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.

What a win against Udinese could bring

So here we are, 5 hours to kick off in a game which, if we dont win would see us eliminated from a competition that many people didn’t want us to be in in the first place.


Things have changed since we first qualified for the competition. Most Liverpool fans I have spoken to want us to qualify from our group and make it to the knock out phase of the competition. The first time I noticed the shift in how people felt about this competiton was walking out of Anfield after we had allowed Young Boys a share of the spoils in a game where we had been sitting comfortably. The disappointment and in some cases anger on the faces of the Kopites showed that suddenly, this competition mattered.

The Europa League, to put it bluntly, is not a pretty competition. It is the uglier, slightly plumpier sister of the beautiful, slinky Champion League. It cant offer us prestige, it cant offer us vast amounts of money hell even if we win the thing we will have made significantly less than a team who made it through the group stages of the Champions League. It does have its uses though. It can offer us experience. Our younger players are getting a crash course in life as a professional footballer this season. They are experiencing highs and lows, games you are expected to win and games you find impossible to win. This will make us, and the players themselves, all the more stronger next season and even the season after that. the Europa league is something else though., it is European competition. Our young lads are going to experience something most of them have not had before, a do or die 90 minutes on foreign soil. Its not just the players either, when it comes to European experience our young manager is also operating at novice level. To win games like this breeds confidence and teaches players how to win. Its not just for this years competition that we need to win, it could be for the experience our players can bring into next seasons Champions League....

Liverpool 1 - 0 Southampton (Talking Points)

Liverpool got back to winning ways with a decent win over a struggling Southampton at Anfield on Saturday. It is a difficult game to some up, we played very well at times, should have put the game beyond the struggling Saints, didn't manage to score the 2nd goal and so ended the game with a nervousness which was not becoming of our stylish play throughout the game. There there were plenty of positives to take from the game not least of which being the simple fact of getting 3 PRemier League points at Anfield for only the 5th time in 2012. As ever there were some negatives too but overall i felt a lot more positive about how we may go forward from here after the game.

Now we fu*kin' love him:    
The return of Lucas to the starting line up was the most welcome surprise I got that day, (until later Saturday evening when I walked into my own surprise 30th birthday party arranged by my beautiful wife and nearly jumped through the roof) We had known of course that Lucas was in contention for a place in the squad but I think most presumed that he would be entering the fray from the bench. While we all have to be careful not to expect that the return of the great Brazilian stopper would be the end to all of our troubles, it was nice to see that some of the things I felt he would help us achieve were clearly evident in his 86 minutes on the pitch. Not only did he perform impeccably himself even though it is simply not possible that he is fully match fit after only 45 minutes for the U21 side, his return immediately lifted the performance of others who had had to temper their own games to make up for his absence. Joe Allen and Steven Gerrard were able to take up much more advanced positions which came much more naturally to them than the roles they had been asked to fill over the last few weeks. In fact the shape of the entire team looked a whole lot more balanced with Jose Enrique returned to his preferred full back position, and Glen Johnson returned to his natural spot at right full, it was clear to see that both felt much more comfortable travelling forward to support attacks, safe in the knowledge that should the ball be lost there would be some cover making its way to fill in. Lucas is quite simply the best defensive midfielder in the league and while it's clear that he will never be the man to score the goals that win the headlines, his very presence on the pitch can be enough to provide an attacking impetus to the side.

Its only Southampton:
Of course this is true, but at this stage of our development these are exactly the kind of games we have to be winning. In fairness, to give it your all and beat one of the top 4 gives you a great feeling and it can lift the optimism of fans and players not to mention the luxury of the bragging rights but until we can consistently beat the teams we are expected to beat, once off wins against the big boys will not make that much difference to our final league positions. The hard fact is that the fixture computer did not give too much leeway to Brendan Rogers at the beginning of the season. We had a run of games which meant it was clearly going to be difficult to put together a huge amount of points unless everything clicked immediately. We all know that that did not happen, although we can also accept that had it not been for some tough decisions and some bad luck without doing too much more, we could easily be 5/6 points better off from even the most difficult of those games. As we approach Christmas, and its run of games which comes thick and fast we have a number of games from which we can realistically hope for a high number of points. And with this in mind, Southampton was a great dress rehearsal and a great result to start off with. whisper it quietly but if we can manage to rack up a number of wins in succession it could feasibly become realistic to start targeting top 4. As of right now we are only 7 points behind Tottenham, which is certainly not an insurmountable gap.

