Report by
Dave Usher at Anfield
I wish I could say I was surprised. I wish even more that I could say I was arsed. When Shane Long scored an inevitable breakaway goal to finally put us out of our misery, all I could muster was a shrug of the shoulders. I’m still mourning the death of our title challenge, so this barely even registers.
In fact, to my shame, if I'm being completely honest there’s a part of me that’s relieved. Far better to go out to Southampton in the semi than lose to Mourinho and United at Wembley. I’m not saying we’d have definitely lost, but I don’t have any belief that this team can come through when it matters most, so at least we were spared that potential nightmare.
We’re in trouble though, there’s no question about it now. It’s not a blip, it’s a full on crisis now. In the space of a week we’ve seen our hopes of two trophies flushed down the shitter, and I’m far from confident that we’ll beat Wolves on Saturday either. If we don’t get our act together, we’ll have seen three chances of silverware taken away in seven days, and it would all have happened at “Fortress Anfield”. We went almost an entire year without losing a home game and now we’ve lost two in four days. It’s entirely possibly it will be four in ten the way we’re going.
A season that promised so much is in grave danger of delivering fuck all. And don’t try and sell me a possible top four spot as any kind of success. Leave that shit to the Arsenal selfie crew. I know it would represent progress and the club needs to be back at Europe's top table, I get all that, I just can't muster any kind of enthusiasm for it.
Besides, right now would you bet on us finishing higher than 6th? We just look fucked, both literally and figuratively. There’s no zip in our play, everything is laboured and slow and we’re easy to play against. We’ve become last season’s Liverpool. I don't know if the way we play has caught up with us, I don't know if the players are training too hard or if criticism of Klopp's ultra intensive methods is valid. I don't know. I just know we don't look the same as we did.
In truth this wasn’t even that bad a performance compared to some we've seen of late, and had Sturridge taken either of the great chances that came his way things may have been very different. Let’s be honest though, Southampton were the better side over both games and could easily have scored six. They fully deserved to go through and in three games against us this season they’re yet to concede a goal, and this time they didn’t even have Van Dijk in there like a big pony tailed ball attracting magnet.
We barely troubled them at all in the first half and they actually had the best chances on the counter. Karius (who looks to have put his bad start behind him, thankfully) made one brilliant save to deny Tadic but we kept getting caught out by the pace of Redmond who was blowing by Matip like he wasn’t there.
The second half was better from our point of view as we created chances and up until conceding that goal at the end hadn’t really given up much on the break, but it just wasn’t enough and ultimately the best team won. Klopp wasn't happy about the ref but that's clutching at straws. There was a handball appeal that I haven't seen yet, and there was a blatant dive by Origi that was rightly waved away. Atkinson might be shit, but he's not the reason we're not going to Wembley.
The closest we came to a goal was a shot by Emre Can that Forster almost fumbled over his own line. Do they have goal line technology in this cup or was that the linesman’s call? It looked over the line from my vantage point but these things are impossible to tell without technology. Nobody seems to be saying anything about it so I assume it wasn't over.
Sturridge put two great chances over the bar and Coutinho whistled a 25 yarder just wide, but it felt like every chance we had was forced rather than as the result of us being on top of our game and playing flowing football. The effort is there but the fluency has disappeared. It's hard to believe that this is more or less the same team that destroyed the likes of Leicester, Watford, Hull and Stoke earlier in the season. It can't all be about Mané, surely?
I don’t know where we go from here, because the team that dazzled between August and November has vanished. As I said, what we’ve got at the moment is last season’s team, the one that finished 8th and lost two finals. Right now I feel like we could lose to virtually anybody. If they can defend deep and hit on the break, we’re fucked. Teams just bottle up the middle and let us have it out wide, because we unlikely to hurt them that way.
Whatsmore, Klopp doesn’t have the answer to it, largely because he doesn’t have the options to change things up when Plan A isn't working.
In terms of his starting eleven and use of subs in this game, what else could he have done? You can argue for Wijnaldum over Can, but other than that the team picks itself, and besides, Can wasn't bad, he was actually one of our better players for once.
As for the use of subs, there was nothing glaring that he should have done because Origi is out of form and is actually an abysmal substitute anyway. He rarely improves things when he comes on but he often makes things worse. We’d probably be better off giving the likes of Woodburn, Wilson or Ojo a go off the bench just to see if they can bring a spark.
