Mac Allister all coming on — gave the attack more presence in the half-spaces. But Leno kept saving things, parrying a Mac Allister drive and getting down to deny Isak from close range. At the other end, Alisson was just as busy, tipping a King effort wide after the Fulham forward slipped mid-curl, and standing tall against a Calvin Bassey header.
By the time Rio Ngumoha failed to connect with a Jeremie Frimpong cross in stoppage time, the pattern was set in stone. Liverpool had done almost everything a team needs to do to win a football match — except score.
Both sides lined up in a 4-2-3-1, which meant the game was rarely won or lost on structural mismatches. Instead it came down to execution in the final third — and specifically, to who blinked first in one-on-one moments with the goalkeeper. On this occasion, neither team blinked at all.
The Numbers Liverpool Won't Want to See
Strip away the scoreline and the underlying picture is lopsided. Liverpool controlled 56% of possession across the 90 minutes, completed 413 of 495 attempted passes to Fulham's 303 of 394, and made 70 entries into the final third compared to Fulham's 46. Their long-ball accuracy was excellent too — 58% completion against a Fulham figure of just 23%.
What those numbers don't answer is a question that has followed Iraola since he arrived: is this a genuine chance-creation problem, or the kind of finishing slump that simply corrects itself over a run of games? The honest answer is that it's too early to know for certain — but it's not too early to say the pattern is now worth watching. Liverpool have drawn three of their first four league games under their new manager, and blank finishing nights like this one are becoming the throughline.
Fulham, for their part, will take real encouragement from the shape of the numbers even without the ball. They won the touches-in-the-box battle 24-18, took more corners (8-5), and covered more ground overall (118.4km to Liverpool's 112.1km) — a sign that Arbeloa's team worked hard without the ball and stayed compact enough to make Liverpool's dominance largely sterile.
First Half vs Second Half: Where the Game Actually Turned
| Phase | Liverpool xG | Fulham xG | Shots | Possession (Liverpool) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First Half | 0.38 | 0.40 | 6-5 | 53% |
| Second Half | 0.75 | 0.31 | 8-5 | 60% |
Notice that in the first half, Fulham actually edged the expected-goals battle. It was genuinely even, and arguably could have gone Fulham's way with a slightly better final ball from King or a cleaner connection from Muñoz. Liverpool's dominance was very much a second-half phenomenon, built on Iraola's changes and a clear shift toward attacking down the right through Frimpong and the newly introduced Kerkez.
Jérémy Jacquet: The Best Player on a Night Without Goals
If there's one individual story from this match that deserves to travel beyond the final score, it's the performance of Jérémy Jacquet. The 21-year-old was rated the best player on the pitch, ahead of Alisson, ahead of Virgil van Dijk, ahead of everyone in a Fulham shirt too.
What makes Jacquet's evening notable isn't just the volume of actions — it's where those actions happened. His goal-line clearance in the first half was the most obvious contribution, the kind of moment that swings a match's entire outcome. But the supporting numbers matter just as much: nine of his fifteen long passes found their target, he won eight of his nine duels, and he still had the concentration to make a key block late on as Fulham chased the game.
Jacquet's goal-line clearance from Gonzalo García's shot, in a first half where Fulham were arguably the better side, is the single moment that turned a possible Liverpool defeat into a draw.
It's a reminder that in games this tight, the difference between one point and zero — or one point and three — often comes down to a defender doing his job perfectly rather than a forward doing something spectacular.
Formation Battle: Two 4-2-3-1s Cancelling Each Other Out
Tactically, this was a match of mirrors. Both Iraola and Arbeloa set their teams up in a 4-2-3-1, which meant the contest was rarely decided by a structural surprise — nobody caught the other side out with an unexpected extra man in midfield or a back-three switch. Instead, the game hinged on the details within that shared shape.
In build-up, Liverpool leaned heavily on switches and half-space combinations in the second half, which explains the jump in both possession share and xG after the break. Fulham's defensive approach — dropping into a compact block and conceding territory in exchange for structure — meant Liverpool had the ball far more often but frequently in areas that didn't immediately threaten Leno's goal.
