Anfield, great. This is the first game that we’ve had for a while where we have zero expectations. Come away with a point and it’s amazing, come away with a win and it’s unbelievable and even coming away with a relatively narrow defeat will have some positives in it.
Last year, there were a few chinks in Liverpool’s armour as they had a bit of a
hangover season after winning the league by a street in the Covid interrupted
season. Last season with no fans, they struggled to live up to the expectations
set the year before but this year, they have been back to more or less their
best. You still feel that squad wise, they are not as strong as Manchester City
or Chelsea but when they get there best 11 on the pitch then there really is no
one better. Whilst they have many great players of course, the two main ones
are Mo Salah and Virgil Van Dijk and if those two stay fit and playing at a
decent level then Liverpool are certainly going to be in the title shake up at
the end of the season.
This season, Mo Salah in particular has been absolutely fucking ridiculous. Even though his goalscoring numbers have
always been exceptional, there was also something about him that I didn’t warm
to, mainly his tendency to throw myself about also the fact that he could be greedy
and at times it look like he couldn’t control the ball and was always chasing
his first touch. Somehow, at the age of 29, he seems to have gone up a level
this season and has been ridiculous. He has scored a couple of goals this
season where he’s had the ball tied to his foot and has just walked around
about five players. The guy is on fire so the first thing we have to do today
is stop him scoring. Easy.
The main key to today is how difficult we make it for Liverpool to score. The
chances are, they will score a goal at some point that you can do absolutely
nothing about and you just have to hold your hands up and say, we can do
anything about that and fair play. However, what you absolutely have to do is
not give them any goals, not give them anything that they don’t have to work
for. In other words, don’t do what we did against fucking Norwich last week when
we gave away two ridiculously soft goals. The only way to get anything at grounds
like this is to defend properly for 90 minutes and don’t give away anything
soft and stay in the game long enough which gives you a chance to try and pinch
something. Of course, when you get that chance at the other end of the pitch,
which I’m sure we will get today, you have to take it and not fuck it up by
hitting it straight of the goalkeeper or butchering the final ball.
The shit house van Dijk of course is back this season and he has been feeling
his way back in. To be honest, he looks like he is in second gear and will
probably only get better as the season goes on. We will have our work cut out
to contain the full backs and it will be an excellent examination of the
defensive credentials of Tino Livramento and KWP. We have played reasonably
well in defeat up here for the last couple of years and it will be nice to go
one better and take something tangible way from the game, which would of course
leave Jurgen Klopp spewing feathers and generally acting like a dick in front
of the TV cameras in his post match interview. Let it happen.
Ralph is of course a big Jurgen Klopp fan boy and he will want to do well with
this challenge of putting himself up against one of the best. Who he uses and
when he uses them will be key today. From
his press conference, it appears that Stuart Armstrong has had the Scotland
jinx again and come back injured so he will again be missing today but the
likes of Redmond, Djenepo and maybe even Jack Stephens will be available. Use
your resources Wisely Mr Hasenhuttl and give us a decent chance. Theo Walcott
is not part of the plan today I hope.
Klopp won’t be taking us slightly because we have given them hard games in the
recent past, so it would be a major surprise if we can get anything out of this
game but then, we said that when we played against Manchester City and earlier
on in the season we were 10 minutes from getting a point at Chelsea before JWP
got sent off.
Team news and ohhhhhhhhhhhhh what the fuck is this? Three at the back with Lyanco starting with
Salisu and Bednarek and … three up front with Broja joining Adams and
Armstrong. Ok then. Seems that we have a few injuries with
Elyounoussi and Diallo nowhere to be seen.
Liverpool are at full strength – Konate partners van Shithouse and Jota
is up front with Mane and Salah. Here we
go.
Away
we go and an early attack of ours gets broken up and a ball is aimed forward
towards Jota. Bednarek has read it but
then gets possessed by the spirit of a bad Under-10s player and misses the ball
allowing Jota to go on and eventually have his shot blocked. As they do, Liverpool swarm all over us and
Robertson picks it up, feeds Mane and then loses Romeu with his run. Now Robertson has it virtually on the goal line
about 10 yards from the near post and he just simply rolls it across for Jota
to tap into the net. Fucks sake, 1-0, 2
minutes.
