Liverpool V Zenit - The Dilemma

Liverpool’s begin Thursday nights 2nd leg against Zenit St. Petersburg knowing that, as it stands, we need to score 2 goals to get ourselves back into the tie. Of course, having not scored in the 1st leg in Russia we also know that if we concede 1 goal. The difficulty of the task ahead increases massively meaning we would need to score 4 goals in order to go through to the last 16 of the Europa league. It leaves a lot of difficult decisions for the Brendan Rogers.


Fans will remember some of our great European games of recent(ish) years when we surprised the opposition by going for the jugular from the off. This has the added bonus of making sure to get the Anfield crowd excited and rocking in their support of the team. When at its best this becomes some sort of motivational circle whereby the players inspire the fans, who inspire the players right back and so on and so forth until Liverpool has become an unstoppable force which pushes frightens and harangues the opposition into submission. This has worked in the past and it may very well work again, but... If we do go for it in this manner it is also quite possible that we leave ourselves a little exposed. Zenit showed in the 1st leg that they have the players to hurt us if given the opportunity. If we were to concede a goal this approach could have the exact opposite effect. Immediately, players and fans would be hit with the enormity of the task ahead and rather than stifling the opposition with fear we may all become consumed by it and find our challenge seeming insurmountable before the half time whistle has even sounded.

The alternative would be to concentrate on not conceding a goal. This way even if the game remains scoreless until the 70th minute the task ahead remains the same, we would still need 2 unanswered goals to go through, which would seem perfectly achievable considering some of the chances we created in the first leg. Again though, there are complications to this option. If we do manage to stop Zenit scoring until later in the game, there will clearly come a point where simply we have to chase the goals we need. Once we do we are in the exact same situation, only this time, if we do concede a goal we leave ourselves with little time to rectify the situation.

On top of this we have some difficult team selections too. Daniel Sturrige is cup-tied and unavailable and Fabio Borini has graced the Anfield pitch for the last time this season as a result of his dislocated shoulder. This means Suarez is once again the only actual Striker available for selection. We saw in the first leg and in the defeat to West Brom that changing away from our system of 2 up top (which has been in place since the formation of our SAS) can leave us looking a little impotent. In this situation I feel that we need to change personnel to accommodate the system which has been functioning best for us over the past few weeks, rather than changing the system to suit the personnel. In order to do this we need to find someone in our ranks who can effectively fill the void left by Daniel Sturridge. Shelvey has been tried in this position a few times this season but not to any great degree of success, certainly not enough to warrant giving him the nod this time. I believe our best option for this job is Raheem Sterling. His form has dipped recently,as can only be expected from one so young, but perhaps a move to the forward line, absolving him from some of the responsibilities he would have as a wide midfielder would help in this regard. He may not match the strength or physical attributes of Sturridge, but he has the pace, he can shoot and we have seen that he has the potential to be a good finisher. He could be given the simple job of stretching the play, running behind the defence and getting some shots away. He is basically there to give the defenders something else to worry about so they cannot focus all their attention on Suarez.

Its a difficult match to plan for but I feel that this gives Brendan Rogers a very good chance to prove his mettle. In fairness this one match will not make or break his tenure as Liverpool manager. The damage was essentially done in the 1st leg so failure to escape this predicament will not be the end of the world. ButI feel that in order to qualify for the next stage of this competition we will need an almost faultless tactical plan as well as a little luck on the night. If Rogers does manage to steer the team through this, I think many people will have to accept that maybe there is more to this manager than philosophies and satirised soundbites!

