D-List

UEFA Champion’s League Draw

So then PSV, Atletico Madrid and Marseille.  Ouch! That could have gone better!

Initial reaction is that we should qualify, our European pedigree in recent years suggests that on our day we can take all of those sides.  What’s a little worrying is that all three will believe they have a genuine chance of qualifying, not to mention unique motivation to take some revenge on us.

Marseille deservedly beat us at Anfield last season, but a Torres masterclass tore them apart in the final group game.  It put us through, but let’s not forget cost Marseille a place in round two.

PSV we played four times in the 2006-2007 campaign – winning both group games before a majestic 3-0 away win in the First Leg of the Quarter Final followed by a drab 0-0 back at Anfield.  On that form we’ve nothing to fear, but a closer look at PSV’s Champions League record will show a team who’ve reached the last eight twice in the past four seasons and only once failed to qualify from the group stage.

Finally there’s Atletico.  Obviously the big focus here will be on Torres.  We took away their hero and whilst his armband proved he was a red,  for the previous decade he was the golden boy of the other Madrid.   Imagine Gerrard or Carragher turning out against us? It’s going to be an emotional night at the Vicente Calderón Stadium.  What’s more it won’t just be Nando in line for a reunion.  Little Luis Garcia and Florent Sinama-Pongolle are both ex-reds in the Atletico squad.

Karl

Albert docks

New signing! New signing!

Well almost.  It’s going to happen though, I’m sure of it.  After all, Liverpool missing out on their prime summer targets and then blowing the best part of £10 million on second or third choice targets just a few days shy of transfer deadline day.  I mean that’s never happened before has it?

I admit, I’m being a bit harsh on Senor Riera here.  I’ve never seen him player, I know very little about him other that he’s not in Spanish national side and once had a unsuccessful loan spell at Manchester City.

What’s wound me up here is the same old, same old situation.  We’ve had these kind of signings repeated over the last few years.  They’ve not worked before, so it’s hard to believe that it’ll be any difference this time.

I’m also not entirely sure where Albert fits in.  He can’t operate as a left-back or as a defensive midfielder in the way Gareth Barry could have.  So to make things even more depressing it looks like we’ve shot £9 million on a squad player.  Yes, we do need width and decent wingers, of that there’s no doubt.  I just find it difficult to believe that Riera is anything more another stop-gap signing.

Plus what of our youngsters and reserve options.  People like Paul Anderson and Adam Hamill. Signings like this have the knock-on effect that everyone else gets knocked one-step further down the pecking order.  Instead of looking forward to some young vibrant motivated youngster appearing down the flanks in the early rounds of the league and F.A. Cup’s we can expect to see the likes of Yossi, Voronin and all the other squaddies making us squirm against Lowerleague Albion.

*sigh* Oh and to make it worse Villa have just signed Milner and our new stadium has been delayed yet again!  Has being joint-top of the league ever felt so depressing!?

karl

Sub-Standard

Liverpool 1 – 0 Standard Liege
(aet. agg. 1-0)

Well, I can see why Gareth Barry’s decided to stay at Villa. He’s got far more chance of winning on Sunday playing in claret and blue than he would in silver.

I can’t really say much about last night, except to applaud the adroitness of the 606 hosts who pointed out how frustrating it is for Liverpool fans to have all of their complaints ready only to then have them blunted by the little detail of actually winning the game. Particularly when such complaints revolve around Dirk Kuyt. But listen – him scoring an instinctive striker’s goal after having been switched up front doesn’t excuse the eighty-three bloody minutes he spent giving the ball away on the right of midfield. If it wasn’t galling enough that he was deployed there while Ryan Babel sat on the bench and Jermaine Pennant wasn’t even in the squad, it was made even moreso by the promise shown by Nabil El Zhar when occupying that position.

Look, we’re through now. It was a horrible, horrible performance by a completely disjointed team bereft of ideas, confidence and passion. But let’s not dwell on it. The only positives were the aforementioned El Zhar (who should have had a penalty – but let’s be honest, losing to a pen would have been even harsher on Standard, though I’d feel more sympathy had they not been such niggling, bullying gits, especially in their treatment of Our Boy Torres) and Reina, by far our best (although “best” is a relative term here) performer with a solid and reliable performance in addition to a couple of top-drawer saves.

I’m not at all confident heading into games with Villa and United (the latter in particular), but still. Three wins and a draw is, on paper, a good start to the season no matter what the performances have been like. If those performances improve, we’ll have no need to complain. But if things don’t start to come together sharpish… well, we’re going to get hammered when we come up against opposition better than the three teams we’ve played so far…

(Seb)

Well it probably is Deja-Vu. It sounds like it.

Fuck off.  Fuck off.  Fuck off.

