WITH the weekend’s clash with Manchester City coming up, many have already said the game could reflect how the rest of Liverpool’s season will progress.
No doubt, playing the champions can show a lot about how the entire team and squad are capable of holding up throughout the season.
A draw perhaps puts the team on an even keel in terms of quality and style, while a win may even show you’re better than them.
Make no mistake though, this is Liverpool we’re talking about. The side that’s continually managed to impress against the bigger teams on a regular basis, and then lose to absolute minnows – being made to look like schoolboys while they’re at it.
Liverpool defeated Manchester United in the FA Cup last year with a fairly impressive performance, overcame Manchester City over two legs in the League Cup. Arsenal were thumped 2-0 at the Emirates and that was at the beginning of the season which gave everyone at Anfield a bucket load to be optimistic about.
However it was the inconsistency that killed Liverpool’s season last year and ended Kenny Dalglish’s second reign on Merseyside as manager.
With their backs to the wall against bigger teams, Liverpool have always had this quality of coming up with the goods. Beating the masters at their own game, so to speak. Think back to Barcelona as defending European Champions were shocked 2-1 at the Nou Camp.
Juventus the year before, during Liverpool’s European Cup winning run. When the odds are stacked against them, they’ll play like champions. Very similar to the lower teams themselves who managed to reduce Liverpool to tears time and again last season.
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The mentality needs to be changed. You can’t bank on one good performance to build your confidence. It needs to be homogenous throughout the season, no matter who’s in the other half of the pitch; the belief has to be there day in, day out.
After the 3-0 loss to West Brom, the players will be fired up against Man City. But it’ll be more important (if, of course Liverpool win) to then carry that confidence and assurance in to the next games as well.
It’s been too familiar a sight to see the same players who played like heroes one week, failing to even pass a ball 25 yards without scuffing it.
Even if Liverpool manage to win, which they are more than capable of on any given day, it still wouldn’t be time to start thinking it’s a sign of forward movement. That’ll come when Liverpool have had a 5 game winning streak, or kept a clean sheet for a fair few weeks.
It’s that kind of thing that scares other teams. People see lower teams have a great one-off day all the time and all it does is give them the confidence of doing something similar. But the moment you see a team stretch that kind of run over a long period of time, that’s when the doubt kicks in, and that’s what’s required here. Other teams need to doubt they can play at all when facing Liverpool.
The more results we see like the season opener against West Brom, the stronger the chances of the rest of the teams in the league fancying themselves against Liverpool.
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To be honest, only Rafa can bring Liverpool a decent winning streak in recent times. Apart from Rafa, I don’t see Liverpool recent managers can do it.
Liverpool has to prioritize one competition and fielded its strongest first 11 for every game. Rotating the squad is never work even Rafa failed to achieve it. Frequent rotated squad never has the team understanding.
We learn from the successful examples. Look at ManCity and ManUnited. They have clear first 11 and only focus on the premiership. They rarely rotate the squad. They play the same set of players until the players got injured (Rooney for example).
Three points is the most important. You have to do it starting from first match. No ‘work in progrss’ excuse. Also never fielded a weakened team when facing the so-called weak opponents. That is classic Liverpool problem. Liverpool always losing points against the so-called weak opponents.
What absolute rubbish! Ferguson went longer than Rafa in rotating his team every fixture (over 100 games) but it was never publicised/vilified in the press cos it was Ferguson. They always chop and change its one of the bugbears with utd fans. City also chop and change – they have to with a squad full of egos, and have started the season (pre-season) with a formation change: 3 at the back, at times.