As a Liverpool fan I guess I should be feeling pretty happy right now. Afterall, we managed to get to the international break unbeaten, joint top of the league and safely through to the group stage of the CL, but despite all of this I find that I have mixed emotions about things on the pitch at the moment, and developments off the pitch have me feeling downright depressed!
On the pitch and in regards to our game against Villa at the weekend, I think that if the club is really struggling for finances than maybe they should try to bottle our performance in that game and sell it as a miracle cure for insomnia, they’d make a bloody fortune! If we don’t play well in a game but still manage to win than I’m happy to focus on the positives and if we do play well in a game but don’t manage to win than I would also tend to focus on the positives, but when we don’t play well, don’t win and don’t even manage to get a shot on target, then I can’t really see anything to feel happy about. 
I know a lot of people may say that as we were without Steven Gerrard and we also lost Fernando Torres early in the game, and that the game was at a tough ground like Villa Park, so maybe we should be happy to get out of there with a point, but I don’t agree. I can’t help feeling that this was a missed opportunity for us and I just hope we don’t end up regretting it. The chavs drawing with Spurs earlier in the day, I thought would have provided us with an extra incentive to really push for the three points and open up an early lead at the top of the table.
I know it’s still very early days in the season but these teams just don’t drop that many points and on the rare occasions that they do I think we’ve got to be doing everything we can to take advantage of the situation, particularly if we are aiming to seriously challenge them at the top. That’s what disappointed me most about the game, even without Gerrard and Torres in the side I still think we are extremely well capable of beating Villa at their own ground, but we just didn’t do enough on the day to earn the points.
I’m full of admiration for Rafa and all of the great work he has done and continues to do at this club under very difficult circumstances, the man is a diamond, but even diamonds have their flaws. On this occasion I thought he overcooked things on the tactical front and we were a bit too over cautious in our approach. With all due respects to Villa, I would expect us to adopt this kind of approach if we were playing an away leg at the Nou Camp in the CL but playing at Villa Park, tough and all that it is, I would have expected us to open up a bit more and take the game to them.
My main frustrations in the game all centred around Ryan Babel. When Torres tweaked his hamstring early in the game I felt certain that Babel would be brought on and Keane would move into the centre, so I was more than a little surprised to see Eggnog coming on. Then on the hour when Kuyt was withdrawn, again I felt certain that Flyin Ryan or even El Zhar would be brought on to spark a bit of life into our attack but instead of this we brought on another bloody defender!
I was surprised to see Keane taken off with 15 minutes to go but again I was certain that Babel would finally make an appearance, but alas Benny Onion was brought on instead. It’s not that I think Babel has reached superstar status as yet, but it’s difficult to see the logic in not bringing him on in a game where we were struggling to create any meaningful attacks because even if he’s having a stinker he is always likely to do something that can change a game, just as he did when he dug out that cross against Liege in midweek.
Still, I suppose 7 out of 9 points is a pretty decent haul for us to start the season with, especially considering how stale our early performances have been. On the plus side, defensively we looked as solid as ever and Mascherano looked to be in good shape and had a great game. So there’s all to play for when we meet the mancs at Anfield in our next game and fingers crossed that Gerrard and Torres make it in time.
In other matters it was great to see us finally completing the signing of Riera on the last day of the transfer window and hopefully he will prove to be the answer to our problems on the left wing. However, my happiness at this signing was overshadowed by my concern about the events at Man City. The fact that they have now been taken over by a middle east consortium that is estimated to be 50 times richer then Robbing Abrahmovitch, is very worrying indeed.
Judging by the events on the final day of the transfer window they are clearly not afraid to splash the cash. Other then managing to secure the signing of Robinho for £32.5 million, they also reportedly put in another five offers of more than £30 million for other players including a £50 million bid for our own Fernando Torres that was thankfully turned down.
Apparently every time the price of a barrel of oil increases by $2, these guys make an extra £500 million and with that kind of wealth they are set to turn the whole game on its head. When you consider that Rafa had to offload 2 or 3 players just so that he could bring in an £8 million winger it’s clear to see that we are mere paupers in comparison. We may not see the full effect of this development this season, although the January transfer window should be very interesting, but by next season these guys should have bought in enough big guns to be competing at the very top of the table.
Suddenly the “big four” has become a big five. These are changing times and we are now in real danger of dropping out of the CL places in the not too distant future if we don’t change with them. Things are bad enough for us at the moment, not only do we already have an uphill battle to catch the teams in front of us but we are also being regularly outspent by some of the teams coming up behind us. And with all the debt our American idiot owners have saddled the club with to enable them to build a fence on Stanley Park, we need the money from CL qualification just to make the payments on it and should we fail to qualify just once it could have disastrous consequences.
