Steven Gerrard is one of the quieter captains. For years, Jamie Carragher was the lungs of the Liverpool leadership duo. The skipper's dissatisfaction tended to be apparent in accusing glances, not harsh words. So there was something very significant when, in September's Champions League win over Ludogorets, Gerrard launched into a verbal attack on Simon Mignolet.
The immediate cause was a mix-up with Mamadou Sakho. The Belgian is far from alone in suffering a breakdown in communication with the error-prone Frenchman; it is an occupational hazard for anyone in the Liverpool defence. But it was more revealing of the attitudes toward Mignolet.
Gerrard can be a barometer at Anfield and, not for the first time, he summed up the views of many at the stadium. This was an indication of the irritation with the goalkeeper, a frustration that seems to be shared by teammates and supporters alike.
Patience is being exhausted. A Liverpool career that began so promisingly could end prematurely. The spectre of Victor Valdes looms large. Available and free, boasting ample experience of the pressures of playing for a big club and possessing the distribution that appeals to Brendan Rodgers' passing principles, everything points to the Spaniard being installed as Liverpool's next goalkeeper.
He ought to bring confidence and conviction, two qualities Mignolet fails to exude. Rodgers urged him to be more aggressive last month. The amiable Belgian is more diffident, which poses difficulties as Liverpool lack leaders at the back.
Dropping Mignolet won't suddenly make Martin Skrtel able to defend set pieces. Finding a goalkeeper who can command his 6-yard box and communicate with his centre-backs might have stopped Aston Villa and Basel from scoring, however.
Yet, in assessing a defence whose sole clean sheet this season came at Tottenham, it is a chicken-and-egg situation. Which came first: indecision among the outfield players or the inadequacies of the goalkeeper? Which is fixed most easily?
At any rate, after a 37 million-pound makeover of the back four, with 17 million pounds spent on the Spanish attacking full-backs Alberto Moreno and Javier Manquillo, and the 20 million-pound investment in Dejan Lovren, the supposed defensive lynchpin, Mignolet is the most vulnerable.
His has been a swift decline. His first four months in a Liverpool shirt were a success. His troubles date back to December, to the mistakes in consecutive games that allowed Alvaro Negredo, then of Manchester City, and Samuel Eto'o, a Chelsea player at the time, to score in successive 2-1 defeats for the Merseysiders. While Gerrard's infamous April slip has gone down as the deciding factor in the title race, earlier errors from other players may have cost more points.
To Mignolet's credit, he makes great saves, sometimes at vital moments; indeed, history repeated itself when, for the second successive season, Mignolet earned an opening-day win with a vital late stop, first blocking Stoke's Jonathan Walters' penalty and then tipping Southampton's Morgan Schneiderlin's full-blooded shot on to the bar.
Yet, his aversion to crosses and enduring set-piece frailties are problems; so, too, his inexperience as the sort of sweeper-keeper Liverpool want. The Belgian has a marked preference for staying on his line, while his mediocre big-game record is sadly familiar. It has been a failing of too many of less impressive signings at Anfield over recent years.
Maybe it is no surprise they have struggled with the tougher tests. A club with ambitions to be in the top four has recruited too few players who belong in the best quartet in the division. Mignolet represents a case in point: he ranks behind the Chelsea pair of Thibaut Courtois and Petr Cech, Tottenham's Hugo Lloris and Manchester United's David de Gea, to name but four.
And perhaps lacking the personality -- some would say ego -- the goalkeepers at elite clubs require, his defensive statistics have changed little from his Sunderland days; he let in 65 goals in his last 45 league games for the Black Cats and has conceded a mere 60 in 45 with Liverpool.
He has entered a phase, too, where it is easy to find fault. He only saved one of the 16 penalties he faced against Middlesbrough, for instance, while Gary Neville highlighted his habit of crouching when anticipating a shot, more in the style of a baseball catcher or a cricketing wicketkeeper than a football goalkeeper, when suggesting he might have been able to save Phil Jagielka's superlative Merseyside derby equaliser. On that occasion, at least, Mignolet ought to be spared blame. Yet it is hard to escape the feeling that, when looking for the best goalkeeper at one of the Premier League's mid-ranking clubs in 2013, Liverpool should have bought Stoke's Asmir Begovic.
It also amounts to a failure when, a mere 14 months after Mignolet's debut, Rodgers is likely to revisit a problem Liverpool had hoped to resolve for years. Pepe Reina's excessive wages and ever more frequent blunders meant they were right to sideline the Spaniard, even if they surely anticipated receiving more than 2 million pounds for the World Cup winner; an ability to command the fees they would want is another regular occurrence.
In the bigger picture, Reina -- the more reliable 2006-10 version -- probably remains Liverpool's best keeper of the Premier League era. Over the past two decades, others have delivered brilliant displays -- Jerzy Dudek's wobbly-legged heroics in Istanbul the most obvious example -- or succeeded in the short term, as Sander Westerveld did, without giving the impression of permanence.
Over 16 years in the Liverpool team, Gerrard has seen quite a few keepers come and go, and Mignolet seems likely to be the next. Like Westerveld, he began well, but another man from the Low Countries has failed to live up to high expectations.