Why Bournemouth match could be an odd acid test for Philippe Coutinho

Midway through Saturday’s Merseyside derby, as Philippe Coutinho waltzed half the length of the pitch, skipped around his marker and clipped an exquisite shot into the Everton goal, two things came to mind. The first was that Liverpool’s capacity to rise to the occasion under Jurgen Klopp is something else, and that their failure to carry out a genuine title charge is squarely due to their failure in the games that logic suggests should have reaped simple wins.

The second was that Coutinho was patently operating at a level above anyone else and wasn’t shy of showing it. Like peak Roger Federer breezing through in the early rounds of a grand slam, or Eminem laying down his verse on those old D12 tracks, Coutinho’s performance made a mockery of the notion that the people around him were supposed to be his peers.

His goal was a high-end technical feat, but was made all the more impressive by the casual, almost lackadaisical manner with which he did it. It was evidence that the Brazilian, at his best, possesses the sort of talent that can really hammer home opponents’ inferiority. He is not quite as lethal as Fernando Torres or Luis Suarez were at their peak, but he carries that same threat: the ability to create a goal for himself in the blink of an eye, especially against middling opposition.

These two points are a tad paradoxical. If Coutinho is such an effective flat-track bully, why is it that his team have been so desperate against the minnows?

Part of the answer is his fitness – Liverpool’s woeful midwinter coincided with his time out with, and slow return from, an ankle injury – but for the most part, it’s about consistency. What currently separates Coutinho from the likes of Suarez and Torres is not the heights he’s able to reach, but how often he’s able to reach them.

In this sense, Liverpool’s No 10 is cursed by the nature of his position. Given that the playmaker’s remit is essentially to carry out the hardest single task on the pitch – to unlock a defence – it’s almost inescapable that performances will oscillate between ineffectual and match-winning. There’s a reason that football parlance has settled on the term ‘mercurial’ as the playmaker’s go-to descriptive – inconsistency is inherent in the job.

There are different interpretations of the No 10 role, but none are without a downside. Some playmakers, like David Silva or Juan Mata, focus less on producing spectacular moments, instead looking to control the rhythm of a game and steadily puppeteer their side’s attacks. On the whole those players tend to be more involved, and more consistent – but they’re also far less decisive.

On the other hand, there are players like Coutinho – and, elsewhere in the Premier League, Paul Pogba, Riyad Mahrez and Ross Barkley – whose interventions are less frequent, but very often pivotal. Only a tiny handful of this breed of player are able to play with any real degree of consistency, and they’re the ones – Gareth Bale, Arjen Robben, Eden Hazard – who belong to the bona fide elite. (And the fact that even Hazard, for instance, is no model of reliability is as much a symptom of the nature of his position than his application or attitude.)

Which is all a roundabout way of saying that Coutinho’s zigzagging form, while frustrating, is no crime, simply a sign that he’s not quite among the world’s best at what he does.

It also means that the links with Barcelona that have trailed him round for the past couple of years are probably more smoke than fire. Oddly, though, the proof that he could cut it at that level will come not in his capacity to pull a rabbit out of the hat in a showpiece game but in the ability to do so in more mundane surroundings, three or four weeks on the trot. Like his team as a whole, his taking the next step up means being able to trample on those a few levels below.

And with Liverpool’s remaining eight games all coming against sides from the division’s bottom two-thirds, there is still scope this season for Coutinho to make a case for his place among the elite. To that end, tonight’s visit of Bournemouth – a humdrum top-flight fixture if there ever was one – is a strange sort of acid test.