Saints continue with whatever game plan they had and why wouldn’t you when you’ve
only been playing it for two minutes. We have a sniff of an opening as JWP
closes down Thiago who underhits the pass back to Allison but the big keeper is
quick enough to dive at the feet of JWP and get the ball. It’s a brief respite though as back up the
other end, Bednarek produces a horrible late rake on Mane to concede a free
kick and get deservedly booked. Over it
comes and there’s Mane to powerfully head home, down and across from the right hand
side. Offside… just. Another good chance comes and goes with the
next attack a Salah tries his trademark left footed curler from the right hand
side but it drops just wide.
The only danger to Liverpool at this stage is complacency and between them, Trent
and Konate have a brain-fart as Trent’s throw is never going to reach Konate
who backs away and Broja is in and goes barrelling towards goal. As he reaches the penalty area, Konate, in a
desperate attempt to make up for his fuck up, dangles a leg in and a less
honest player would have gone down for a pointless penalty appeal in front of The
Kop. As it is, Allison gets out to smother
the effort.
Half an hour gone and we’ve actually done ok since the goal but as I begin to
think towards half-time… bollocks.
Perraud loses the ball to Alexander-Arnold and then the lightning quick
passes take over. Salah, Henderson, Salah again crossing to Jota for another
tap in. 2-0. Replays show that there’s a
handball in the buildup when Trent won the original challenge but no point in
even asking for that at Anfield.
Now we’re being shat all over and there needs to be a change. It should be 3-0 but luckily, Jota gets
greedy for his hat-trick and gets blocked by Lyanco but we still carry on
playing the same way and the next break sees Adams head a cross away and Thiago
picks it up ion the edge of the box, moves forward and via a deflection, sees
his shot fly into the roof of the net to make it 3-0. Fuck.
This could now be very ugly.
We have a chance in the 5 minutes that remain to get one back but following
Adams lovely ball inside Robertson for Tino, Armstrong picks up the cross and
scuffs it goalwards, allowing Allison to get down and save easily enough. The cutting edge of a spoon. Half time, 3-0, game dead. In my opinion we need two midfielders on for
two of the strikers and we almost get it with Redmond and Tella on for Adams and
Bednarek. Time for the big fightback.
…or not. It’s nearly 4-0 straight away
as Mane aims one at the far top corner and McCarthy gets airborne to push it
away. From the corner which comes in
from Alexander-Arnold, it eventually drops to van Shithouse on the edge of the
box and he volleys it through McCarthy and in for 4-0. Fucks sake.
At this point Liverpool declared. They didn’t
need to score any more and they’d had a tough game on Wednesday. We were done, cooked, stuffed and looking to
get out of Anfield without getting annihilated.
Ref could have blown the whistle to be honest and no one would have
cared.
Saints did get one more chance to prove how unclinical we are in front of goal
as Broja flicked on to send Tella scampering into the Liverpool half and he
played a nice ball into Armstrong who drilled it sideways and into Konate and
then he couldn’t put the rebound in. Up until the point that Armstrong hit it sideways, it was a bit like the legendary Josh Sims - Shane Long move. There you have it. In order to
get something here we had to not give away any soft goal and we failed
there. We also had to take our chances
and we failed there as well.
Jota really should have had a hat-trick and made it 5 but he missed a chance on
the stretch. Klopp’s taking the piss now
and the man who has never been a first team regular anywhere since he left
Saints at 17, Oxlade-Chamberlain comes on for his 200th sub-60
minute appearance in a row. Ah well, 4-0
it is and bizarrely, everyone has something to be happy about.
In the end, we are certainly happy that we didn’t get beat by any more than 4-0. As a competition that game was over as soon as the second goal went in but the real damage was done before the kick-off and you have to question Ralph’s team selection. Playing three centre backs with is not the issue here. Pushing the full-backs forward caused us endless problems, especially on our right and playing just the two in the centre of midfield and three narrow attackers was mind blowing.
