Good Grief Liverpool, What Was That Gutless Dross?

Article by Red Phil

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I can remember my first game at Anfield, with Roger Hunt partnering Ian St John up front, a young Tommy Smith and Chris Lawler at the back along with ‘Rowdy’ Yeats and the glorious ‘Flying Pig’ was in goal. I’ve seen every great player we’ve had in the years since then and seen hundreds of great games. Dalglish, Rush, Keegan, Toshack, Souness, Hughes, Fowler, Owen, Barnes, Torres, Suarez, Terry Mac, Ray Kennedy, Alec Lindsay, Steve Nicol and Gerrard and then the morons who now run the club seem fit to provide whatever THAT was that gave us a lovely, unforgettable 6-1 defeat at Stoke!!!

Utterly gutless doesn’t sum up my feelings even remotely. We’ve got owners who are only interested in buying kids and then selling them on when it looks as if there is a large profit to be made and we have a manager – hopefully not for much longer on that display – who obviously goes along with that theory.

We don’t have any guts within the team, a defence that is cut to ribbons whenever anybody attacks them, home or away, a midfield that simply cannot protect the defence or create anything and, up front, we are utterly pathetic.

Take Coutinho, Ibe and perhaps Skrtel out of that team and you are talking about a relegation fight next year. When Anfield used to be a fortress it is now a footballing takeaway for anybody who needs a few points and who quite likes a relatively pleasant stroll in the Merseyside air.

Seemingly no movement on the transfer front, the manager praising Raheem Sterling more with every breath, even though the kid wants to leave and thinks he is bigger than the club, and the rest of his purchases have singularly been atrocious on the evidence of recent games. God, I’ll bet the top teams will be crying out for the fixture list next year pairing them with the once-mighty Reds in the first few weeks of the coming season and even the mid-table teams will fancy their chances against this dross, home or away.

Will the manager begin to tell us that it’s just been a bad few weeks and if we get Sturridge back next year, for every game, we’ll suddenly be able to defend or create chances whilst scoring more than Real Madrid? I can’t ever remember a capitulation to match this, even though it was more-or-less a meaningless game at a ground that nobody likes going to, but WHERE was the passion? I don’t know if I’d just sell the bloody lot of them or take most of them outside and shoot ‘em?

Can we replace most of them with players who have already had numerous chances but been found wanting themselves, time and time again? What would be the point of that? There must be a hard core of six or seven players who will NEVER put on the red shirt for this club again . . . but I suggest that, in all probability, several of them will be in the first squad announced for next year if this manager stays.

I think that, after many weeks of thinking about his position, the manager must go. He obviously cannot motivate this group of players and if his judgement is as bad THIS summer as it was LAST summer, when it comes to spending a hundred million, Heaven help us! Players playing out of position, too frequent chances of tactics and nobody able to score or even make chances – excluding Coutinho and Ibe – makes this possibly the worst season for Liverpool since I first walked into the ground and saw the mighty Kop filling up for the first time!

It’s a shambles, we’ve got nobody who can defend, other than Skrtel, and he is possibly on his way out, and the rest of them are like terrified rabbits when caught in the headlights every time anybody enters our half.

The keeper simply isn’t good enough, that must be accepted, but who is going to come to Anfield to be part of the seemingly endless decline in our once-great club? How many more kids or free-transfers can we get?

This manager cannot hack it, his judgement is a joke, and we’ve simply got to see if we can grab Klopp before he signs for somebody else . . . and if he thinks about bringing half the Dortmund team with him, so be it!

We’ve seen the experiment of playing a diminutive Raheem Sterling as a striker – which must petrify the likes of John Terry when it comes to the chances of him scoring with his head – fail miserably so instead of that we play with NO recognised striker and have Coutinho, the five-foot-six inch tall Coutinho, playing up front. Are we mad? Then we have the rather cumbersome Emre Can still playing out of position as a right back and he was tormented throughout the game and even headed the ball back across his own six-yard-box for one of the goals. Utter madness!

The guy is NOT a full-back or even a central defender but our manager simply cannot get to grips with that unarguable fact. Why? How many times do wingers have to tear him to shreds before Brendan Rodgers puts him in his rightful midfield role?

Then we had Sakho, who I cannot abide due to his inability to look anything other than a serious disaster about to happen, making defending look like Mission Impossible! And Toure looked so slow, especially on the turn, I wondered if he’d got an anvil strapped to his back?

These are obvious failings – not having a decent keeper, having a poor defence and midfield and our attack is lamentable – so what tinkering will Mr Rodgers do to correct it next year? He’ll probably buy another full-back and give Balotelli another season to prove himself! If he does let’s write next season off as well, eh?

We don’t need to sell one or two players, we need a cull of Biblical proportions. I don’t know where to begin. Perhaps stating that we start next season with Coutinho, Ibe and possibly Lallana in midfield and Skrtel at the back I think we can safely say that we need the rest of the team to be new blood and preferably very expensively-acquired new blood at that. By that I don’t mean the likes of Andrea Pirlo and Dani Alves!

That debacle wouldn’t have happened had Bill or Bob still been at the helm. These days it’s more like we’ve got Bill and Ben, the flowerpot men, playing for us.

For anybody under the age of sixty you may not remember Bill and Ben but, please, accept it when I say they were part of a kiddies TV programme in the early sixties . . . and it is NOT a compliment to be compared to them! A more modern version would be to call most of our team Muppets!

Get rid of the kids, and the wastes of space, and bring in MEN who will at least show guts and character! If the owners won’t listen to sense we need to pressurise them into selling the club to people who know what they are doing when managing a globally-renowned football club.

We must NOT have Balotelli, Sakho, Toure, Lambert, Borini, Allen or Lucas in our squad next year, end of story!

The worst thing is that when we had the likes of Hansen, Thompson, Lawrenson, Souness, Dalglish, Rush, etc., we KNEW that we wouldn’t fall apart, even if we did lose occasionally, but with this set of diminutive kids and gutless nonentities we almost EXPECT it. When was the last time we had a set-back and fought back from it? We go a goal down (in any game) and we normally lose because we can’t score or we literally fall apart, conceding more goals, instead of seeing character and an Istanbul-style fight-back.

This was one of the saddest days in the long history of Liverpool Football Club and, again, I’ve got to go into work, in Manchester, to be ripped apart by thirty-odd United and City fans! Than you for nothing, Mr Rodgers! At the moment I can’t see any light at the end of an ever-darkening tunnel!

Do I trust this manager to get it right next season? No. His constant chopping and changing of both players and tactics, not to mention the use of using failed, average players time and again, is ruining the club I love.

He got it spectacularly RIGHT for one season but this fall from grace, since then, has been of record-breaking proportions and now there just doesn’t seem to be one player with any confidence or passion. We are rudderless!

RED PHIL

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