Stuttering Liverpool Start Continues

Article by Red Phil

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Having been to more than 1,000 games at Anfield over 50 years my passion for the club cannot be doubted. However, there are times when I just want to scream and the Cup-Tie at Wimbledon was one of those days.

Let us set the scene. We were playing a second division team, from the fourth tier of English football, so it wasn’t exactly Real Madrid, Barcelona, Munich or Juventus. Also, we fielded more-or-less a full-strength team so nobody could say we fielded a bunch of kids.

We won the game, courtesy of a couple of Stevie Gerrard’s touches of class but, other than that, defensively, it was a nightmare. How many teams now realise that all they have to do is hoof the ball towards the edge of our six-yard box and, amidst the panic that always ensues, the ball could end up anywhere with the goal itself being a very likely destination for the spherical object.

We suffered greatly during that game, against players from the fourth tier of our game with not one defender coming to terms with any physical confrontations and with the ball being like it was in a pin-ball machine sometimes. If a defender managed to reach the high ball, with Skrtel being slightly better than most, the ball could literally go in any direction with hardly anybody being able to power it away from danger.

I’m sorry, but even though I love the club, I cannot get used to what I saw, defensively. We are playing with three centre backs not because it offers us more options elsewhere on the pitch but because we haven’t go two defenders who wouldn’t look as if they should be playing at Wimbledon every week, let alone starring for the mighty Reds at the Nou Camp or San Siro.

Instead of spending whatever is necessary to get one or two top-lass centre backs we are more likely to keep persevering with various, constantly-changing combinations of failed defenders who simply aren’t up to the job and, sooner or later, we might go to FIVE central defenders in the hope that quantity might somehow make up for a woeful lack of quality!

Would Hansen and Lawrenson, Thompson, Smith, Rowdy Yeats, Gary Gillespie Larry Lloyd or Sammi Hyypia have looked so ill at ease against fourth-tier opposition? Not a hope! Twenty years ago we WOULD have played the kids and we WOULD have won 3 – 0. Most of the defenders mentioned would have played that game in carpet slippers with a TV channel changer in their hands, they would not have been made to look incapable of defending beyond Sunday League standard.

If Wimbledon can make us struggle as much as they did then, boy, we’ve got serious problems when we face the might of Bolton! At this point may I just mention that some of the players in that game, the defensive ones, earn more in three days than I do in a year!

At some stage we must come to the conclusion that when fans of a fourth tier team get excited about the number of times the ball hurtles around our penalty box, irrespective of where it ends up, that just tells other clubs that we have a soft, soft, soft centre, ripe for plucking! It is patently NOT good enough.

It was one of the worst defensive performances I can recall. Seriously, in the days of most of the above-named players, Wimbledon would have got into our penalty area three times, at the very most, and our keeper would have had a lot of trouble with boredom. Instead of that he proved, once again, that his confidence is completely gone and he just needs replacing before he needs a therapist!

As for getting a Brazilian or Italian keeper, with Brazilian or Italian football not exactly being hotbeds of sending three people to ‘rough-up’ the keeper at every corner or free-kick, shouldn’t we be going for somebody well-proven in the rigors of English football? I would start and stop looking in the Potteries!

I don’t know how much more of this drivel I can take . . . before I need a therapist.

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