When he scores a volley or when he............. uses his hand:     
OK, so its a pity that the 5th yellow card which leads to a one match ban for our favourite Uruguayan was received in such a silly and utterly avoidable fashion but what is done is done. For what its worth, I honestly think that this was a simple reflex action which was driven by the insatiable desire to win we all know he possesses, much like the other hand ball he is famous for was. Its difficult to know what BR is going to do in this situation, it could be an opportunity for a youngster to come in and stake a claim, but from watching the Europa League it doesn't seem like there are any of the deputy strikers which BR deems ready. If he had his eye on any of them I think they would have started more games in that competition so i think its unlikely they will come in. It's a pity because I've liked things i have seen in both Yesil and Morgan but to be fair to BR he has shown that he is to be trusted completely when it comes to the progress and the state of readiness where the youngsters are concerned so I would not questions his decisions there.. One Europa League experiment could be given another try however with Jonjo moving into the striker position as he did against Young Boys at Anfield. It seems that BR likes him in this advanced position although I am not totally convinced just yet. Although I am pretty sure it won't happen I would really like to see Steven Gerrard get the nod up top. Although I’m sure iI don't need to describe how good of a finisher he is, to me it makes perfect sense. Perhaps BR see's a forward role for Jonjo as something which will be more frequent in his future and if thats the case this provides a perfect opportunity to familiarise him further. For my money though, if someone is going to be on the end of a chance I would much prefer it to be Stevie rather than Jonjo.

You're either with us or against us

Its kind of hard judging Liverpool at the moment. In fairness if you asked me right now what i think about how we're doing my answer would be much the same as it would have been at the start of the season, basically we'll have to see how it pans out.

Where Spurs supporters, whose manager has been in place for a similar timeframe as Brendan Rogers, have seen fit to boo their team off their home pitch at least 3 times this season our own manager has seen his name sung by the anfield faithful a number of times. Just to put that into perspective, spurs currently sit in 5th place joint on points with Everton where Liverpool are currently in 12th 6 points of the champions league qualification.

Its not simply blind faith by fans either. if we look at things realistically there is no hiding the fact that after 10 league games under Hodgson we had more points than at the same juncture under Rogers and after those 10 games fans discontent with Hodgon was made widely known at most available opportunities, granted this was somewhat by his own doing in that (fabulous orator that he is) he specifically asked to be judged after 10 games. I have heard some Liverpool fans wondering why we should keep faith with Rogers when Hodgson was so readily cast away by supporters (an belatedly the owners). it is pretty simple really. What we have been able to see so far from Rogers is forward thinking where the only thing Hodgson could look to was the past. There is something to buy into under Rogers where all the Hodge could offer was a face scratch.

The problem Rogers has right now, is that unlike Rafa Benitez for example, he has nothing to point to on his CV to convince you that he can turn this situation around. There is no track record on which to lean. Using Rafa as the example, when struggling in the league in his first season we could look to his 2 La Liga titles for reassurance. With Rogers it is promotion to the PL with Swansea and one season where they performed better against expectations in the PL. Its not exactly reassuring. What is tangible though is what we can see on the field. We have seen our side dominate possession in most games this season. We have seen the blooding of youngsters, some as young as 17 slotting seamlessly into the side. I know full well that at times last season under Kenny we saw some beautiful passing football but it was rarely alongside the type of control we have seen so far this season.Its not much to cling too but its something. Whether that domination can start to turn itself into points is another story, if we are to take this as a starting point then its a good position to start from. If we can win the control of games, it can't take that much to turn winning control into winning matches.

A major problem at the moment is scoring goals. At the moment we have only Suarez who looks likely to score in any game, we really need to start sharing the goals throughout the team. Gerrard, Shelvey and Sterling have all had big opportunities over the last few weeks but  many for whatever reason the confidence to just stick it in the back of the net is lacking. Whether that will simply come with time or it is a more chronic problem time will tell but if we can make an astute signing in January to help out in this respect then i’m sure that things will improve quickly.

To break things down, it seems we have a side who cannot score, but can dominate possession. In this situation we wouldn't be in too bad of a state if we were solid at the back, but unfortunately it seems we are prone to shipping weak goals. The funny thing is our Centre Back partnership still looks like one of the best in the business on paper. I honestly think our first priority MUST be to sort out our defence and stop shipping goals. If we're not conceding so many we could maybe get by, even with our poor scoring record.  I think the re-introduction of Lucas can instantly improve our shape and make us stronger defensively while also improving out attack by moving the likes of Allen to his more natural advanced position.

As for Rogers I can honestly only say that i'm not making any judgements just yet. I've seen enough to mean that i still believe in what he is trying to achieve, but i can't honestly say that he definitely WILL achieve this. I don't subscribe to this idea that everything is black and white. Its not as simple as simply being for or against the manager, its not as simple as saying we are a shit team or a great team. Right now we are in transition. We’re not sure what we are going to get out of this season, and we are not sure what we are going to get out of this team. Performance wise we have seen improvements, even if they have not been accompanied by an improvement in points tally. I still support what this manager is trying to achieve, but it is too early to judge how successful we have been, or even can be.