We are all relieved that the new Man City owners failed in their £50 million bid to buy Torres but I wouldn’t get too excited about it just yet. I’ve no doubt they will make a fresh bid for him when the January window comes around, and January also just happens to be the same time that this massive loan we’ve been saddled with comes up for renewal and should these guys start waving about £60 million under the noses of Hicks and Gillett, then who knows what might happen.
But perhaps this takeover of Man City might also work in our favour and help to accelerate the departure of these two clowns. Clearly the money these guys are capable of splashing around will drive up prices in the transfer market and with the two American clowns in charge of our club we just don’t have the financial muscle to compete with them. So if things stay as they are I think it’s likely we will drift out of the top four and without the revenue from the CL we might be lucky to stay in the top ten and then our revenues will continue to fall and so will the value of our club. So if these guys have even half a brain between them, which is debatable, then they should see that now is the optimum time for them to get out.
In an ideal world I would love to see the Share Liverpool Scheme succeed in their efforts to buy the club but I just can’t see it happening so I think the best solution for us is DIC. Despite having plenty of other options they are only interested in owning Liverpool and have spent the last two years trying to make it happen, which has to be a good sign. Apparently their offer to Hicks and Gillett still remains on the table and it’s an offer big enough to clear the outstanding debt and allow them to walk away with a £75 million profit.
Despite being continually frustrated in their efforts to take over the club they have continued to work in the background. Their plans to put a fan on the board have been well documented but I have also heard of meetings with some legendary names from the clubs past as well as local businessmen, the plan seemingly to not just regenerate the club but also the area around the club.
These are sound business people who would bring some much needed stability to the club and also provide the kind of financial clout that would enable us to truly compete with the other top clubs on a level playing field for a change.
Football has certainly changed an awful lot from the game I watched as a kid, and not for the better as far as fans are concerned. The game seems to have lost its soul and things such as honour, loyalty and common decency have become meaningless words from a bygone era. The majority of players, managers, chairmen and governing bodies at the top level in the modern game are nothing but a bunch of greedy, lying, cheats.
The despicable conduct of Ronaldo over the summer and the disgraceful actions of Ferguson and Berbatov on Monday are prime examples. The sport and the media should properly vilify them for their behaviour but instead of this they are held up as role models and heroes, and a blind eye is turned to anything to the contrary. To ordinary fans the shameful conduct of these players and club officials is really quite stomach churning at times, but that’s the game as it is today.
For us to survive and compete at the top level of this quagmire, we need to have people in charge of the club that have the financial means to properly back the boss, the team and get this bloody stadium built. For me the only way for us to achieve this is with DIC at the helm. With them in charge I can see a bright future for us, but without them I can honestly see us heading towards a downward spiral that there may be no way back from.
Keep the Faith
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It’s Tough At The Top
Well it’s certainly been a tough and eventful couple of days for Reds fans. You need a strong heart to be a Liverpool supporter, figuratively and literally, because you can always be sure that we will never ever do things the easy way.
Wednesday night’s game turned out to be a long hard slog and fair play to Standard Liege for their performance which pushed us to the very limit. I must admit that at the end of the first half I was starting to feel a bit nervous because although we started the game brightly, they grew in confidence as the half went on and seemed to be getting on top of us. 
However, I felt a bit more comfortable in the second half and in extra time because even though we weren’t creating any clear cut chances, we were controlling the football a lot better and looked to be the team most likely to win it. While our overall performance wasn’t great it was another improvement on what we’ve seen from the team so far this season and I was impressed with the fact that even though the Liege players made this a very tough match for our players and allowed them little or no space, their heads never dropped and they just kept battling away.
Although we did have a couple of dodgy moments in defence our back four did well overall, even Arbeloa who clearly responded to my brilliant motivational tactics in the last blog! Alonso and Gerrard worked hard in midfield and eventually got the upper hand. Stevie didn’t look right in our past couple of games and now we know why. It turned out his groin strain was giving him a lot more problems than he and Rafa had let on and he’d been playing through the pain.
I also hear the Standard Liege supporters have been full of praise for him as he apparently stayed behind for a full 30 minutes signing autographs for them and didn’t leave until every one had been signed. I must admit that I haven’t always been convinced by his leadership abilities but I think it’s time for me to revise that opinion because it looks like we’ve now got ourselves a great captain both on and off the pitch. Let’s hope he makes a speedy recovery from his groin op and is back in time to face the mancs.
