Heading into Sunday's Premier League game against Brentford, Liverpool's midfield appeared to pick itself. Wataru Endo was the clear candidate to start at number six, with Alexis Mac Allister suspended and Curtis Jones out injured, and Dominik Szoboszlai and Harvey Elliott were the only available number eights after Ryan Gravenberch sustained a minor issue too.

However, Jurgen Klopp decided to go a different way, surprisingly naming Cody Gakpo in a midfield role and leaving Elliott on the bench. This may have been down to the fact that the latter had played all 100 minutes or so in France on Thursday as Liverpool went down 3-2 to Toulouse in the Europa League, while the former had come off around half an hour before the end.

It may also have been tailored to this particular opponent - indeed, this was the first time that Gakpo had started alongside Diogo Jota, Darwin Nunez and Mohamed Salah since this same fixture last season, when he first appeared as an eight. Brentford is one of the most direct and physical teams in the league, and that lent itself more to the 6ft 2in Gakpo than the comparatively slight Elliott.

Either way, Klopp's snub would have been immensely frustrating for Elliott. He has only started one Premier League match all season (and even then he came off at half-time against Brighton last month) and he couldn't even get into the XI amid a pile-up of injuries.

On the surface, the Gakpo call worked in the sense that Liverpool scored three goals and kept a clean sheet. But when you dig a little deeper, you see that the Dutchman struggled to impact the game.

He ranked down in eighth among Liverpool's outfielders for both touches (41) and passes completed (29) and wasn't able to create a single chance. It wasn't as if he was especially effective on the other side of the ball either given that he only made one tackle and one interception.

Wherever you are in the world - in the US, the UK or further afield - you don't want to miss out.

This has been a recurring theme in our limited glimpses of Gakpo as an eight. The 24-year-old started there in the first two games of the season against Chelsea and Bournemouth, but placed last among Liverpool's starting outfielders for touches in both games, and completed fewer passes than substitute Curtis Jones in the first. Even when you include Sunday's match, Gakpo has only managed a cumulative 0.4 expected goal contributions in the role, which shows that he's struggling to offer the kind of offensive threat Klopp would surely have expected when redeploying his false nine.

While there were promising signs against Brentford last season, the games since suggest that it's now time to abandon the Gakpo midfield experiment, and instead show trust in someone like Elliott in these scenarios.

The Englishman has predominantly served as a super-sub this season, a role he's carried out very well to his credit, but even though he only came on in the final 10 minutes on Sunday, his prospects of starting games may actually have improved.