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Chelsea 1 Liverpool 1 (May 10 2015)


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Report by
Dave Usher
 
 
 

Well it could have been worse I suppose. Not much worse, admittedly, and only the fact that Steven Gerrard managed to grab a tiny little piece of redemption against a side that has inflicted more misery on him than any other prevented this from being a complete nightmare. Chelsea are without question the most insufferable bunch of twats from top to bottom that you’ll find anywhere in football.

 

Forget that we didn’t lose, we may as well have as this was a game we needed to win and there are no moral victories here regardless of how we played. They won the title, they didn’t need to win the game and the sight of our players standing there applauding them onto that stupid fucking blue carpet will stay with me for a long time. What can we do about it though? We’re just fans, we’re powerless. The only people who can make us relevant again are either unwilling or unable to do so.

 

I’m sick of moral victories over Chelsea, I want proper ones for a change. So what if we outplayed them again, we didn’t win did we? Besides, I’m seriously starting to wonder if the reason we tend to look ok against them is because they let us. They know how to beat us; keep it tight and wait for the mistake. It’s a foolproof method that’s worked for several other sides this year too.

 

Teams know we’ve got no firepower anymore. We’re like a flyweight boxer in with a heavyweight. Buzzing around throwing harmless little jabs while our opponent just absorbs them, waiting for us to leave our guard down so they can land the knockout blow. Most managers don’t take that approach as they aren’t the kind of massive shithouse Mourinho is, but we’ve seen Pulis and Bruce do it to good effect recently too.

 

Ordinarily I’d be fine with a draw at Chelsea as it’s a pretty good result. Let’s not kid ourselves though, this wasn’t even a proper game. We dominated the second half because Chelsea weren’t really that arsed. I mean Hazard actually looked like he was playing in a pre-season friendly and if Costa had been playing we’d have probably lost as his nastiness and will to win would have rubbed off on the rest. He’s like their Suarez in that respect. So for me there is no honour or consolation in this result, we may as well have lost as anything but a win was not going to be any use to us anyway. Gerrard’s goal was somewhat satisfying but even that had the shine taken off it thanks to Rodgers. I’ll get to that shortly.

 

We didn’t blow fourth place in this game though, the damage was done by losing at home to United and then failing to beat West Brom and Hull. We don’t deserve top four and have no-one to blame for it except ourselves. Ok, when I say ‘ourselves’, I mean the morons who have fucked up our last two summers (while doing nothing in the last two January’s to rectify it). Great news though kids, it looks like they’re getting the chance to make it third time lucky. James Milner & Danny Ings, come on down!

 

I suppose some credit is due for the players coming back from that early setback and getting a draw. I didn’t think we’d come back when Terry put them ahead so early, and I was also convinced we wouldn’t be ending the game with a full compliment of players either as Andre Marriner went card mad in the first half. It seemed like every foul committed by our lads saw a yellow card produced. To make it worse, he bottled out of sending off Fabregas. Twice. The first tackle on Sterling was a clear red card. Nasty, dangerous, snide tackle from a nasty, dangerous snide little twat. No-one ever says it, but he is a little bastard that Fabregas.

 

He escaped with a yellow for that (do Chelsea do this shit deliberately because refs will never send anyone off in the first minute?), and then escaped all punishment for pulling Sterling back by his shorts. Sterling defo milked it but it was a foul and given the way he was handing out yellows for even the most innocuous of free-kicks then Fabregas should have been off.

 

The longer the game went on the more comfortable we began to look and the less arsed Chelsea seemed. Sterling was a threat but his end product was usually crap (although he did set up our best chance to win the game), Coutinho was looking sharp (but wasted that best chance to win the game) and Lallana grew into the game and was especially lively after the break until he was subbed for Ibe. For all the neat approach play we didn’t look like scoring until Gerrard escaped the attention of Obi-Mikel and headed in Hendo’s free-kick just before half time.

