LIVERPOOL 1 Everton 0
Report by Dave Usher at Anfield
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| Scorer(s) – Dirk Kuyt
Half Time - 0-0
Venue - Anfield
Date - Sat 6 February 2010
Star Man – Jamie Carragher
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When Sotirios Kyrgiakos reluctantly made his way from the field after being red carded, it was clearly going to be a major turning point in the game. So it proved, but not in the way most would have expected. Being reduced to ten men immediately put us onto the back foot, and put the onus of attack onto the blues. Perennially used to being the underdog, they never looked comfortable in the role of 'favourites' and this was pretty comfortable for us in the end. The sending off actually hurt them more than us.
Finding themselves with a man advantage completely threw Everton. We retreated into two banks of four with just N'Gog up front, and the blues didn't have the first idea on how to break us down. They had to tear up their gameplan, and you could almost see them thinking "Shit, what the fuck do we do now?" Screech left the field injured after his clash with the Greek, and even though his replacement Mikel Arteta is a vastly superior footballer, the blues had lost their tallest player and were now resembling the Smurfs. Osman, Arteta, Pienaar, Baines, Cahill, Donavan..... All that was missing was Papa Smurf Abel Xavier. It was all very predictable and easy for us to deal with. Distin was the only one with any kind of height, and that would ultimately cost them as they conceded from a set piece.
Being a man down, we understandably posed only a limited attacking threat ourselves and it wasn't a great spectacle. We were very comfortable in defence though and Reina only had to make one save of note. We're getting by on hard work, battling and organisation at the moment, and very little else. In a Merseyside derby, that's often all you need. It's usually a game for the Dirk Kuyt's of this world rather than the Albert Riera's.
It's rarely a game for the purists, and you can usually guarantee a red card or two as it can often spill over. There were two dismissals in this one, but there should have been three, and the one straight red that was given was probably just about the lesser of the three evils.
Before seeing any replays of it, my initial reaction was that the Greek was going to be in trouble as you simply can't go in for tackles with both feet together like that. I don't think he was trying to hurt anyone, I think he was trying to protect himself from what he thought was going to be a strong challenge from Fellaini. It didn't look good though and he was always going to see red for it.
I was also wondering about Fellaini's part in it though, as it seemed to me that he'd gone right over the ball and Kygiakos' obvious pain seemed to confirm it. That was how I saw it at the time, and a few text messages confirmed it. Both should have saw red, not just our player. The snidey Fellaini's participation in the game was over anyway, but Everton shouldn't have been allowed to send on a replacement as he should have suffered the same fate as theGreek.
The texts also stated that neither challenge was as bad as the one from Pienaar just before it. I hadn't seen that at all, there's a big post that completely blocked my view of that incident and all I saw was Mascherano on the floor holding his shin. It was only later that night I saw the challenge. Quite how the referee could see that and award anything other than a red card is mystifying. Seriously, that's about as bad a challenge as you're likely to see anywhere, but he stayed on the field. Ridiculous. He should be made to explain himself, as he clearly had a perfect view of it.
Carragher went into the book seconds later for going through the back of Pienaar, and initially I couldn't understand why he'd dived in like that. It just seemed like a stupid, reckless tackle and a needless booking. Having now seen the challenge on Mascherano, it seems likely that Carra was just taking some retribution. He was well fired up this one, and set the tone for our performance by clattering Pienaar in the opening seconds. It was a perfectly fair challenge, but the winger was shaken up by it and it got the crowd going. Carra was immense all afternoon.
It was a war of attrition, with both sides flying into tackles and not much in the way of goalmouth action. I wouldn't say the sending off helped us, but I don't think it did us any harm either. The way we've been playing lately, it may have suited us in a way to be able to just sit back and battle it out. With eleven men there was more onus on us to attack them and that's not our strength at the moment.
Going down to ten gave us no choice but to be 'compact' and to keep the game tight. We would have done that anyway, but the crowd wouldn't have liked it. With us being down to ten men, the fans expectations changed, and grinding it out became not just acceptable, but necessary. We did it really well, and Everton just couldn't get anywhere near our goal as we fought and scrapped for every ball and showed a great desire to get the job done.
The only time Everton came close to hurting us was when Cahill headed against the bar. Aside from that, our defence did a great job of protecting Reina. The sending off didn't cause a problem for our backline, as Carragher slotted in seamlessly alongside Agger, and Mascherano performed admirably at right back. I did think we might miss Mascherano's tenacity in the middle, but we really didn't as Lucas put in a proper shift and really got stuck in alongside Gerrard.
If we'd have had Torres available, even with ten men I think we'd have been able to take the game to them and cause them problems. I'm not knocking N'Gog, he played well and worked very hard, but Torres even on his own could still have ripped them apart. N'Gog did a good job for the team, and his performance looked even better after he went off and we saw the abomination that is Ryan Babel in his place.
Once again, he was just fucking shit. For the first couple of minutes he ran around a bit, then he lost interest. Didn't close them down, didn't hold the ball up, didn't run the channels.... everything that N'Gog did (or at least tried to do), Babel didn't. I can understand why Rafa felt putting him on was the right thing to do, but once again Babel let him down and showed that whatever faith Benitez has left in him is completely misplaced. He's just dreadful, and he was the only player who let us down as everyone else gave their all for the side.
The frustrating thing is, the game was perfectly set up for Babel to wreak havoc. He had fresh legs, they were pushing forward and there were gaps to exploit. He's just shit though, and I'd rather we used Amoo in that situation now than this brain dead, lazy waste of a shirt.
When Everton threw on Anichebe and Yakubu, we stood up to it really well and aside from one snapshot from Yakubu they didn't trouble us. Everton really didn't seem to be able to handle the expectation suddenly thrust on them when they were handed a one man advantage, and sending on the two big lumps was a final act of desperation.
Anichebe's only contribution to the game was to kick off when Gerrard went through Pienaar. Gerrard was booked, even though he won the ball and it was his follow through that caught the Everton player. It was good to see Agger get straight in there to have a pop at Anichebe when it went off though.
It had been a bad tempered game from start to finish, and it was no surprise when Pienaar finally got the red card he'd been virtually begging for all afternoon in stoppage time. It was a bit of a nothing challenge, but he knew what he was doing and clearly jumped into Gerrard. The skipper may have made a bit of a meal of it, but you can see on the replay his head get jolted backwards as Pienaar's shoulder caught him. It was probably just about worthy of a yellow, but even if it wasn't that little twat has no right to complain given the shithouse lunge he'd done on Mascherano earlier.
This was a gutsy, battling performance from our boys, and it must be pretty demoralising for the blues that even when we are playing the worst football we've played in years, even without Fernando Torres, and even reduced to ten men from an early stage in the game, they STILL lost to us. Moyes' record against us in the league is appalling, and he's somehow managed to lose to us twice this season even though we've hardly created anything in the two games.
There were a number of heroes out there for us in this game. Kuyt's monumental effort was rewarded with the winning goal (very well taken it was too), Lucas did a great job protecting his defence, Mascherano was excellent and Agger and Carragher were faultless. Chosing one from that group is difficult, but I'll go with Carragher, just edging out Dirk.
Team: Reina; Carragher, Kyrgiakos, Agger, Insua; Lucas, Mascherano; Kuyt (Skrtel), Gerrard, Maxi (Aurelio); N'Gog (Babel):
