After all the trouble the team and fans have had to go through to get to this fixture, let’s hope it proves to be worth the effort.  A trip to Madrid to face Atletico is never going to be easy, particularly with Torres on the sidelines, but I don’t think this game is as difficult as it may appear.  Basically, for all their star names they aren’t very good, and Benfica was a much tougher opponent in my opinion.

The biggest worry I have is how much the journey has taken out of the squad.  It shouldn’t make a difference really, as it’s not like they had to jog there (Dirk would have loved that I reckon), but looking at the performance of Barcelona this week you do worry if the extra travelling doed have an impact.  It will have affected the training schedules for one thing, and players these days are kept to a strict routine, when that routine changes it can have an effect.  On the flipside, you’d like to think that the trip will have been good for team bonding.

The key to this is to just make sure we don’t lose the tie in Madrid.  If it’s still alive for the 2nd leg, we’re in decent shape as we know how well we usually do in 2nd legs at Anfield.  We’ll miss Torres, obviously, but perhaps not as much in this game as the home leg.  We can just go there tonight, and be organised and ‘compact’, and just hope to take whatever chances we create on the counter or from set pieces.

I’m very confident about this game, although I’m not sure why as it’s not like we’ve been in great form without Torres.  It was a good result against West Ham, and we played ok, but they were really, really bad, so I don’t think we can read too much into it.  The previous game we were held to a disappointing 0-0 draw by Fulham, and I don’t think it’s being overly harsh to say that there is a huge drop off between Torres and Ngog.  That being said, if others step up their game and give him the service and support he needs Ngog can get goals.  He just can’t make them out of nothing in the way Torres does.

However, Ngog may not even start this game, it’s more likely we’ll see Kuyt up front with Babel and Yossi on the flanks.  I’d be tempted to try Babel up there as chances are we’ll be counter attacking a fair bit and his pace and strength might come in handy.  Only thing is, any time he’s played up front he’s been fucking attrocious, so it would be a risk.  Might be worth using him on the right instead of the left though.  If we had a front four of Gerrard, Babel, Kuyt and Yossi, that would be fairly interchangeable and would give us numerous options.

The rest of the side picks itself, we’ll have two holding midfielders as usual, and it would be a big surprise if it wasn’t the same back four that has played the last few games.  As for Atletico, I don’t know that much about them other than they’ve had a bad season and have lost four of the last five league games to lie in 10th place in La Liga.  Pretty poor that.

Whatsmore, they didn’t win a single group game before crashing out of the Champions League, and despite reaching the semi finals of this competition they have only actually won one game en route, when Forlan’s stoppage time goal defeated ten man Galatasaray.  Sporting Lison and Valencia were both seen off on away goals, so they’ve only won one game in European competition all season.

We’re having a bad season too of course, and lie 7th in the Premiership.  As bad as we’ve been however, it’s still a lot better than Atletico, and it would be far from acceptable if we went out to the Spanish side.  We’re missing Torres, but they are without the suspended Aguero, so that evens itself out.  We should go through the tie, and I’d be very disappointed if we came away from the Vicente Calderon with anything worse than a draw.

Line up prediction:  Reina; Johnson, Carragher, Kyrgiakos, Agger; Lucas, Mascherano; Benayoun, Gerrard, Babel; Kuyt:

Score prediction: 1-1 (Gerrard)