Liverpool 0 - City 3
Posted by Akzoony2 in Liverpool, Man City | 25 August 2010
Would Mr Gillet and Mr Hicks please stand up.
Well in all honesty that was the worst defeat i have witnessed for years. Manchester 'money bags' City 3 Liverpool 'the new hope' 0.
Simply Appalling. And if we're honest, at no stage in the game did it look as though the result would be any different.
How you may ask- after the disaster that was the 2009-2010 season – was that our worst defeat? Simply because of the level of tactical naivety on show, Something we have not seen in many a year.
Benitez for all of his faults knew how to set up a team, to prepare a team. But to arrive at Manchester City - a team that cost in excess of four times that of Liverpool- to arrive with team set up in a 4-4-2 formation with a midfield consisting of Gerrard (a great passer and reader of the game but not an enforcer) and Lucas (a youngster who is much better player than people give him credit for but one who will not impose himself on a game without help) and a forward partnership of a barely fit Torres and a still not quite ready for the big games David Ngog was taking the idea of optimism to a whole new level.
The reason it was the worst game i have seen for a long long time was not the result or even the performance. The thing for me that was so bad was the fact the the players on that pitch clearly knew what winning this game against 'the pretenders' Manchester City meant. I do not have a bad word to say about any of them as everyone did their job and were clearly working hard, The problem was the fact that City had control of the game throughout because they controlled the midfield and we did nothing to change that. As the minutes ticked by oh-so-slowly the formation remained the same, the names on the pitch remained the same. Liverpool were clearly being tactically overwhelmed and our bench had no reply.
I wont blame Roy Hodgeson for this. Even though he chose to send a side out to simply play open offensive football away from home even though we were clearly being outgunned and out manned - this has always been his way, It is one of the reasons he is loved by the press and is certainly one of the reasons he was brought in to the club. It is also the reason why -for me- he should never have been chosen for the job.
Liverpool are simply not the powerhouse we were a few decades ago, and in order to stay in touch with with the top teams in England and Europe in recent years we have had to use very clever tactics at appropriate times, rotate when required and find ways to control games -often against greatly superior opposition-.
Hodgeson is Liverpool manager now and -despite how this sounds- therefore i will do all i can to support him, but we have been outspent in the transfer market for many years by many teams and we have been over performing for just as long largely thanks to some very prudent and forward thinking tactics.
Hodgeson does not have the tactical nous to compensate for this in the way that his predecessor did. He is going to bring in the open attacking football that some fans have been crying out for and -i believe- will therefore doom us to life back down in 5th or 6th place.
Again, i do not blame Roy for this, Everybody knows what kind of manager Roy is, and as such he should not be attacked for sticking to his principles.
The people at fault are those that spent many millions of pounds to get rid of one of the worlds most tactically astute managers who was not ready to leave (even the most hardened doubters can have very little argument against the speed in which the best team in the world last year snapped him up once available), and to replace him with an Englishman with a pedigree of doing well in the Scandinavian leagues, being a stand in for 2 years at Inter Milan, overseeing a terrible time at Blackburn and doing a half decent job with a mid table Fulham for two years. An undeniably nice guy with a many years of management behind him but with a mediocre at best CV.
Will Gillet and Hicks please stand up. Will they then please turn around and walk away from the table. Despite the money they have taken from the club, despite the debt they had placed upon the club, despite the year upon year devaluing of the squad and despite all of the anguish they have caused amongst loyal fans Liverpool have still been contenders and considered a real threat around the world. This summer seems to me to have been the final nail in the coffin and the end of all of that.
Tonight was our opportunity to show that there was still life despite the departure of Benitez. A year on we still have no replacement for Alonso and with the season loan for Aquilani we now have no hope for one, We may have signed Joe Cole but as exciting as he can be his stats are no better than those of Yossi who went the other way. We are no stronger on the pitch than last year however with fewer injuries we should be in a much stronger position, but without an astute tactical mind at the helm i think we are likely to find ourselves where the price of our squad and our wage bill say we should be, and should have been for the last 5 years. Scrapping it out for 5th or 6th place looking enviously as our richer cousins and dreaming about what might have been.
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