Cazza said:
edd_jedi said:
That was a decent game last night, I don't know where that West Ham team came from but they put on a decent show, end to end stuff.
We've been poor for three games, but were on a very good run before that. Remember we've beaten Man Utd and Arsenal and drawn with Chelsea and Liverpool. Not too shabby. Missing Balbuena, Arnautovic, Lanzini, Nasri, Wilshire, Yarmolenko, Reid etc etc.
As for Carroll, I'd rather give one of the young lads, or even Lucas Perez a run out!
Decent game? I thought it was dire. Lol
Fair play to WH they deserved at least a point from that. In fact I could have had no complaints if they had gone in 2/3-0 up at HT. You would think Liverpool had never defended a free kick before. Quite how the linesman managed NOT to flag Milner offside for Liverpool's goal I will never know. He is stood 2 feet from him and the ball is 10 feet to his left. Truly shocking. TBF to him (and the other lino) they then flagged Liverpool offside about 3 times when they were onside and appeared to miss the fact Origi was offside when he missed his chance right at the end.
I suspect those two will be off to the Championship this weekend.
I was getting more and more pissed off as that game went on. Leicester turned up and played a flat back 9, counter attacked and got a (deserved point) cos Liverpool played right into their hands by passing sideways and backwards and doing it nice and slowly to allow them to get up. Klopp even said that the way to break that down is fast paced attacking with incisive movement. So when WH played a very similar tactic (and no disrespect implied by playing that tactic, you go with what you think will give you the best chance of winning and so far this season most sides who have tried to square up to Liverpool have lost) what did Liverpool do? They played even slower. The number of times the ball went from RB (Milner), to RCB (Matip), to LCB (VVD), to LB (Robertson), to LCB, to RCB, to RB, to RCB, then wow exciting in to the DCM, who then passed it back to the RCB or the LCB and we repeated, was unreal. There was no forward movement and the midfield who are normally very good at taking the ball on the half turn and ehh turning to get a forward pass, just passed it back to the defence. I would say the average distance of a Liverpool pass last night was 5 yards. It one point there were 3 Pool players stood in the centre circle, within touching distance of each other passing the ball between themselves. That's a sure fire to open up a packed defence right there. FFS I could organise Susan Boyle, Stevie Wonder and Stephen ****ing Hawking into a competent defensive line in the time it took Liverpool to move the ball forward.
Credit to WH's midfielders and wing backs/deep lying wingers but they made Liverpool's midfield their bitches for most of that game.
I felt sorry for Fabinho, he was trying. Lallana looked rustier than the Titanic and Keita just looks lost. Poor Fabinho was in there on his todd trying to out muscle 4 or 5 players, all after the defence had played passies amongst themselves for 30 seconds to let WH get set up first, of course.
Playing badly is no really biggie, every team will have bad games over a season, and getting 2 pts from games you could have easily lost is no bad thing. BUT playing that badly against the same set up days apart is worrying. What do they do in training? Not even that, surely any half experienced player knows that against a packed defence you need speed and you need movement. Two things Liverpool were synonymous with last year. They almost (almost) looked like Utd under Jose.
Ohhh, and it was not a mitigating factor in the draw, but Liverpool had half a teaming missing as well. Gomez, who looks to be out for the season now thanks to that non foul from Ben Mee, Trent Alexander Arnold, Lovern, Henderson, Wjinaldum, Ox, and worst of all Moreno is fit.
