AND so, leaving aside the hurly-burly of club football – and the transfer window isn’t even properly open yet! – we turn to the Euro’s.
I suppose it shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise that Roy Hodgson chose a fairly Liverpool-heavy squad for the tournament. After all, he was hardly about to fill the national team with West Brom players.
But six players in the squad – including TWO right-backs – is surely more than we expected.
However (some would add at this point “as befits what these days is nothing more than a mid-table side”, but sod them) LFC didn’t have much representation in the actual starting eleven. We got the right-back position, of course, because we practically own that, and we got central midfield because Steven Gerrard owns that. Jordan Henderson got a brief run-out towards the end, but too late to make the slightest difference. (The unkind souls referred to above might suggest that Hendo could have been brought on after 30 seconds and still arrived too late to make any difference, but, again….)
Reports indicated that Andy Carroll may have put in one of his puppet-on-a-slightly-malfunctioning-string displays in training, and so was replaced in the central striker role by the solid, workmanlike Danny Welbeck. Of course a further reason for this may have been the hope that the latter would be able to form a winning combination with Ashley Young, who shares with him the sad handicap of playing for that bunch of sorry losers at the wrong end of the East Lancs. (In fact Young achieved very little apart from getting himself pointlessly booked, leaving Welbeck to be solid and workmanlike for little reward.)
No-one can really complain about our lads’ performance, though. Glen Johnson did what he does best, putting in some decent runs down the right and denying Benzema in the box with a beautifully timed block. And Stevie – well (like Beckham in his latter days) he’s still The Man for set-pieces – and he showed the heart and guts he always does; but it was one more reminder that he’s at his best these days when marshalling the rearguard, rather than providing the spark to light the fire up front.
One interesting facet of the Euro’s was the chance to see a few old Anfield alumni still going strong. Watching Milan Baros still hanging around in front of goal at barely-supported lone striker brought back the old Houllier days. And I was slightly surprised to see Andrei Voronin still playing, even more so to see him playing as well as he did for Ukraine against Sweden. (A pity Finland didn’t make it to the Euro’s – they might have trotted Jari Litmanen out for a last hurrah.)
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But one slightly depressing aspect of the Sweden-Ukraine match was the sight of proper strikers doing the proper-striker thing properly. Shevchenko and Ibrahimovic doing what it says on the tin was an awesome sight. I sometimes wonder exactly what it says on Andy Carroll’s tin. Let’s hope it’s not too long before we can decipher the message.
Either way, let’s hope the rest of the Liverpool lads get their chance to shine, and let’s hope they grab it with both hands, or feet, or whatever. (After all the controversy, what wouldn’t we all give to see Martin Kelly put in a really stellar performance?) And let’s hope they return from the outer edges of Europe in the kind of spirits which will set them up to bring LFC in from the outer edges of the Premiership struggle.
And if (when?) England totally screw up, we can say, like the great Carra allegedly used to say in similar circumstances, “Well, at least it isn’t Liverpool”.
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