Had they been told in August that they would go into the October international break unbeaten in the Barclays Premier League, a point ahead of Chelsea and with a vastly superior goal difference, the Liverpool players would have been giddy with excitement. As it is, they trudged off to join their respective national teams in a state of mind that lurked somewhere between disappointment and alarm.

On Sunday evening, after a stoppage-time equaliser from Fernando Torres had earned a 2-2 draw with Tottenham Hotspur at Anfield, a handful of them, including Steven Gerrard, the captain, headed into Liverpool city centre to attend the grand opening of Jamie Carragher’s new sports bar. But, as a glum-faced Gerrard stopped to speak to reporters on his way in, it appeared that the mood was less Jamie Carragher than James Callaghan. Crisis, what crisis?

“We haven’t been ourselves of late,” Gerrard said. “The results haven’t been good and the performances could have been better. We’re going through a dip in form, which all top teams do at some stage, and we just have to make sure we play our way through it. We’re not performing to the standards we can do, but that will change.

“I’m asking the fans to trust me when I say there’s no crisis here. We have fantastic players and a world-class manager and we will get things right again. There’s no doubt about that.”

Liverpool are fourth in the Premier League with four wins and four draws from eight matches, but those bare statistics cannot conceal an alarming dip in performance level. Most worrying of all has been their form in the Champions League, in which they were lucky to earn a 1-1 draw away to FC Porto before falling to a 1-0 home defeat by Marseilles last Tuesday.

Gerrard has been far from immune from the malaise that has swept the team, having struggled to reproduce his best form since being asked to play with a broken toe for both Liverpool and England last month. Similarly, Carragher and Steve Finnan, arguably the two most consistent players at the club, have suffered rare dips in form while Torres, his goal on Sunday notwithstanding, has been below his best in the past two games.

It all adds up to a conundrum with which Rafael BenÍtez, the manager, will wrestle during the two-break hiatus from Premier League action, but there is a growing feeling among supporters that, rather than further tinkering, what is needed is for his team to get back to basics and for the manager to establish an air of stability in terms of his team selection rather than indulge in excessive rotation.

The portents, however, do not point towards a more settled team, with BenÍtez defiant last week in the face of growing criticism of his selection policy.

With many of his players appearing in two international matches over the next nine days, some of them travelling to far-flung corners of Europe and, in the cases of Mohamed Sissoko and Javier Mascherano, to Africa and South America, BenÍtez is already giving a lot of thought to his team for the match away to Everton on October 20, four days before a must-win Champions League tie against Besiktas in Istanbul.

The handful of players who have been overlooked by their countries will figure prominently in BenÍtez’s thoughts for the game at Goodison Park, such as Álvaro Arbeloa, Fabio Aurélio, Jermaine Pennant and Lucas Leiva, the Brazilian who has been left out of his national squad because of his lack of first-team action since joining Liverpool from Grêmio in the summer.

But at least BenÍtez is hopeful that Xabi Alonso will be fit to return to action against Everton, having been sorely missed since suffering a fractured metatarsal four weeks ago. Daniel Agger, the Denmark defender, also hopes to step up his rehabilitation in the next fortnight, having been side-lined by a similar injury.