 

It was an intelligent header as if he hadn’t headed it down into the ground he probably wouldn’t have scored. As I said last week though, it once again showed the folly of having him taking the set-pieces all these years. He’d only scored against these once before (ten years ago), and he’s generally been shite against them over the years. I don’t know what it is, whether it’s some kind of mental block or what, but he’s always struggled against them. He was good in this one though which is why I was so surprised that he was subbed with 15 minutes still to go.

 

I was even more surprised that so many Chelsea fans applauded him off. Probably just copying Mourinho, although at least his respect for Gerrard is genuine and heartfelt. As Stevie said afterwards, the Chelsea fans can shove their standing ovation up their Tory arses. I may be paraphrasing a little there, but it’s clearly what he meant.

 

They’d been mercilessly ripping him for the entire game (or entire season if you want to be totally accurate), stopping only when he scored and briefly shut them up. How dare he spoil their fun, they’d even had their little signs laminated and everything. A word hasn’t even been invented yet for how smalltime and embarrassing Chelsea fans are.

 

Some of the applause will have been genuine but most of it was them just trying to give them impression that they have some class, which of course they don’t. The Demba Ba chant rang out in full force before Gerrard had even parked his arse on the bench. Shove your standing ovation up your arse, knob heads.

 

What was that substitution all about though? "It was just to give him the acclaim on what will probably be the last time he played at Stamford Bridge." explained Rodgers. Really? REALLY? *sniffs* Can you smell that? *sniffs again* Yep, it’s unmistakeable. I can defo smell bullshit, and tons of it.

 

 

Of all the things Brendan has said and done since he’s been Liverpool manager, this has angered me more than anything else. If that was his reasoning behind taking Gerrard off then he should be sacked on the spot. It’s that simple. IF he’s telling the truth, then he has essentially put Gerrard getting a round of applause from Chelsea fans ahead of trying to to win the game. If I’m John Henry today I’m getting him on the phone and demanding he explain himself there, and if he says that’s why he took him off then I’d be telling him to clear his desk and fuck off.

 

Of course the likelihood is he isn’t telling the truth. I’d even go as far as to say there is no chance in hell that with 15 minutes to go he decided “I know, I’ll take Stevie off here and let him milk the warm ovation he’s bound to get from these sporting and fair minded Chelsea fans”. Firstly, I think the entire football world was shocked that some Chelsea fans actually rose to applaud him off. Nobody could have anticipated that.

 

I’d even say that subbing him early merely gave the Chelsea fans even more of an opportunity to give him shit if they’d so chosen. Rodgers actually got lucky that they did applaud him, because if he’d had to walk off to jeers and mocking then that would have been all on Brendan and he’d deserve every bit of shit that would have come his way. Them clapping Stevie off has kind of gotten Rodgers off the hook a little really.

 

The second reason I’m convinced he’s bullshitting is that this is something you do in stoppage time, not with 15 minutes to go in a game that’s finely balanced and in which you need to win to have any hope at all of staying in the race for 4th place.

 

Brendan was lying through his shiny new false teeth. The question is why? Probably because he didn’t want to say anything negative about Gerrard, but by not telling the truth he’s done something far worse. He’s made himself look like a complete bullshitter who was kissing up to Chelsea fans. This was Roy Hodgson behaviour.

 

I can only assume he took Gerrard off because he’d been left behind on a couple of Chelsea counter attacks. Fabregas beat him on the touchline and then he was done by Hazard and it needed a great Lovren tackle to rescue the situation (yeah that actually happened). That’s why he subbed him I reckon, although I still think that was a bad call. If that is why he took him off, he should have just said so. Would it have been so unthinkable to just say “Stevie gave us everything there today, he was outstanding but I felt we needed some fresh legs in there to deal with their counter attacks”.

 

Gerrard had played very well, in fact it was one of the best games he’s ever had against Chelsea. We were controlling the midfield and he was keeping things ticking over nicely in there. And of course he’s OUR FUCKING TOP GOALSCORER!! Why the hell would you be taking him off and replacing him with Lucas ‘one goal every three years’ Leiva (with all due respect to Lucas who I like)?? You know why? Because he was happy enough to just not lose.

