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)
I thought that the match was tortuous to watch and I was calling Kuyt all game, especially when took Keane off, but as Rafa is the manager, and not me, Kuyt ended up winning the game for us in the last moments of the match, the third consecutive time that has happened this season so far.
The problem is that we didn’t deserve to win the match. Over the two legs Liege were the better team and how we managed to pull this off I will never know. I know it sounds strange complaining when we won but I hate it when this happens, we play shit and still win. Then again if we win the league playing like this then it will make up for having to sit on the edge of our seats for the entire match and then some before we can finally kill a team off!
Keane will come good I am sure of it but I am not confident at all going into our next two league games.