1 Crisis at Liverpool
After the recent Liverpool v Manchester United game, which Utd won one nil to send themselves temporarily to the top of the league, ESPN studio pundit Paul Masefield was asked “Are Liverpool out of the title race?” His answer was a resounding “Yes.” As an avid Liverpool fan, and keen football watcher, I had to perform a double take and check my calendar. I had assumed that the date was mid December. Evidently I was wrong. It must have been mid April and the 2007 – 2008 Premier League season was coming to an exciting end. 10 points behind, with a game in hand and over half the season still to play, this statement was ridiculous, even by ESPN’s anti-Liverpool standards.
For the majority of this season, the team from the red half of Merseyside has apparently been in crisis. The team has been apparently been under performing under manager Benitez, particularly in the Champions League, there has been crisis in the board room and conflict between the manager and the owners which culminated in Benitez publicly being critical of Tom Hicks and George Gilette over transfer policy. This spat threatened to rip the club apart, with Benitez questioning his role at the club and other managers being linked with the job. This amounted to nothing and all members concerned were eventually appeased. This was a club in trouble. Or was it? However, when we look at the statistics, it paints a different picture. It took the team until the second week in December and fifteen league games, to suffer their first domestic defeat of the season, a suprising 3 – 1 defeat at Reading and despite a stuttering start in the Champions League, 3 successive wins and 16 goals later they were in the draw for the second round. It was Liverpool’s best start to a season in many years. The one thing that will have disappointed Reds fans, would have been the number of draws that the team accumulated which left them slightly off the pace at the summit of the league. A second consecutive league defeat against their bitter rivals from Manchester was obviously the final nail in the coffin and now it is clear, Benitez must go.
What a joke. This relatively successful start to the season has been done in a style that hasn’t been seen at Anfield for a number of seasons. As one would expect of a Benitez side, the defence has been solid, with only Manchester United conceding fewer. It is worth noting that this has been achieved largely without Daniel Agger who it could be argued is Liverpool’s best defender. The young Dane adds a level of calm, skill and composure to the Liverpool backline and has the pace required at the back that an aging Sami Hyypia no longer has. Even the ever dependable Jamie Carragher has seemed more reckless without Agger alongside him. Not only has the side been miserly at the back, but Benitez seems to have addressed the problem that plagued his Liverpool sides over the past few seasons. They can score goals and lots of them. Last season in particular, Liverpool were guilty of dominating games, making countless chances and failing to convert their superiority but the addition of the man known as “El Nino” has corrected this glaring flaw. Fernando Torres has hit the Premier League with a whirlwind combination of skill, pace and clinical finishing. With a twenty million pound price tag, the pressure was on Torres from the beginning but he has responded with such élan that the Kopites have a new terrace favourite. His combination, of great pace, control and hard work for the good of the team has changed Liverpool and given them a cutting edge that they haven’t had for a number of years. Torres, with the addition of the exciting young dutchman Babel and proven Premier League performer Yossi Benayoun have given Liverpool an extra dimension. This, coupled with the return to form of captain Steven Gerrard and the return to fitness of Harry Kewell have allowed Liverpool to play a more expansive and free flowing game. As yet, they still don’t play with the level of pace and style as Arsenal, few teams do, but they are getting there. It is a large step away from the route one style served up in the late Houllier years and for Liverpool fans brought up on those great sides of the 1970’s and 1980’s it is a case of welcome back.
It seems that ESPN have a problem with Rafa Benitez and his style of management. The pundits are constantly critical of his rotation policy, yet if they look closely the spine of the team, it remains largely unchanged. By and large, this season, Liverpool line up with Reina in goal, Carragher, Hyypia and Arbeloa as three of the back four, Gerrard and Mascherano in midfield and Torres and Kuyt up front. When Benitez changed the side for Reading, a side he thought could beat the Royals, and Liverpool lost, Benitez was criticized for his constant tinkering. The Liverpool boss kept the same side that beat Marseille so emphatically against Manchester United and the team lost. The studio pundits then had the gall to say that maybe the reason for the defeat was down to tiredness of the players. Another criticism is that Benitez uses the zonal marking system when defending set pieces and therefore when the team conceded from a set piece it was dragged up once more. It seemed to escape the attention of the punditry that Liverpool have conceded one goal, direct from a set piece in the league all season, that being Tevez’s goal for United. The “experts” said it was a result of the zonal system. When Spurs, a team that uses a man to man system, allowed Nicklas Bendtner a free header in the most recent north London derby, not one criticism was voiced. Another issue which confirmed the anti Liverpool stance was Steve McMahon’s praise of Arsenal’s Mathieu Flamini. McMahon had stated that a large part of Arsenal’s success was the role played by Flamini as a holding midfielder. Previously in the season, McMahon had criticized Javier Mascherano for being one dimensional and not contributing in other areas of the team, despite playing the exact same role as the Arsenal man and arguably being much better at it.
As a Liverpool fan, I would prefer to be closer to those at the top, but heading into the new year in touching distance of the Premier League summit, playing an attractive brand of expansive football spearheaded by the exciting partnership of Gerrard and Torres, things are looking bright for Liverpool fans and even if the team don’t win the title this year, its getting nearer and nearer with every passing season. With Benitez at the helm, the club being bank rolled by messers Hicks and Gilette and plans for a new stadium in the pipeline, this young batch of players that the manager has assembled can look forward to challenging for trophies both at home and in Europe of the forthcoming seasons. Crisis? What crisis.