 

I suspect he saw a draw as some kind of face saving exercise. You only had to look at the lack of urgency from the players in the latter stages to see that. Skrtel staying back on a set-piece and Mignolet faffing around on goal kicks in stoppage time. There was no urgency or desire to grab a late winner. None whatsoever. Rodgers was happy with the point even if it sealed our fate in terms of missing the top four.

 

He was happy with the performance too, calling it… wait for it…. yep, you guessed it, outstanding. Now I’m not going to criticise him for that as there’s plenty of other things he came out that are genuinely worthy of criticism. We were far from outstanding though because we barely tested the keeper. We were ok, but I’m not sure that’s a word in Brendan’s vocabulary. It’s not flowery enough. We played some nice stuff in midfield and there were a number of good performances, but were Chelsea ever really in any serious trouble?

 

We’re brutal in the final third and we’ve somehow succeeded in making Rickie Lambert look like a pub player. I feel bad for the guy, I know he’s actually a very good player because I’ve seen it before he came here. Southampton knew how to use him, Brendan clearly doesn’t. It’s always difficult against Chelsea’s defence and I wasn’t expecting Lambert to do much, but really he may as well not have even been on the pitch. Had he been playing for Southampton I guarantee he’d have done more, but we just don’t play to his strengths.

 

It’s all intricate passing and trying to play one twos on the edge of the box. Do we ever put any decent crosses in? Lambert earned his living at Southampton peeling onto the back post and nodding down crosses, or dropping deep and playing passes through to runners. He doesn’t get to do either playing for us. Replacing him with young Jerome Sinclair was an absolute no-brainer, I’d have done it at half time.

 

Not that Sinclair contributed any more than big Rickie had. He had about two touches in the 25 minutes he was on. Again, that’s not his fault it’s more an issue of how the team plays. Sinclair is a better fit for this team than any forward we have other than Sturridge though, because he plays on the shoulder and will make the kind of runs that Coutinho loves to pick out. Not against Chelsea though, it’s hard running in behind a defence that has pitched up a tent on the edge of it’s own box.

 

Hopefully Sinclair gets a couple of starts now, and I’d like to see one or two others given a go. Whether that’s Ojo, Brannagan, Wilson, Kent or whoever, let’s just have a look at them. And please, no more Glen Johnson now. Enough is enough. Even when he looks arsed he’s still shite. Twice he burst into the Chelsea box and I almost got excited, only for him to then dribble the ball out of play on the first occasion, and then weakly get knocked off the ball on the second. Drop him now.

 

On the positive front, Lovren was decent enough again. He may not ever be the £20m defensive rock we hoped for, but he’s showing enough now to suggest he can be a serviceable player for us. I can’t think of too much he did wrong in this one, although that has to be taken in the context of Chelsea not really being arsed. He may not be as good as Sakho, but at least he doesn’t have hamstrings made of wet bog roll.

 

Back to Brendan though, I’m so furious with his Gerrard comments that I can’t even get too worked up about the other shite he spouted afterwards. “They added Fabregas, Costa and Courtois while we lost Suarez, Sturridge and Flanagan”. I love how recently he has started lording Flanno’s influence. He never mentioned him for most of the season but he’s been clinging to him like some kind of fucking life jacket recently. “Best full back in the league last year” apparently.

 

How did we reward the “best full back in the league” for his efforts last season? Certainly not with a new contract befitting that lofty status. In fact Brendan went out and bought two new full backs to take his place. Yes, I know Flanno got injured but he wasn’t getting a game in pre-season even before that. Using Flanagan’s absence as an excuse for our poor season is embarrassing and clutching at the thinnest of straws, and I say that as one of Flanno’s biggest fans. If Manquillo and Moreno had been any good Rodgers wouldn’t be giving the Scouse Cafu a second thought.

 

As for the rest of that horse shit, well there was nothing stopping us offering Fabregas more money than Chelsea did and at least giving him a decision to make. Don’t forget, we finished above them last season, we had Champions League football to offer and more cash to spend than ever before. This is a player who said a few years “if you ever see me in a Chelsea shirt you can shoot me” and who actually had his heart set on a return to Arsenal rather than a switch to Chelsea. Perhaps if he’d been offered a viable alternative he’d have taken it? Maybe he’d still have gone to Chelsea just because he’s a knob, but we’ll never know because we never got involved, either because FSG won’t sanction those kind of wages or because the clowns on the committee think they can outsmart everyone else and cheat the system.