Up front clearly Torres and Keane haven’t clicked as yet and although they put a lot of energy into the game, they both seem to be lacking a bit of their sharpness at the moment that hopefully won’t take them too long to rediscover. Our real problems were in the usual areas. With Dynamo Dirk and cul-de-sac Jack playing on our flanks we simply had no width.
I’d like to be able to compliment Liege for doing their homework on us but in truth there wasn’t a whole lot of homework required. Our attack pretty much resembled a bottle neck and once they had blocked us from getting at them through the middle, they knew they had nothing to worry about from us on the wings. Babel didn’t improve things much when he came on but El Zhar did make more of an impact and we really should have had a clear penalty for the foul on him in extra time. This lad looks like he is ready to be starting some games, but I’m not sure about those blue boots of his!
Still we came through in the end thanks to a very good cross by Babel which Kuyt did very well to get on the end of. He may not be prolific and he may also frustrate the life out of us all at times, but he does seem to have developed a knack of scoring some very important goals for us and it was good to see him receiving some adulation from the fans for scoring yet another one on his 100th tireless appearance. 
However, although Kuyt got the headlines for his goal, the real hero of this tie over the two legs was most definitely Pepe Reina. Without his brilliant saves in both games we would have been dead and buried, and even leaving those saves aside I thought his general play was excellent and it must give our defence an extra bit of confidence knowing he’s behind them.
So we eventually made it into Thursday’s draw for the CL group stage and I must admit that throughout that day I didn’t give it a lot of thought. I’ve long since given up hoping for us to get a handy draw in the CL as past experience has shown us that such things seem to be reserved for the likes of mancs and chavs. Besides this, as thanks mainly to the heroics of Reina we were spared the prospect of Thursday night matches against such opposition as Kkrvqrbvkrk the outer Mongolian Champions, I was content for us to meet whatever teams the draw threw at us.
I watched the draw live online and thought everything was looking rosy for us when we were drawn with PSV and Marseille, we just needed to draw one of the minnows from Pot 4 and things would have been comfortable for us. But then that axle grease headed, shirt-lifting ladyboy drew out Atletico Madrid and suddenly our group became an awful lot tougher.
Don’t get me wrong, I still fancy us to qualify for the knock-out stage but unlike the other English teams there are no soft touches in our group and I don’t think we will have too many opportunities to rest any of our players for any of these games. Anyway we can cross that bridge when we come to it but if we are to get to Rome next year it looks as though we’re going to have to do it the hard way, but what else is new?
At least now we can put our focus back on the Premiership this weekend and our experience in these CL qualifying matchs have shown us that these games are getting tougher and tougher, so now more than ever we really need to be pushing for a top two finish so that we can avoid them. Maybe we have rode our luck a little in the two wins from two games we have had so far but there’s no doubt that if we are to keep things going we will need to perform a lot better in our toughest test to date at Villa Park on Sunday.
It’s a tough place to go hunting for points at the best of times but we will go into the game most certainly not firing on all cylinders and without our captain Steven Gerrard, so it may seem like a daunting task but I’m feeling quite positive about our chances for a number of reasons.
Firstly, I think our performances are slowly but surely improving game by game and while there may be a few tired legs after our efforts on Wednesday, the confidence among the players should be pretty high after the victory. While Gerrard may be missing, we will be boosted by the return of Mascherano. He is a very important part of the teams spine and there’s no doubt we’ve missed him, so it’s great to have him back.
Alonso will also have a big role to play in the game but he has often played some of his best games for us when Gerrard isn’t in the side. In such circumstances he tends to play a bit further forward and with a little more freedom than is usually the case. That’s the role he played last season when we played Derby at Anfield and we won that game 6-0, and if memory serves I think Xabi got two of the goals that day. Now granted Aston Villa are no Derby County and they are at home but nevertheless Alonso can be very effective in this role, assuming of course that Rafa will play a 4-4-2 formation.
There’s also the fact that the Torres and Keane strike partnership is going to click eventually and it might very well be on Sunday. I haven’t watched any of Villa’s games so far but I know that they have conceded two goals in their victory over Man City and three goals in their defeat by Stoke, so it would appear that their defence is not all that it should be and maybe our attacking duo can take advantage of that. 
However, in order for them to do some damage they need to be receive some quality balls preferably into their feet and Rafa has really got to do something about our lack of width. I really can’t see him dropping Kuyt especially in this game but Benny Onion has had a nightmare in our last couple of games and needs a spell on the sidelines. Babel certainly hasn’t pulled up any trees in the two substitute appearances he has made so far but at least until this signing of Riera is tied up, he is the only one who offers us any kind of width on the left and has got to return to our starting line-up.
