Liverpool 'gave up' in FA Cup exit - Van Dijk

Liverpool captain Virgil van Dijk's admission that his side "gave up" during their 4-0 FA Cup quarter-final defeat at Manchester City is the kind of verdict that echoes far beyond the scoreline. Captains apologise. Leaders rarely tell the public their team stopped competing.

The collapse at the Etihad Stadium was surgical in its brutality. All four goals arrived in an 18-minute span either side of half-time, transforming a balanced contest into an embarrassment. Erling Haaland scored a hat-trick, his 28th career treble and 12th for City, with a penalty in the 39th minute, a stoppage-time header, and a 57th-minute finish. Antoine Semenyo added a third in the 50th minute, latching onto Rayan Cherki's pass before Haaland had even completed his treble.

The origin of the collapse is traceable to a single moment: Van Dijk's foul on Nico O'Reilly in the 39th minute, which referee Michael Oliver punished with a penalty. Haaland dispatched it past Giorgi Mamardashvili without hesitation. The statistic attached to that concession carries its own indictment. Van Dijk has now given away as many penalties in this single season as he did across his entire first eight years as a Liverpool player combined.

"I can only apologise to the fans for what we have shown, especially the second half," Van Dijk said. "Obviously you come out with the right intentions from the dressing room, to hopefully score for 2-1 as soon as possible to change the game. The opposite happens and to come back from 3-0 is obviously very difficult here, but also you shouldn't give up and that's maybe, at a certain point, what happened."

That the admission came from the captain makes it a culture question, not merely a tactical one. Van Dijk linked the collapse to a broader fracture in the squad: "The main thing we always had was togetherness. Now obviously we are in a little bit of a transition, we have to find it. It's difficult to perform every two days if you don't have it consistently."

The season's numbers support that diagnosis. Liverpool have won just two of the 19 games in which they have fallen behind. They sit fifth in the Premier League, having dropped points in 17 of their 31 league games, and across three meetings with Manchester City this season they have shipped nine goals. Saturday's loss was their 15th defeat of the campaign, their heaviest margin since October 2020.

Arne Slot, watching from the stands under a touchline ban, was unsparing. "I missed the fighting spirit in the first 10 minutes after half-time," the Liverpool manager said. "In that 10, 15 minutes we missed the fighting spirit, the willingness to win our duels or to make it difficult to pass, to cross, to finish. That is something we definitively have to do better on Wednesday." Slot, who won the Premier League title with Liverpool in his debut season last year, called the result "an unbelievable disappointment."

Midfielder Dominik Szoboszlai offered no mitigation: "The fighting spirit wasn't there enough; the mentality wasn't there enough. None of us were there to be honest, as much as we could."

Mohamed Salah's afternoon added a particular weight to the occasion. Playing his first game since announcing his end-of-season departure, he squandered early chances alongside Hugo Ekitike and had a consolation penalty saved by James Trafford when the score was already 4-0.

For Manchester City, the win extended their own records still further. It was their 18th consecutive FA Cup home win, surpassing a 150-year-old mark set by Clapham Rovers between 1873 and 1881, and it booked a record-extending eighth consecutive semi-final trip to Wembley. Pep Guardiola, himself serving a touchline ban, has never lost an FA Cup home game as City manager. City also won the EFL Cup a fortnight earlier, beating Arsenal 2-0.

With the FA Cup gone and the Carabao Cup already surrendered earlier in the campaign, Liverpool's season now rests entirely on the Champions League quarter-final first leg against Paris Saint-Germain in Paris on Wednesday, April 8. Van Dijk's obligation before then is less about formation and more about recovering in the dressing room what he himself admitted has gone missing.