Goalscorer Mason Mount claims Chelsea exposed Liverpool's biggest weakness in the 1-0 win at Anfield on Thursday night.
Thomas Tuchel's side earned all three points to pile yet further misery on Jurgen Klopp.
Liverpool have now lost five straight home games - for the first time in the club's history - in what has been an increasingly woeful defence of their Premier League title.
The Reds are now embroiled in a fight for the top four, currently sitting in seventh, four points off the Champions League places.
Speaking after their latest loss, Sky Sports' Jamie Redknapp noticed a worrying theme to Liverpool's games this season.
"Last year, Liverpool were a pressing machine," he said. "Right now, teams are doing that to them."
And it certainly seems as though Redknapp's declaration has some basis.
At full-time, Mount revealed how Tuchel instructed his Chelsea side to press Liverpool high, and to put a defensive line on its 19th centre-back partnership of the season, under immediate pressure.
"The game plan was to press them high and not let them have the ball," said Mount.
"We had to be brave and try and win the ball up high.
"Most of the time they defend high and that is where the goal came from."
It's a brutal taste of their own medicine for Liverpool who suffered defeat in the same manner they won so many games last season.
It leaves Kop boss Klopp with a mammoth task of picking up his players' morale and going again against Fulham on Sunday.
"I don’t say the boys didn’t show heart, I know what they invest and all these kind of things but we talk about the last [and] decisive two, three, four per cent and it will never happen that we will start blaming or whatever the circumstances," said Klopp at full-time.
"That’s just not the case, we had a good team, a really good team, tonight on the pitch and played in a lot of moments good football but not in decisive moments good enough.
"There is only one person or group to criticise for that [and] that’s me and us. That’s what I told the boys."