I’m assuming the gaffer will stick with the 4-4-2 formation he has been using so far but it’s possible he might revert to the 4-2-3-1 formation he used last season. In such circumstance he could perhaps consider playing Keane in the Gerrard role or maybe bring back Lucas and leave Keane on the bench. I would prefer it if he stayed with the 4-4-2 but Rafa usually favours a more cautious approach to such games and just might be tempted to change things around.
It would be a huge boost for us to go into the international break with our 100% start to the season intact and would certainly have us full of confidence going into our Premiership clash with the mancs at Anfield on the other side of the break. I believe that we will and in a tight game, my money’s on a repeat of last season’s score line, a 2-1 win to The Reds.
On a final note, I’ve noticed that the club’s official site have announced that there will be yet further delays in the construction of our new stadium. They really shouldn’t waste our time making such announcements because I think that even the dogs in the street realise that this stadium is nothing but a white elephant and it will never happen while these two American clowns are in control of our club.
I also noticed that they made a pathetic attempt to temper this news by adding that they will use this extra time to revisit the possibility of increasing the capacity of this mythical stadium to 73,000, but an extra 20% of nothing, is still nothing. Do these morons seriously expect us to believe that if they can’t finance a 60,000 capacity stadium, they are somehow going to be able to finance a 73,000 capacity one? I am totally uninterested in hearing anything these pair of knob-heads or their spokespeople have to say. The only official announcement I want to hear from them is that they are leaving and hopefully that they are taking Parry with them!
Keep the Faith
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Winning Ugly But Looking Good!
It’s often said that to win games when you’re not playing well is the mark of champions. However, if you can win those games while playing complete shite then I’m not sure what it’s a mark of, but it’s got to be something pretty damn good!
Despite our indifferent form on the pitch it’s hard not to feel good about things at the moment. The Premiership is just two games old but we are sitting joint top with a maximum haul of six points, and we haven’t even turned up yet! 
Football really can be a strange game at times. On too many occasions in recent years, I’ve seen us play miles better than we are at the moment and yet fail to get the rewards our performances deserved. Saturday’s 2-1 win over Middlesbrough made it the first time in six years that we have opened up a season with two wins. We had the opportunity to do that at the start of last season when we opened up our campaign with a 2-1 win at Villa Park, thanks yet again to a late winner by Gerrard, and then in our second game we had the chavs at Anfield and played them off the park for the entire match, but late in the game referee Rob Dallas awarded them a penalty for absolutely nothing and they escaped with an undeserved point. Such has often been our fortune in the past but perhaps things are starting to change.
Winning ugly is something that we haven’t been particularly good at for a very long time. When Rafa first arrived, games like the couple we’ve played so far might well have been lost. More recently, even up to last season, those types of defeats had been turned into draws but hopefully the way we have started this season is a sign that those draws are now being turned into victories.
Obviously, I was exaggerating when I wrote at the beginning of this blog that we were playing complete shite. Our performance on Saturday showed some signs of improvement from the previous weekend, but in fairness it would have been hard pressed to be much worse. There isn’t really any fluency in our game at the moment and most of our play has been as flat as a witch’s tit.
As I said in the last blog, I think the results are more important than the performances at this stage but that said, we can’t keep on relying on winning ugly and clearly our play will have to quickly improve. Outside of the result and the delight of seeing Carra scoring(ish), the only really encouraging thing we could take from Saturday’s game was that the attacking partnership between Torres and Keane seems to be developing with every game, other than that there wasn’t much else for us to get excited about.
I suggest that Rafa call in the local paranormal society to investigate why so many of our players seemed to completely disappear for most of the game. With all due respect to Dynamo Dirk, it’s never a good sign for us when he turns out to be our best midfielder but that was the case on Saturday. Benny Onion on our left side, did a vanishing act that Houdini would have been proud of. Alonso seemed to start well but gradually drifted out of the game and Gerrard turned out to be a hero with his late winning goal but the guy just didn’t look fully fit and wasn’t really in the game. Babel hardly kicked the ball when he was brought on in the second half but full credit to El Zhar who did well in the 10 minutes or so that he was on the pitch.
I know that I promised in the last blog that I would be keeping my powder dry on any moaning until we actually dropped some points, but you all know what a weak-willed person I am and there’s a couple of gripes that I just have to get off my chest. Firstly, I can’t understand why the hell Arbeloa is in the team. As I said in the last blog, I think he is useful to have in the squad for his versatility. By that I mean that he is useful to bring on from the bench sometimes or to play him in the early rounds of the cups or even in the event of an injury crisis, but I don’t think he should be a starter in the first team particularly when we have better options.
