Liverpool transfer blunder is haunting the champions. They have lost their fear factor and £125m Alexander Isak looks like a kid playing  in a men's game, writes LEWIS STEELE

My phone was overheating in July and not just because I was using Apple Maps in an effort to navigate the humid setting of Hong Kong, trying to find a lunch spot in the futuristic metropolis of sky-scrapers that makes Canary Wharf look outdated.

It was also happening because ping, ping, ping came messages and posts online with a general sense of fury at an article I had written. 'Alexander Isak will be one of the signings of the summer,' it read. 'But buying defender Marc Guehi will be just as – if not more – important.'

I was called every name under the sun as, apparently, I was trying to put the Reds off signing Isak. There is a tangent we could fall into here about how online idiots get nasty over a simple opinion about a game of football and take criticism of their club personally, but we will save that.

Now, four months on from those musings on July 25, I ask the angry mob to think again and reconsider. Then and now, I still (maybe wrongly) believe Isak will go on to be a success for Liverpool. Defensive frailties are a bigger problem, though.

Whether Isak will live up to his £125million price-tag or not, let's wait and see, but he will come good. Probably anyway. He is signed for six years, not six months… class is permanent, form is temporary and all that.

Sadly, though, we can only analyse the here and now. And right now, playing with Isak is like playing with 10 men. He is a passenger. The Swede looks like an academy kid drafted into a men's game, fighting against the tide.

But more on Isak later. The 26-year-old striker is not the main problem right now. He is one of many on a list that, if anything, is only getting longer. We have discussed the old 'it can't go on like this, can it?' quote from Mick McCarthy before in these pages but, well, clearly it can.

Eight defeats in 11 now, if you had lost count. A negative goal difference. A gaping gap between them and league leaders Arsenal. Sean Dyche talked about how his Nottingham Forest team did all the 'basics' and the former Evertonian's ex-rivals cannot get any of those basics right.

Dyche's successor across Merseyside, David Moyes, once said a rather funny quote when his Manchester United side were in freefall which one thought of this weekend. 'We would like to pass it better, we would like to create more chances and to defend better,' he said.

So improve everything then. It is the same for Liverpool now. They cannot defend and they cannot put their chances away. Maybe some of that is luck but, overall, it is a deep-lying problem.

This defeat by Nottingham Forest was the most embarrassing of the Slot era and the second-half performance was the worst in recent memory. Not a single player came out of it with credit but the worst of the bunch was Ibrahima Konate, not for the first time this season.

The French defender last season was a formidable force alongside Virgil van Dijk. Run at us if you dare, thou shalt not pass. Now he is a walking, talking mistake waiting to happen. Attack us all you like, we will roll over and let you play pretty patterns through our back line.

Slot, though, has so far been reluctant to give deputy defender Joe Gomez a chance in the XI. Surely the Englishman, the club's longest-serving player, cannot do any worse than Konate and deserves a game or two to prove himself?

Liverpool sold Jarell Quansah to Bayer Leverkusen in the summer for £35m. He has since been a regular for the German side and is well-liked by England boss Thomas Tuchel. Was it a mistake to sell him?

All of this is easy to say in hindsight, especially as the Reds signed Italian defender Giovanni Leoni from Parma in August for £26m only for him to suffer an anterior cruciate ligament injury and be ruled out for the season. That is nothing other than rotten luck.

But what was not bad luck was Crystal Palace pulling the plug on a deal for Marc Guehi at the 11th-hour of Deadline Day on a move that was 99 per cent done. Liverpool had all summer to sign the Palace captain but did not act until the final days.

The fact it was not a done deal until Deadline Day – handshakes had been made, medicals underway until Palace chairman Steve Parish pulled the plug – was due to Liverpool knowing the later they waited, the more likely the Eagles would be to reduce their price.

Three months on, that dilly-dallying looks costly. As we wrote at the time, Guehi would walk into this Liverpool XI. But then again, so would most players in the Premier League based on the performances of the last two months.

An attempt at a joke there, of course, but it is no joke to say most teams in the league look well-drilled and well-coached whereas Liverpool just look clueless. Slot has credit in the bank still but how long before questions must be asked over his job security?

For now, it is secure. After all, he is a Premier League champion. Since being knocked out of the Champions League by Paris Saint-Germain in March, though, something has changed. They have won 14 of 30 games in that time including that defeat by the French side.

Scoring goals is a problem, too. Isak has lost every single league start and, 82 days into his Liverpool career, one goal in the Carabao Cup against second-tier Southampton is just not good enough. Yes, he has mitigating factors but when you cost £125m, it is hard to find sympathy.

There is a catch 22 with Isak: don't play him and he does not get match sharpness, play him and he is just not good enough yet. Hugo Ekitike's early-season form has dipped but the Frenchman, who scored over the international break, must have been irked to miss out.

Have teams just worked out how to play against Liverpool? Well, yes, as Slot worryingly admitted at Brentford a month ago. That defeat to the Bees was the worst of the run but this 3-0 at the hands of Forest now takes that tag given it was at so-called fortress Anfield.

Teams used to fear coming to Liverpool. Now the champions just bend over and take their beating. Slot took English football by storm but now is blown over several times a month and some fans are calling for his head.

Are they right or wrong? A month ago you would call those supporters bonkers, now they are still perhaps premature but not completely mad. Liverpool, it is worth saying, still believe he is the man to lead them out of this spiral.

Slot described Liverpool's recent form as a 'bad cocktail' of missing their own chances and conceding with every opportunity at the other end. Fair enough, maybe, but if results do not improve then he will need a cocktail of some very strong stuff.