Said this before: Endlessly denigrating the squad to shield Frank is a dangerous game, a slippery slope whose logical conclusion would be to commit to a kind of revisionism regarding last season and the previous manager as well. Do it at your risk.
Focusing specifically on Solanke, Son, Maddison and Kulusevski would be the obvious cop-out since they were mostly available last season unlike this season, but then none of these guys were held in that high of a regard. Son was washed, Maddison was a fairweather player, Kulusevski was a one footed plodder, and Solanke was just running around a bit.
So their absences can't be that bad.
Hint: There's an easy way out of this ostensible conundrum, which is to simply acknowledge that Frank is also not doing a good job. But if you, instead of staying grounded in your support and belief initially, have already chosen him as your hill to die on for God knows why, then you cannot really back out now without losing face.
Some people, and maybe the same people in some cases, went through the exact same thing 12 months ago; and chose to escalate their commitment to the manager at the expense of embarrassing themselves further.