He is not a particularly bad player and Shanks knows we’ve certainly had a lot worse but I’ve seen enough of him to know he is an accident waiting to happen and ultimately he will cost us points. There was a perfect example of this on Saturday when Mido in fairness took his goal very well, but he was given all the space in the world to pick his spot and was invited to shoot because Arbeloa backed off him instead of closing him down and that mistake could have been very costly to us. 
There have been other such examples of his bad decision making in other games, some we’ve got away with and some we haven’t. Another one that sticks in my mind was our game last season when we had Arsenal at Anfield. We took an early lead in that one and despite the gooners than taking control of the vast majority of possession, they were struggling to break us down until we brought on Arbeloa. You might remember that Fabregas made a run in behind him in that game and had he gone with him there would have been no danger, but for some reason he let him go and he went on to score their equaliser from that position.
I know that Rafa brought in Degan in the summer to be our first choice right-back and he’s been out injured, but in the meantime I think Finnan should be in the team. I saw him play an hour of the Rep of Ireland’s friendly in Norway last week and he played well and looked fit. While Arbeloa may be younger and faster than him, Finnan is a much better defender and when he gets forward he is probably our best crosser. But the gaffer might be leaving him out because he is planning to sell him and if that’s the case I think Carra should play on the right with Skrtel and Agger in the middle. We’ve got some very big games coming up and we cannot afford any silly mistakes in defence, so in my view Arbeloa needs to be benched.
My second gripe is an old chestnut of mine that I’ve been banging on about on this blog for ages, our corner-kicks. I’ve often been full of praise for all of the progress Rafa has made on the playing side of things at the club but one of the areas where we haven’t seen any real signs of progress is our corner kicks and general set-plays. From watching our games I think it’s clear to see that there is obviously a lot of work put in on the training pitch in defending such situations but there is precious little evidence of any work we do on the attacking side.
If we are to go on the evidence that we see in every single one of our games, it would appear that our training routine for corner-kicks consists of us putting a sack of potatoes on the front post and asking our players to attempt to hit it as often as they can. It drives me mad when I see the amount of times our corner-kicks fail to beat the first man on the post. We talk about signing wingers and attacking full-backs to help us work openings in opposing defences and yet we consistently waste these opportunities to put teams under pressure in their own area.
Of course, we would all like to see the team playing fast free-flowing football and carving open teams with our wonderful interplay but that’s not always possible and its on just such occasions where a well taken corner-kick can nick you a result. We tend to force a lot of corners, probably an average of 7 or 8 per game and sometimes more. They are the ideal opportunity for us to bring the big men forward and even though most defences these days are very well drilled in defending them, I still think if you can stick 6 or 7 decent crosses into the box from these situations the chances are at least one will fall kindly and it just seems crazy to me that we don’t make better use of these opportunities.
We haven’t had a decent deliverer of corner-kicks at the club since Gary Mac. In the current side, Gerrard is very hit and miss, mostly miss, and Xabi Alonso for all his passing ability seems unable to deliver a decent ball into the box from a corner. Aurelio is probably the best we have at the moment. I think this has to be dealt with as a priority with more time dedicated to it in training and as potential new signings are being considered, as they apparently are at the moment, it should be one of the qualities that we look for. Having one or two players in the side that can truly deliver some quality crosses from a dead-ball situation would be of great benefit to us and its high time it was sorted out.
Anyway, on to other matters and the second leg of our CL qualifying tie against Standard Liege is on Wednesday. Even though we luckily managed to get a 0-0 draw in the first leg and have the second leg at Anfield, this is by no means a foregone conclusion. Liege was one of the toughest teams we could have got in the draw. They are the Belgian Champions and I believe they are unbeaten in more than 30 games domestically. I think we saw in the first leg that they are not a side who will come to Anfield and rollover for us, and obviously if they can pinch a goal they can spin this whole tie on its head.
That said, if we play anywhere close to our best on the night I would fancy us to see them off, but the problem is we have not played anywhere close to our best up to now. There is a lot of talk of us bringing in a player for the left wing before the transfer window closes but I think we can be pretty sure there will be no more moves authorised by the board if we don’t manage to get past Liege and qualify for the lucrative group stage of the CL.
I don’t think our starting line-up will be a lot different from Saturday’s, but I would like to see Arbeloa out of the side and I would like to see Babel starting, even though he was anonymous when he came on at the weekend he will give us the pace on the left that we missed in the first game and present a different set of problems for Liege to deal with.
If we are not on our game this could be a close one, but as I’m in an optimistic mood I’m hoping we can settle any nerves with an early goal and go on to win the game 3-0.
Keep the Faith
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Let’s Keep It Going Lads!
