Birmingham City 0 - 0 Liverpool (Positives and Negatives)

This was a disappointing performance in many ways, even if a point away to Birmingham is not necessarily a poor result. I had hoped we would get to see an improvement on recent displays but unfortunately that was not the case.

NEGATIVES:

Lack of Creativity: As has been the case in pretty much all of our games this season there has been an apparent lack of creativity to our play. In fairness Joe Cole being suspended for the past 3 games has not helped on that front, and his return along with Meireles getting acclimatised can only help.

Defending Deep: In a complete change from the previous regime Liverpool have adopted a very deep line of defence. Where Benitez encouraged his players to press the opposition in order to force mistakes and win back possession Roy prefers for his players to sit deep. Although this is not necessarily a negative point in itself, at the moment playing with just Poulson and Lucas in centre midfield it means that when possession is won back our forward line is to distant with no meaningful link between midfield and attack. Hopefully we can change the midfield with either Mereiles or Gerrard coming in to bring the ball forward and possibly Cole as a link man.

Indecision:  I personally thought our lack of creativity and the need for something different was pretty obvious from quite early in the game. I thought it was therefore strange that Roy waited until the 76th minute to make his first change. Meireles came on for Lucas and I thought that his mere presence improved us as a unit. The ball seemed to get up the pitch quicker and seemed to stick up the right end of the pitch. He looked ok on the ball and his movement was good.


POSITIVES:

Pepe Reina's Performance: Another world class display from our Number 1, a display which literally could have earned us a point. Pepe has had a couple of mistakes over the last few weeks (1 against Arsenal and 2 for Spain V Argentina) this performance was a timely reminder that Pepe is (still) possibly the best goalkeeper in the world today.

Paul Koncheskey's Performance: Nothing too spectacular from our debutant at left back, he did however do well defensively and pushed forward to decent effect on a couple of occasions. Its good for him to have his debut out of the way before the game against Utd next week.

The Result: As I said in my match preview this was always going to be a difficult game, and considering we did not play very well and gave away a few decent opportunities we should really be happy to have gotten away with a point. As I said before we have some big games coming up and it is important for us not to lose games and keep momentum as long as possible.

The End of Joe Cole's Ban: This was the last game for which Joe Cole was suspended. We are desperate for creativity as i pointed out earlier. Hopefully Joe can bring this back with him and give us another option to help break teams down.