TWITTER: @barrymeehan7

Liverpool 5 - 0 Swansea (Talking Points)

Liverpool celebrated a nice, straight forward win on Sunday. For the first time in a while it was simply just good fun to watch us thoroughly dismantle a team. Granted this was a below par Swansea team who had one eye on their first ever major cup final to come next week but regardless, Liverpool  put them to the sword with no apologies. The icing on the cake was in the fact that Red-men FINALLY got the monkey of having recorded no victories against a top 10 team off their back. According to the "experts" for the last few weeks, the failure to record a victory over a team in the top 10 at the time we played them so far this season was evidence of how poor our results have been this season. However it turns out that this "fact" was categorically not a "fact". At the end of play on Saturday 8th of December Liverpool sat in 12th place in the table, West Ham sat comfortably in 10th position on goal difference. When Liverpool beat West Ham by 3-2 on Sunday the 9th December, we knocked West Ham out of 10th position but this doesn't change the actual fact that Liverpool beat a team in the top 10 for the first time this season on 9th December. 

You can only beat whats in front of you
There is no denying this fact, and in these terms the players selected by Brendan Rogers did a very good job. We were expected to win the game and we did so with aplomb. Where i usually preach keeping set-backs in perspective at this time it is important to keep a strong victory in perspective, after all it is not the first time Liverpool have put a mediocre team on the rack this year. Its a telling statistic that Liverpool have recorded 7 victories by a margin of 3 or more goals this season whereas Spurs have only recorded 2. The fact that Spurs sit 9 points ahead of Liverpool, with a game in hand, at the moment should tell you the relevance of this stat (For perspective Man Utd have only recorded 3 victories by more than 3 goals). Alternatively Liverpool have only recorded 3 single goal victories whereas Spurs have recorded 8. It goes someway to shows that, while victories of this type are fun entertaining and of course if managed correctly they can breed confidence, until we master the art of winning tight games, or managing to score when not playing to 100% it is likely that our point gathering will remain sporadic rather than consistent.

SAS
I think even the people who advocated the signing of Daniel Sturridge would admit to be somewhat surprised by just how quickly he has settled and become one of the most important members of our squad. His directness, pace and power breath something new into the team, that is sorely missed what he is absent. The danger he provides is 2 fold in that he is a threat so not only might he do some damage, opposition defenders have to worry about him so much that it frees up space for others. A lot of people were worried about moving Suarez in order to accommodate him, but its clear in the short time that they have appeared together that the sum of the SAS partnership is greater than the value of either individual S. We may still lack depth up front, more-so now in light of Fabio Borini's season ending injury but our first choice partnership has the potential to become one of the strongest on offer throughout the Premier League

A Real Brazilian?
Its no secret that it took a long time  for the Anfield faithful to take to Lucas when he first arived. There are many theories ranging from his long hair to maybe he was just a bit pants. One theory put forward by the man himself i believe is that when people heard we had signed a Brazilian they, maybe understandably, had flashes of Romario, Rivaldo, Ronaldiho or even Juninho flash through their minds. When those visions tried to match up with the stylings of Lucas' game some sort of crash happened and people could not help but feel let down. When Liverpool's newest Brazilian arrived, an Inho aswell there was never going to be such a conflict. On his full home debut he showed tricks, flicks and scored the goal which opened the floodgates to allay any fears of him adapting to life in England. Its early days of course and he is still just 20 year old but what he has shown glimpses of is how the 8.5 million outlay is no great gamble for a player with such potential. It is important to bed him in intelligently but at least the first hurdle of a goal is out of the way.

Is Enrique levelling out?
A lot of people were excited when Liverpool signed the Spanish full-back from Newcastle in last year's January transfer window. For the first few weeks of his Liverpool career it seemed like we may have captured the signing of the season. This didn't last too long however when his performances started to dip somewhat. In fairness it is important to caveat this a bit by reminding everyone that the whole teams level's seemed to drop in unison to the Spanish bulldog's. At the start of this season it seemed like things hadn't improved and what in the beginning we had taken as the norm, seemed now to be the exception meaning he had over performed in his early days. Credit should be given to BR for the improvements in Enrique's performances, but we should also give credit to the man himself. We are now talking about  a consistent level of performance over the last 8 to 10 weeks. Perhaps he is showing that this is his true level and it was not the better performances that were the blip, it was the period when he was not performing that was the exception.