A quick summary of last week.  We’re all set to sign a player, the team is playing well and Rafa is happy.  Enter stage left Parry, Gilette and Hicks to spoil the party by refusing to stump up the cash for Barry.  So inevitably we now have disharmony between manager and board and what little confidence we’ve managed to muster as fans stripped bare all over again.

Oh and look here’s news of Rafa’s potential resignation (or in this case a denial of it).  I give it a week before one of the tabloid’s publishes a story about DIC launching a new takeover bid.

* * *

Now it’s dead in the water, I feel genuinely embarrassed by how the club handled the entire Barry affair.  Hopefully all Villains will welcome him back with open arms.  It seems the majority of Liverpool fans didn’t want him anyway, so he’s surely better off at a club where he’s a living legend than as a squad player at a club run by the three stooges.

(Karl Eisenhauer)

Beautiful!

Sunderland 0 – 1 Liverpool

The Performance? No.  The result? Hmm… no.  Torres’s finish?  Well okay yes, but no.  I’m talking about that goalie kit!  Infact, the entire away kit.  Seeing a Liverpool team run out in silver & red, with a keeper in a proper keeper’s green top just for a few moments jumped me back twenty years.  Then the game kicked off and we were far from championship material.

So what can we take from that game?  It was a better performance than against Liege, although it’s hard to see how it could have been worse.  We were somewhat fortunate to come away with three points.  If the Sunderland starting XI had possessed a decent striker things could have been very different.

Still we rode our luck a bit, and ultimately we did that thing all league winning sides are meant to do – Play badly and win One-Nil.  How often we can do that this season will depend on how often the big names do the business and those pundits thinking Torres will struggle to repeat his form last season might want to think again.

Ultimately I’m still feeling quite positive despite our slow start.  We’ve 3pts in the bag. We have Masch, Lucas and Babel all to come back and if we’re lucky maybe one more new signing to come in.

Right now if I have any concerns it’s over starting selections.  Alonso was brilliant for us today, grabbed the assist for Nando’s goal and almost won goal of the season on the opening day with a trademark 60-yard screamer.  Yet Rafa chose to start with the inexperienced Plessis.  Similarly defence? A lot of the talk this summer has been about the future defensive pairing off Skrtel and Agger, so it was a surprise to see Carra and Sami get the starts.  Surely it’s too early to start rotating already!?

As for the new signings.  Dossena definitely stepped up a gear today.  Meanwhile Keane frustrates, mostly himself with another ordinary showing.  Surely it would make more sense to stick with our winning formula from last season with Gerrard in behind Torres and then bring in Keane gradually?  At the moment it’s all starting to resemble Crouchy’s early Liverpool career and we all know how long it took him to break his duck.

(Karl Eisenhauer)

Premier League 2008/09 Predictions

As the new season looms, I thought I might as well stick my neck out and do a quick glance over each team’s prospects for the season, and where I think they’ll end up. Just so I can look nice and stupid in nine months’ time, like…

1. Liverpool
Well, frankly, why the hell not? It’s the prerogative of the Liverpool fan to claim every year that “this is our year”, so sod it, I’m going with blind misplaced optimism even after the shambles of the other night. There are various reasons I could give – the extra cutting edge of Keane hopefully turning those draws into wins, an already pretty solid backline getting even solider with the burgeoning Agger/Skrtel partnership to look forward to (and Dossena, again Wednesday notwithstanding, arguably Serie A’s top left back last season), Ryan Babel looking to start to fulfil his potential, the anger of one-too-many recent pathetic capitulations to United inspiring us to thrash them both home and away this time out, and our having the best fucking striker in the world wearing our number 9 for the first time since Rushie retired. But naturally, the main reason why we’ll win the league this season is that we’re wearing a silver and red away kit. You know it makes sense.

Oh dear

Standard Liege 0 – 0 Liverpool

Well, if there’s a positive to be drawn from that little shambles, it’s that it will be physically impossible to play worse than that for the rest of the season.

Just quickly, then, because I don’t want to dwell on it any longer than I have to : Is it some kind of massive elaborate practical joke that Dirk Kuyt is somehow considered to be a right midfielder? Xabi Alonso seemed to be doing his best to ensure he stays at Anfield by making his market value plummet as far as possible with each free kick drilled into the wall and each fumbled bit of possession. Arbeloa had perhaps his worst game for the club, and Dossena was only rescued from “worst debut ever” territory by Robbie Keane, on whom we’ve spent twenty million for someone who doesn’t seem to know how to weight a pass. It took until the last ten minutes of the game for Carra – who also seemed to have forgotten he was wearing the captain’s armband, so lacking were any attempts at inspiration - to successfully make a tackle rather than being flat-footedly beaten. Agger might have had a good game, showing a willingness to get forward creatively, but was busy having the crap kicked out of him by an aggressive (but spirited) Liege side, as was Torres, for whom I genuinely feared an injury was on the cards (not because Liege were any worse than your average Championship cloggers, but because that’s just how the night seemed to be going). Plessis showed willing, but was clumsy. Benayoun was pretty anonymous. The only one to emerge with anything like any credit was Reina, simply because – despite a couple of late flaps – he saved a penalty (piss poor as it was) and actually had other saves to make as well. Unlike the Liege goalkeeper.

