The new season officially began with a one all draw against Sunderland. Anticipation had been getting higher as the season approached and in the opening half an hour of the game it seemed that all the optimism was totally justified. Early in the game Liverpool were completely in control, we attacked well and early on Suarez went through one on one with the keeper and won a penalty. The shine was quickly taken off the penalty though when referee Phil Dowd failed to dismiss Kieron Richardson, and also of course when Suarez missed the penalty with some flair! He made up for this of course a few minutes later when he got the all important flick to a dangerous Charlie Adam free kick. At this point in the game it seemed Liverpool would capitalise on our control, as the half continued we had many more chances. Adam had a long range effort saved, Downing smashed the cross bar following a blitzing run from the half way line there were other less notable chances too. The best chance of course fell to Andy Carroll who finished it well, the referee struck again though when he disallowed the goal. As half time approached, with the important second goal proving more elusive it became apparent that Liverpool’s intensity had dropped, it seemed the players were getting tired, we hoped that the half time break would prove to re-invigorate them, unfortunately this wasn’t the case. Sunderland were the stronger side throughout the second half and equalized in some style through, a debutant of their own in Sebastian Larsonn. Kenny made some changes, and the players tried to rally but were not able to raise their game to the levels achieved in the first half.
The sending off and penalty:
The rules state that you receive a red card for denying a clear goal scoring opportunity and I don’t know of a much clearer goal scoring opportunity than Luis Suarez one v one with a goalkeeper. The ref stated he was moving away from goal, but it is very hard to bring a ball around a goal keeper without momentarily going away from goal. To me, it seemed that Phil Dowd bottled it, he didn’t want to be the first ref to give out a red card in the season and so he took an excuse. I also think that if the rules lead to ambiguity then they need to be clarified for everybody. I think the penalty miss made have been as case of over confidence from Luis. He made up for the miss with his goal a few minutes later, you can be sure the Kop wont hold it against him, so long as he doesn’t make a habit out of it.
The disallowed goal:
I’m not going to dwell on this too much, I could not see any reason for this goal to be disallowed. A very slight coming together between two players, the defender goes to ground and the referee blows for a free kick. If the same circumstances had left the Striker on the deck, You can be sure that a penalty wouldn’t have been awarded. It was a big decision, looking back on the game we can see how it panned out and say that a draw was a fair result, but who’s to know how a second goal at this point might have effected both teams performances?
The Performance:
As I said earlier, Liverpool looked tired as the game wore on, I don’t think this is necessarily something for us to be overly concerned about. Pre-season training is not designed to have any team at peak fitness for the first game of the season, its usually intended that a team hits peak from the second or third game onwards. I think there was enough in the first 30 minutes to show that this team has something about them. Once the team starts to gel and players start reaching their peaks we will be a force to be reckoned with.
There are other talking points, the right hand side, Flanno, the first 11, the tactics overall and playing people out of position but as this is the first game of the season i think we need to reserve judgement on a lot of things for the moment. If things keep on cropping up over the next few games I will certainly discuss them but for now I think we can trust that these issues are nothing more than teething problems
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