It’s really great to have the football back again and to have gotten off to a winning start with last weekend’s 1-0 victory at Sunderland, but despite this there’s no doubt things are a bit frustrating at the moment for Reds fans. Off the pitch there’s been the usual the backroom bickering, which sadly seems to have become the norm at our club since the American owners came in, played out in the full glare of the media spotlight and providing plenty of column inches for our “friends” in the press. On the pitch, while the results have been great the performances have been pretty uninspiring so far and all of this has led to an awful lot of moaning among our supporters. 
In regards to the behind the scenes bickering at the club, most of it stems from our long overly publicised attempts to sign Gareth Barry. The club’s unwillingness to meet Aston Villa’s crazy £18 million valuation for the player has meant that this deal appears to be dead in the water and has led to many “Liverpool Owners Were Right” type of headlines, which I’m sure they are both loving. The unwritten implication of these stories seems to be that the owners were right and therefore Rafa Benitez is wrong, but that is just total bullshit! I don’t think there is anybody outside of Villa Park who would value Barry at £18 million and I dare say Rafa doesn’t think so either, but that’s not really the point.
I think the main point here is that our gaffer identified Barry as his main transfer target a good month before the transfer window opened and Barry made it clear that he wanted to come to Anfield but once again Rick Parry couldn’t make the deal happen, just as he couldn’t make the Alves, Simao, Vidic, Mancini and many other previous deals happen. It’s easy to just put this down to the Americans not putting up the money but for me the real culprit is once again Parry and I can well understand why Benitez would be so pissed off with him.
All clubs initially stick unrealistically high valuations on their players just as Rafa stuck £15 million and £10 million price tags on Crouch and Carson respectively, and it’s up to the appointed person of the buying club to trash out a deal. However, during his many “illustrious” years at Anfield, Parry has proven to have about as much negotiating skill as an organic potato. You can just imagine the intense negotiation between him and his opposite number at Aston Villa as they no doubt met in a cosy little wine bar somewhere to discuss the potential transfer of Gareth Barry.
“So, do you fancy selling us Gareth Barry then?”
“Only for 18 million quid old boy”
“Couldn’t you let us have him for a little bit less?”
“No”
“Ok then. More wine?”
It could be that Villa stubbornly stuck to their crazy valuation because they didn’t want to lose face after Moaning O’Neill spent the entire summer bitching to the press, but given Parry’s past record I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was his inability to do his job effectively that cost us the player. I think we can be pretty sure that we will bring in at least one more player before the transfer window closes but with this moron in charge of our transfers, I’m also pretty sure that we will pay over the odds for whoever it is.
Interestingly, somebody did suggest to me that the Barry deal may not be dead yet and that Villa played him in the UEFA Cup to enable them to sell him at a lesser price without losing face. It sounds a bit far-fetched to me but I guess we’ll find out soon enough. In other matters on the transfer front I also noticed in the news yesterday that Real Madrid’s feeder club sold Silvestre to the gooners. Strange that, this time last year they blocked us from buying Heinze because they said they wouldn’t sell players to their rivals and yet now they have no trouble selling to Arsenal, typical two-faced manc scumbags! 
On the playing side of things, as I mentioned earlier, our couple of performances so far have been pretty uninspiring but as I said in the last blog, I’m not overly concerned about that at this stage. As far as I’m concerned, the result last weekend was more important to me than any concerns I might have had about our performance. I say this because we are notoriously slow-starters. Our 2-1 victory at Villa Park last season was incredibly our first opening day victory since 2002. So I was just relieved to see us getting off to a winning start last weekend especially given the facts that we were without a number of our first team regulars and a couple of our new signings are still settling in.
I know there’s been a lot of moaning going on and regular visitors to this site will know that I’m quite partial to a good moan myself. Moaning is the God-given right of every football supporter and secretly I think we all love it, as long as it doesn’t cross the line and people back up their points and don’t just moan for the sake of it. And let’s face it, without the fine art of moaning this blog would become just another one of those many other boring Reds cheerleading websites that delete any comments that contain the slightest hint of dissent and stifle any possibility of a healthy debate/argument. That said, I’m keeping my powder dry on the moaning front for the moment until we actually drop some points.
Until then I’m happy enough because I know that things will most definitely get an awful lot better in the coming weeks when we have everyone back and we build a bit of momentum. For the moment I think it’s vitally important for us to just keep putting the points on the board by any means necessary and if we can keep doing that, the performances will certainly come.
Tomorrow’s game against Middlesbrough gives us an ideal opportunity to keep things going. It’s our first home game so fans and players alike should be well up for it. We will be also bolstered by the return of a number of our regulars. Agger is fully fit and Skrtel and Degan are also available after injury. I’m not sure if Lucas got back from the Olympics in time but Babel is certainly available and that is a big bonus for us. This could be a big season for Flyin Ryan and of all our players he is the one that I am most interested in seeing back in action for us.