On our right, Livramento had to push up into midfield to support JWP and Romeu and all that meant was that Andy Robertson just went flying past him at regular intervals which dragged Bednarek, lumbering out of the middle. On our left hand side, Perraud went out to engage with Alexander-Arnold which basically meant that Salisu was dragged out to the left back position by Salah who is like greased lightning and the quick exchanging of passes between Alexander-Arnold Henderson and Salah just tore us apart. When we went to a flat back four the second half, we looked much more solid defensively. In the first half, whenever our fullbacks dropped in to try and cope with the pressure that we were under, it left JWP and Romeu with the whole width of the pitch to cover because the forwards weren’t dropping back in to help. This meant that Henderson and particularly Thiago, could pick passes at will.
As for the three strikers bollocks, None of the three attackers, Adams, Armstrong and Broja are happy in the wide areas and none of them are particularly good at dropping deep to pick the ball up. We tried those three upfront last week against Norwich and it didn’t fucking work and yet we tried it again today and it still didn’t fucking work. I assume we have practised it during the week but it sure as fuck didn’t look like it. Overall, that formation was a bit of a cluster fuck.
Liverpool are so good going forward. The speed at which they attack and move the ball is mind blowing at times. What is also impressive is that they are always in the right place to pick up any second ball. It’s almost like they know that some of their crossfield passes for example aren’t going to connect but they always get a player over there to pick up the header that the defender makes and so the attack continues and they just have players flying past you the whole time. In addition to that, they also break ridiculously quickly from deep and this is where their midfield excels, passing forward accurately and quickly. As soon as the second goal went in, we should’ve just been sitting 20 yards deeper but instead we carried on trying to press the ball on the edge of the penalty area and got picked apart which led to the third goal and from that moment on it was damage limitation.
The changes at the start of the second-half were an attempt to address the obvious issues. Bednarek was having a complete shocker so he out of the centre backs, he was always going to be the one who came off. The remodelled back four with Lyanco and Salisu did pretty well in the second half once van Shit Bag had scored the fourth. It has to be said that neither Nathan Tella or Nathan Redmond did a great deal on the wings in terms of attacking play but we did create a few chances which Adam Armstrong battered at the nearest defender. We had no clinical edge whatsoever to our attacking play.
Before this international break, we had three wins and one draw out of four games and we were looking like a half decent side and then we had the international break and Ralph has had two shockers since then. We had all three central midfielders playing against Norwich and then we had all three strikers playing and today we’ve had all three strikers playing again and none of these slight tactical tweaks have worked. Previously, Ralph has used the international break to sort things out when things have been going badly and we’ve come back much better. Because we were doing well before the international break, he’s used this one to overthink it and has fucked things up. If you are constantly saying like he is that he is happy with his squad and the options it gives him, he is basically putting more pressure on himself do not make these mistakes which on the face of it, do not make any sense.
Ralph did admit that he got it wrong in his interview afterwards which was refreshing to hear and hopefully proves that he won’t try the experiments again. The short notice withdrawals from Diallo and Elyounoussi obviously made a difference to his thinking, especially in the wide areas. Redmond has missed a lot of training recently, as has Djenepo, Walcott has been dreadfully out of form, Armstrong is injured and Tella is not completely trusted so who would you play in the wide positions if you wanted to play a formation that demanded it?
It’s not a surprise that we lost at Anfield and it’s not a devastating blow to anything but we as a team (and this is you I’m looking at Ralph), need to learn the lessons from today. We win or we learn. Remember that? Well we lost at Norwich last week and we tried the three main strikers all playing and it was fucking shit and it was fucking shit again today so I do hope that is an experiment that we do not see repeated. We also learned in the second-half that Lyanco is perfectly capable of partnering Salisu in a back four so I hope to see that going forward.
Liverpool phoned it in for the last half an hour because the job was done and it was perfect for Klopp to be able to bring on his makeweights like professional substitute Oxlade-Chamberlain and our former lone superstar Takumi Minamino. It was great to see van Shitbag sscore wasn't it? Was it fuck. Also, I see some think that his lack of celebration was a nod of respect for us. Fuck off was it. No one really celebrates a 4th goal in a drubbing do they?
Next up is Leicester at home which of course has an interesting mix of memories for everybody but we have to put up a better performance than we did today and we need some points from that and the following Saturday‘s home game against Brighton.
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