THAT it came to this; we scrape a draw at home to a club fighting relegation, and everyone breathes a huge sigh of relief. The campaign for a Champions League place has subsided into what looks like a messy scrap to cling on to seventh place.
Everyone is laughing at us. Only 15 months into the triumphant Return of the King, and the great man is increasingly in the firing line (pun intended).
And our hopes of salvaging the season from disaster turn on an FA Cup semi-final, against none other than the Bitter Blues, who have been on the end of two of our eleven victories this season but who are still above us in the table….
The good news is that the malaise which has beset Liverpool in the Premiership does not seem to have extended to our Cup campaigns. If the team can convince itself the game matters enough, the Redmen usually get their act together. And, if we can’t persuade ourselves that a Cup battle with Everton, with a final in prospect, matters quite a bit, then we may as well all go home.
So we will just have to rely on the old Liverpool spirit to beat the Blues. Nothing in the way we’ve played recently imparts much confidence; the Aston Villa game was as bad as most of the others this season for shots slightly off-target, lack of penetration where it counts – did you realise that LFC have had far more shots on goal than Man Utd this season, only the latter seem to have scored 41 more goals?
But this is the sort of game where spirit and leadership can really count, Which is another way of saying that it’ll probably all come down to Mr S. Gerrard as usual. The way he took the last Merseyside derby by the scruff of its neck was breathtaking, until you got your breath back and reflected that Stevie is required to win matches on his own far too often, which isn’t a good outlook in view of the fact that he’s nearly 32 and fifteen years of giving 200% for the team is beginning to show its physical effects.
Still, someone’s got to get into the penalty area and set the erratic strikers up with something they can actually score from, and if nobody else does it, then it’ll just have to be Stevie. “Talisman” just doesn’t cover it. If he gets injured again, game over.
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But wouldn’t it be nice if the attack didn’t meet an invisible and impenetrable forcefield just outside the penalty area for once? The plethora of misdirected goal shots must surely be due to the strikers not getting into the right positions for them (although Dirk Kuyt’s rugby-style skier from about four feet last Saturday couldn’t have been from a better position – that sort of thing makes you want to groan “Death, where is thy sting?” and turn your toes up).
But we’re getting desperate in searching for excuses for this year’s underperformance. Wrong players? Surely not – they’re not 1977-88 era players for sure, but in a straight comparison with other Premiership players, they’re definitely not dross. And we’ll have to get away from routine blaming of refereeing decisions, though I admit that might be easier if we got the odd penalty, offside or handball decision in our favour on Saturday, and let the Bitters do the whingeing. No, it’s got to be the positional play and penetration in the final third (or should I perhaps say the fifth sixth?) which will make the difference.
I forget who it was who defined madness as “doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different outcome”. Somehow Liverpool have got to steer a course between that (and there’s been enough of it this season) and flailing around increasingly desperately in every direction, sacking people left and right. Get a grip, Kenny. We’re behind you, but patience can’t be endless. Let’s have a victory on Saturday which we can build on.
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