With a season of experience under his belt, I think we saw enough tantalising glimpses last season to suggest that if he can maintain some consistency and is able to better utilise his pace, he could be a huge star for us. We certainly missed him on the left last week so hopefully he’ll make a big difference for us tomorrow. Upfront Keane and Torres will get another game to develop their partnership.
I watched Keane scoring his 34th goal in 82 internationals in the Rep of Ireland’s 1-1 draw with Norway in midweek. The heavy rainfall throughout the game made the pitch a bit treacherous and it was almost swamp-like in places so I was very surprised to see Robbie playing the full 90 minutes, but he looked pretty lively throughout and it will probably do him no harm. As for Torres, he equalled Roger Hunt’s record of scoring in 8 consecutive home games at the end of last season and he will have the opportunity of breaking it if he can find the net tomorrow, so as ever he should be well up for it.
As for our line-up tomorrow, it’s a little difficult to call without knowing the fitness levels of some of our returning players but this is the team I’d like to see. As I’m curious to see what Degan can offer us in terms of extra width, I’d like to see him start at right back with Carra and Agger in the middle and Dossena on the left. If Degan isn’t fit enough to start, then I’d have Carra on the right with Skrtel and Agger in the middle as although Arbeloa is a useful member of the squad due to his versatility, I don’t think he’s good enough to be a regular starter for us, in fact I don’t think he should be in the side ahead of Finnan.
Across the middle it should be Dynamo Dirk ( a bit more appropriate then Deadly), Gerrard, Alonso and Flyin Ryan. With Torres and Keane upfront in perhaps a more traditional 4-4-2 formation. I don’t take Boro lightly by any means. Southgate is doing a good job for them as their manager and he has some good players in his team. They had a great result last weekend and should be going into this game in confident mood.
There’s no doubt we will need to significantly improve on our performance from last weekend and although I’m not expecting us to be fully firing on all cylinders just yet, I’d expect a fully packed out Kop to help the team to raise their game and my money’s on us keeping things going with a 2-0 win and hopefully a goal apiece for Torres and Keaneo.
Keep the Faith
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A Bright Red Start
Man, it’s good to be home. Devon is certainly a beautiful part of the world but it never stopped bloody raining the whole time I was there, in fact I got pissed on that much I felt like a cigarette butt in a urinal. So it’s great to back here at Kopblog HQ, with the footy back again and to be able to get down to some proper blogging, life is good!.
Mind you, when I first arrived back and was catching up on all the latest news, I thought I had somehow drifted into a parallel universe. With Andy Gray, Jose Moaninho and Steve McMoneyman all tipping us to seriously challenge for the title this season and yet seemingly many Liverpool fans feeling a lot more pessimistic about our chances, these are strange days indeed!
People are of course entitled to their doom and gloomy outlooks for the season but I suspect some may be worrying too much about the possible weaknesses in our squad instead of focusing on its many strengths. For my part, in the last blog I tipped us to finish in the top two this season and I’m feeling even more confident about that after yesterday’s game. 
I’ve long suspected that the Premier Leagues fixture computer has been infected with an anti-Liverpool virus as once again it has managed to “randomly” give us a much tougher set of early fixtures in comparison to the rest. Starting with a very tricky away trip to Sunderland while the rest of our big four rivals all had home games. We than have a home game against one of our bogey sides Middlesbrough followed by an away trip to Villa Park and then the mancs come to Anfield. So I was absolutely delighted that we managed to get our campaign off to a good solid start with a 1-0 victory at the Stadium of Light yesterday.
Obviously it was very important for us to get off to a winning start but even that aside, all things considered, I thought this a great result for us. Sunderland have spent a lot of money in the transfer market and were full of optimism for the new season and keen to impress in front of a full house, so this was not the best time for us to have to face them at their place.
In contrast to this, we came into the game on the back of a very tough midweek CL qualifying first leg tie at Standard Liege and were without Masch, Lucas and Babel due to their Olympic involvement. We were also without Skrtel and Degan through injury and Agger also had to remain on the bench after picking up a knock in midweek. I think it’s fair to say that at least 5 of those 6 would have played in this game if available and not to mention the fact that Torres and Keane are still in the “getting to know you” phase of their strike partnership. So I was a bit worried going into the game that there was a big fat banana skin just waiting for us to slip up on.
That said, I thought we did a professional job and while the performance was by no means vintage we controlled most of the game and I never felt that we were really in any danger of losing the match. In the first half we were about as heavy legged as a herd of pregnant elephants and they had a couple of half chances but we soaked that up and came back at them towards the end of the half. I realise that some people may accuse me of child abuse for daring to be critical of Plessis, as he is a player that has come through from our young reserves, but nevertheless I can’t say that I’ve really been overly impressed with what I’ve seen of him so far.