 

The point is, Brendan is being incredibly disingenuous coming out with that crap. Yeah, we ‘lost’ Suarez, Sturridge and *shakes head* Flanagan, but we spent £110m on the squad!! It’s ridiculous to point out who Chelsea bought and who we lost when Chelsea bought those players for a little over half what we spent in last summer’s window alone. And it’s becoming extremely annoying listening to him talk as though he played no part in our failings this season.

 

I just wish he’d learn to shut his mouth and stop digging himself into an even deeper hole. I’m not calling for his head, I’m fine with him getting another year but for the love of all that it good and pure man, just stop with the verbal wildshites.

 

Ronan Keating was right. Ronan Keating is always right. Sometimes "you say it best, when you say nothing at all”.

 

 

Team: Mignolet; Can, Skrtel, Lovren, Johnson; Gerrard (Lucas), Henderson, Coutinho; Sterling, Lambert (Sinclair), Lallana (Ibe):


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"Stevie gave us everything there today, he was outstanding but I felt we needed some fresh legs in there to deal with their counter attacks"

 

He'd have been slaughtered for saying that, too  Just my opinion.  

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As Steven said his goodbyes, Brendan was left to reflect on his bad ones.

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As Steven said his goodbyes, Brendan was left to reflect on his bad ones.

Bye buy sex rex.

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"Stevie gave us everything there today, he was outstanding but I felt we needed some fresh legs in there to deal with their counter attacks"

 

He'd have been slaughtered for saying that, too  Just my opinion.  

 

How dare he publicly throw Stevie under the bus to cover his own failings?  Maybe if he had actually signed a DM he wouldn't be relying on a 40 year old to stop counter attacks!!!  He is using Gerrard's age to cover his own failings in the transfer market.  

 

He should have used the Chelsea applause to his advantage and said that's the reason he came off, but he's not clever enough to do that.  I wish he'd just shut up! Etc.

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"Outstanding".  

 

Another contender for Dave U's book title this year.

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Is TK421 replying to his own posts?

 

*Backs slowly away.

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Should post this report in the culture of failure thread.

 

Rodgers is so small time it's embarrassing. Midgets are only successful if they are angry.

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"Stevie gave us everything there today, he was outstanding but I felt we needed some fresh legs in there to deal with their counter attacks"

 

He'd have been slaughtered for saying that, too  Just my opinion.  

 

I agree, no matter what he said there'd be people not happy, either because they disagreed with the substitution or just because they don't like Rodgers and will jump on anything.

 

However, far better to be slaughtered by some for the truth than by most for a lie.

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How dare he publicly throw Stevie under the bus to cover his own failings?

Fair comment.

 

But the season is almost over now, an EL slot should be safe, and I do have some sympathy for managers with post match interviews of which there are often as many as five or more, at lest one for TV, one for national radio, one for the club media, one for the Sunday journos and one for the dailies. Once you have agreed that you have either won, drawn or lost, the rest is just a hostage to fortune.

 

How Brendan covers Steven's experience and goals next season will be telling.

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Don't know about the Chelsea fans, but we were singing Gerrard's song as loud as we could as he took his seat. We're they defo singing their shitty version as well?

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 Chelski fans are untermensch (good German word, learned from Sven Hassel).

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I know your music taste is Shite Dave, but quoting Ronan Keating?!! Ffs!

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Some dude on EPSN has written an article about this Gerrard substitution kerfuffle.  

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Dave U knows all - from last week's report:

The football gods have shit all over us and Stevie this past year and this looked like being the final slap in the face (actually no, that will be next week when he has to applaud Chelsea onto the field before being mocked for 90 minutes by their scumbag fans). 

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Soufiane Kota sounds like an Espanyol player that we're linked to all summer in a reported £13m deal. He joins Chelsea on August 31st, plays four games until January and then gets loaned out to Porto, who he joins on a permanent deal for £4.5m that July.

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