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!
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