Dear me. Our early-season optimism isn’t usually in tatters this early, is it? Oh well, roll on Sunderland. You never know, we might just scrape a point.

Green is the colour…

As with Karl, I can only apologise for how quiet things have been lately – various reasons have meant that we just haven’t been able to give the site the proper pre-season focus that we would have liked. BUT! Never fear, because in the coming weeks the site will really kick into gear as the season gets underway, and we’ll be talking about our hopes and dreams for the season, and our thoughts on its opening salvos.

But in the meantime… well, I never got round to talking about the European away kit, did I? And I probably should, since – with Standard Liege sporting a red home kit – our boys will probably be wearing it tonight. And, well… I quite like it. But then, anyone who reads F1 Colours will know that I like green – and the much-maligned ‘91-’92 away shirt is probably my favourite LFC kit of all time (not the horrible shiny centenary one that followed it, though. Ugh.). So anything that harkens back to that is, in my books, a Good Thing. Not hugely keen on the navy collar, but apart from that, it’s a solid kit. Better than last year’s, anyway – which, while dramatic and stuff, never quite looked right as an onfield kit (except when El Nino was dancing through the Marseilles defence, of course).

The other thing I’d wanted to pass comment on was squad numbers. It was apparent from pre-season friendlies that Benayoun was going to sacrifice a first-eleven number for his preferred 15 now that Crouch has left (I’d actually predicted last summer that he’d take that, and Crouchy would get #11), and that Emiliano Insua, Damien Plessis and Nabil el Zhar would enhance their first-team credentials by taking numbers 22, 28 and 31 respectively, and so it proved. If I’d not been in Ireland (and, er, been on the ball at any point) I could have posted that and looked all cool and prescient. The other main “promotions” are Jay Spearing (26), Kristzian Nemeth (29) and Stephen Darby (32), all given numbers that suggest they’ll feature regularly on benches and in Carling Cup games. Somewhat surprisingly, Daniel Pacheco doesn’t make the cut just yet, despite impressing in pre-season – clearly Nemeth remains ahead of him in the queue at the moment. I’m not hugely impressed, either (although I’ve liked him on the pitch so far), by new left-back Andrea Dossena taking #2 – that means we now have a left-back wearing 2 and a right-back wearing 3. It’s WRONG, I tell you.

Of the first thirty numbers, then, only #6 and #11 remain available (demonstrating how fucking huge our squad now is compared to, say, Arsenal). The former, of course, is clearly being kept warm for someone who already wears it at his current club (and if he doesn’t sign, then it should be Skrtel’s next year – none of this #37 rubbish, unless he’s a Clerks fan, in which case I love him even more), while #11 is nicely primed for that winger that EVERYONE BUT RAFA KNOWS WE STILL NEED ONE MORE OF. Although that said, it’s clearly Babel’s future number for years to come. You heard it here first.

And now that I’ve bored you all (well, I would have done if we had any readers yet) with that, I’ll bugger off. See you for Standard Liege post-mortem, and/or Exciting Sunderland New Premier League Joy Joy Build Up!

(Seb Patrick)

Mighty Morphin Four-Past Rangers

Okay four reasons for this post.

Number One – Apology.  Who the shitting hell stole the last three weeks? Oh well it’s not like we missed anything important is it.  Oh wait, pre-season.  Oh hold on two new strikers.  NEW £20 million signing.  NEW NUMBER SEVEN!  Oh, and the Barry-saga which was on, off… and as of about half an hour ago back on again.  Thanks MON we knew you always loved us really.  Of course by this time tomorrow he’ll have probably signed for Arsenal, but at the moment it’s looking promising again.  Anyhow, yes – we’ve missed far too much so apologies.

Number Two – We stuffed FOUR past Rangers and I really wanted to use that headline.  Okay it’s only a friendly, but after the mostly reserves outings against lower league teams and middling european sides we’ve now hit pre-season proper.  Today’s performances was impressive. Great to see Torres back in the old routine, positive to see our other new striker, David Ngog, show great confidence for the 2nd goal and also a personal highlight getting to see us in a silver away kit again.

Number Three – To push my last post and it’s stupid amount of tags from the top of our hymn sheet.

Number Four – Barry. Keane. Ngog. Pacheco.  Four potential new names for the first XI.  With the new season now in sight we’ll run through our expectations for each of them for the coming 12 months.  Apart from the one that will probably be staying at Villa/poached by Arsenal/Announcing he’s Shergar’s lovechild (delete as applicable) by the time I’ve finished this sentence.

Karl Eisenhauer