Fulham's own attacking approach relied far more on directness. Their long-ball completion rate of just 23% wasn't a sign of poor execution so much as a deliberate strategy — going long and playing for second balls and transitions rather than trying to build patiently against a well-organized Liverpool press. It's a pragmatic approach for a side that had lost their first three league games of the season, and on this evidence, it worked well enough to leave Anfield with something.
In the duels and defensive numbers, the picture is nuanced. Liverpool dominated in the air (13 of 19 aerial duels won) and edged the overall duel count 53-47, but Fulham actually won more ground duels, 28 to 26. That split tells its own story: Liverpool's control was partly aerial and partly about who won loose-ball recoveries, while Fulham found their moments in scrappier, closer-quarters situations.
Title: "Two 4-2-3-1s: Where the Match Was Actually Won"
Purpose: Visualize the phase-by-phase xG and possession shift, plus the duel breakdown (aerial vs ground), in one shareable graphic.
Key Data: First-half xG 0.38-0.40, second-half xG 0.75-0.31, aerial duels 13-6, ground duels 26-28.
Layout: Split-screen pitch diagram, Liverpool on the left in red tones, Fulham on the right in black/white tones, with a central "swing" bar chart showing the first-half-to-second-half shift.
Design Direction: Dark editorial background (#0B0F14), single accent red (#E63946), minimal typography, Cooling Break watermark bottom-right.
Suggested Image-Generation Prompt: "Dark modern football analytics infographic, split-pitch diagram comparing two teams in 4-2-3-1 formation, red accent color on black background, clean editorial sports design, minimalist data visualization style"
History Repeating: Liverpool's Anfield Alarm Bells
Individually, none of these numbers would be alarming. Together, they start to look like a pattern. Liverpool have now drawn four consecutive Premier League games at Anfield, something that hasn't happened since November 2011 under Kenny Dalglish. Going back a season, this is only the third time in 63 top-flight campaigns that Liverpool have failed to win either of their first two home league games — and the first time ever they've drawn both.
None of this means crisis. Liverpool are still unbeaten under their new manager in the league games that matter most for context, and the underlying numbers in this match suggest a team creating enough to win most weeks. But football has a way of turning "we should have won that" into "why can't we win at home" if the finishing doesn't improve soon, and Iraola knows it better than anyone.
The Bigger Picture for Iraola and Arbeloa
For Fulham, this point matters more than the underlying numbers suggest. Arbeloa arrived to a difficult start — three straight defeats to open the season, a run matched only twice before in the club's Premier League history, in 1951-52 and 2020-21, both of which ended in relegation. A first point, even one built on 44% possession and a heavy underdog's set of underlying numbers, eases some of that early pressure. They've still won only one of their last twelve away league games, but a clean sheet at Anfield against a side missing four big chances is a genuinely good defensive shift, whatever the possession stats say.
Was this Liverpool's best 90 minutes under Iraola so far, undone purely by finishing? Or is the pattern of home draws starting to reveal something more structural about how they create and convert chances? The numbers support the first reading. The results support the second.
Conclusion: Control Without a Payoff
Take away the scoreboard and Liverpool were the better team on Saturday — clearly so, by shots, by xG, by territory, by chances created. Take away everything except the scoreboard, and it's still a Liverpool side without a home league win in four attempts under a new manager. Both of those things are true at once, and that tension is exactly why this result matters more than a routine goalless draw usually would.
Jérémy Jacquet's afternoon was the individual highlight, a reminder that defensive discipline can be just as decisive as attacking talent when finishing lets a team down. For Iraola, the challenge now is straightforward to describe and much harder to solve: keep creating four big chances a game, and eventually, some of them have to go in.
Related reading: check out our breakdown of Iraola's tactical setup since arriving at Liverpool, and see how Fulham's start compares in our Premier League bottom-half power rankings.