One month ago, I wrote about how Liverpool’s Brazilian playmaker Philippe Coutinho was a good, sometimes very good player, but didn’t affect games consistently enough to be considered great. I wrote:

“The fact that the Brazilian is the best player at a club of Liverpool’s ‘stature’ must be worrying. There was never any doubt that Luis Suarez was a great player, constantly influencing games in a variety of ways, or Gerrard at his peak. When it became a case of if not them then nobody, at least it was a comfort to fans that ‘they’ were extremely capable.”

Now six league games into the English domestic season, those comments look prescient. Coutinho has undoubtedly been Liverpool’s best player this season, but too often it seems like he has looked around him and decided that if he didn’t pull the game by the scruff of the neck, nobody else was good enough to. Scousers are used to seeing Steven Gerrard or Luis Suárez try to play Roy Race, the Roy of the Rovers comic book star who saved his team match after match by ignoring his teammates of lesser ability and taking shots from anywhere and everywhere, dominating the ball. But at their peak Luis Suárez and Gerrard were a world away from where Coutinho is now.

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During Liverpool’s best season in recent memory, 2013-14, Coutinho realized that he was playing with a pair of forwards in Daniel Sturridge and Luis Suárez that would consistently score if they received enough service. He understood his role as a facilitator of offensive moves, not a finisher. In 33 league appearances that season, he created 64 chances, almost two a game. Even last season, when Steven Gerrard and Raheem Sterling were around him, he created 58 chances in 35 appearances, a drop but not a huge one.

However those players have now gone, and for the second season in a row there has been a lot of player turnover. Having arrived in January 2013, Coutinho is now one of the clubs longest serving players, and perhaps when he looks up with the ball and sees all these fresh faces, he feels a responsibility to go it alone and make something happen the same way Gerrard or Suárez did. This season Coutinho has only created 3 chances in 5 starts, but he’s been bashing out 5.6 shots per game, according to WhoScored — almost two shots per game more than last season, with quite a few being low-percentage options from outside the penalty area.

On Sunday in the 1-1 draw against Norwich City, he had 12 shots according to Opta’s StatsZone, but only put two on target. Four of his shots were well outside the box, and he created just a single chance. Alberto Moreno, a wing-back created six. And Lucas Leiva, the most defensive midfielder Liverpool have, created three.

The most glaring example of Coutinho getting his head down and being determined to go it alone, despite it being the worse option, was when set free by Roberto Firmino down the right-hand channel late in the game. With Danny Ings running alongside him and free for a tap-in if Coutinho had squared the ball, the Brazilian chose to aim an effort from the side of the goal and fired straight at Norwich goalkeeper John Ruddy.

Yes, Christian Benteke has looked isolated and starved of service, and his goals this season have hardly been down to Liverpool’s offensive game-plan. And Sturridge looked understandably rusty after making his first appearance for 163 days. But Liverpool played with two strikers for most of the game Sunday, and with Firmino starting on the bench and Coutinho behind them, his sole responsibility should have been to feed them. If Coutinho is constantly looking to shoot or run with the ball when in possession, that means he is not doing what this team needs most of all, incisive passing and through-balls to encourage and reward players for making runs beyond the opposition defense.

In six league games this season, Liverpool have scored four times. One goal was offside and shouldn’t have stood. Two goals have been screamers that nobody could legislate for. And Ings’ against Norwich was due to the opposition gifting Moreno the ball in their own half. Liverpool’s offensive game plan, the passing patterns and moves that they work on in the training ground, has not produced anything tangible yet, despite promising signs on Sunday. A large part of this is because the player who should be the fulcrum of these sequences is taking all the shots rather than setting them up.