In yesterday’s game he reminded me of a blind crab. He couldn’t seem to see a pass further than two yards and everything went sideways. I don’t wish to be overly harsh on the lad but if he is to seriously challenge for a place in our first team now and in the future I think he has got to make an awful lot more of the opportunities he is given. I know he will need more time and games to develop but he was 20 back in March and he is now at the age where the likes of Lucas, Babel and players like Fabregas were already starting to play international football.
It may seem unfair for me to be comparing him to such players at this stage, but this is Liverpool Football Club and if he is really going to make it here that is the level he’s got to be aiming for. Please feel free to throw all the flak at me that you want, but basically my point is that these opportunities he’s been given won’t come around too often and I just think that he needs to do a lot more.
When Alonso came on in the second half he transformed the game and we played a lot better with him pulling the strings in midfield. I thought he was clearly our man of the match. Not only did he set up Torres for the goal but he also nearly gave us another one of his specials with a shoot from well inside our half that wasn’t too far away from hitting the target. When you see Xabi playing like this you can’t help but think why in Shanks name would we consider selling him but the truth is he hasn’t really played like that often enough for us over the past two seasons. That said, based on his performance yesterday I think Rafa might want to reconsider letting him go and I’m sure he would be happy to stay if he was given an assurance he was in the managers plans.
Torres’s goal was a real cracker and it was good to see him starting the season in the same manner he finished the last. He wasn’t having one of his best games, in fact he had less touches than a lap-dancing leper, but he doesn’t need many chances and is always capable of scoring from seemingly nothing. When he got the ball from Alonso he was a long way out and there didn’t seem to be a lot for the Sunderland defence to worry about, but one touch, than a half turn and the ball was banged into the bottom corner, end of story.
I thought we well deserved the victory. Although the game finished 1-0, it could very easily have been 3-0. In the first half we had a stonewall penalty turned down after the ref played an advantage to us when Gerrard was fouled. The ball than went through to Benny Onion in the box and he was totally clobbered from behind by a Sunderland defender but the ref bottled the decision and idiotically gave us a free-kick for the original foul on StevieG instead.
Than in the second half when the ball was deflected out off Craig Gordon and Torres’s goal-bound shot hit off Robbie Keane and went wide. That was obviously frustrating on the one hand but on the other it was good to see that our two forwards reacted so quickly to the loose ball while the rest of the Sunderland defence had barely moved. That has got to be a good omen for plenty of goals from them both in the future.
Had we managed to win the game 3-0 I’m sure everyone would be crowing about us right now, but as we only won by the one goal I notice some people are having a moan about our under par performance. I thought our performance was understandable in the circumstances and besides this, I personally couldn’t give a monkey’s fart about our display as long as we take the points.
It’s all about results at this stage, the performances will improve in time. Overall though, I thought everyone did ok and I would give them all 6 out of 10, except for Dossena at left back who gets a 7 and is beginning to look like a very good quality addition and Hyypia also gets a 7 for showing why Rafa made a very wise decision in keeping him around for at least another season. Xabi Alonso gets an 8 out of 10 from me for his man of the match 45 minutes.
Before I put this game to bed, a few words about Dirk Kuyt. I notice from reading the comments on the last blog that some people are having a pop at Deadly Dirk and he seems to be becoming a bit of a scapegoat for any of the teams dodgy displays. I can understand the points being made about him and I would agree that he can sometimes be very frustrating to watch, particularly when he’s having one of those games where he spends more time on his arse than a one legged tap dancer. But all that aside, I’m still very glad that we have him.
He may not be seen by many as the ideal player to play on the right side of our attack but he also plays in that position for Holland and what he may be lacking in mazy wing-play he certainly makes up for in sheer hard graft. The guys energy levels are amazing and I’ve never seen him give anything less than 100% in a Liverpool shirt. Besides this, he was hit hard by his Father’s death last season and this clearly affected his play but even so, he did score some very important goals for us during that campaign. I think we’ll see a lot better from him this time around, so give the guy a chance and get off his back. If some of our other players put as much effort into every game as he does, I think we would run away with the league title this season.
Anyway that’s all from me for now. I’m very happy that we’ve started off the season with three well-won points, which is more than the mancs can say. So that’s one game down and 37 to go and we will have Babel back to help us try to double our total against Middlesbrough at Anfield next week, now that Holland have been knocked out of the Olympic competition. So far, so good!
Keep the Faith
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time saved
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