Mané going away appears to have killed us, but we were running in treacle even before he went. At least with him here, we were just about able to keep going because he always does something even in games where he’s been quiet. I don't even think he's played that well since those heady days of August through October, but regardless of how he's playing he’ll invariably pop up with a goal, an assist or he’ll win a penalty. There’s rarely a game where he doesn’t do something significant, and without him the wheels have come off.
The lack of forward planning for his departure is certainly deserving of criticism, but at the same time it’s easy to have some degree of sympathy for Klopp too, because “the plan” was that Sturridge would come in and score a few goals and that would help to cover for the loss of Mané. And if he was injured and couldn’t do it then Origi would step up. Both have completely fallen off a cliff just when we needed them most, and that's fucked us just as much as Mané himself not being around.
Sturridge can’t run anymore, but we knew that anyway. It was highlighted in the second half when Can played what looked to be a brilliant ball down the left channel. It would have been a great ball had anyone else been chasing it, but it quickly became apparent that the ball was moving quicker than Sturridge it was all he could do to prevent it going out for a goal kick. It was just sad to see.
It’s not necessarily that big an issue though, or at least it wouldn't be if he was on form, because if you get the ball to his feet he can make things happen and we know he’s a great finisher. Perhaps for the first time in his entire career though, he visibly looks like he’s got no confidence. The first chance he volleyed over at the Kop end was a case in point. He snatched at it, and that’s because he’s anxious and low on confidence. He NEVER misses those kind of chances.
The whole team is low on confidence because of the bad run they’ve been on, but given that this was supposed to be the time that Sturridge stepped up and took his chance, much of the focus will be on him and that’s probably fair. We needed him to step up while Mané was away, but truth be told he’s been fucking abysmal. So too has Origi, and in having to pick one of them Klopp has also had to move Firmino way from his best position and occasionally Lallana away from his too. It’s not just that we’ve missed Mané and what he brings to the team, it’s that in trying to find an adequate solution we’ve completely lost the balance we had before.
Southampton just did what others have been doing. I wasn’t confident before this game but I felt that if we could get a first half goal we’d probably be ok. If it dragged on with us having to chase it though I thought we’d be in big trouble. It was all just so sadly predictable wasn’t it? It was exactly how Claude Puel probably envisaged it going.
I said to someone beforehand that if it was goalless after an hour and we really had to chase it, then it would be set up perfectly for them to catch us on the break. My mate John absolutely nailed it at half time too, predicting that Long would come on and win it for them. As I say, there was a feeling of inevitability about the whole thing, and when that late counter attack started, I pointed at Long - still in his own half at this point - and said to John “look, someone needs to stay with Long here”. Nobody did and he just sprinted up the field, collected the pass and buried the shot. So simple, so predictable.
It was also quite fitting that it was Long who buried us considering this time last year we were being linked with a move for him, and most fans were hugely underwhelmed by the prospect. How we could do with a player like him right now though. Loads of you will scoff at that because he’s not top class and we should be aiming higher. I don’t dispute that, but don’t tell me that this squad couldn’t use a Shane Long. He’s like a shot of adrenaline. Would I want Long leading our line for the next few years? Of course I wouldn’t. Would I like the option of bringing him off the bench and starting the odd game here and there? Hell yeah I would.
You know why? Because he’s Ronny Rosenthal. Remember him, the unfashionable, unheard of low key signing who won the league for us by sparking the team into life when they’d started flagging down the stretch? Modern Liverpool would never, ever, not even for a second, consider signing a Ronny Rosenthal. Yet without Rocket Ronny, number eighteen would never have happened.
Kenny didn’t see him as a long term signing who he would build his forward line around, and as it turns out Ronny was only ever really an impact sub in the rest of his time here. But even if he’d never kicked another ball for us again after that season he would still have been a great signing because he gave us a massive shot in the arm just when we needed it and he got us over the line to win the title.
Somewhere along the line this club stopped caring about the present because it’s become so obsessed with the future. A future that never comes. Always planning for next year and never this one. We're just like how Yoda described the young Luke Skywalker. "All his life has he looked away... to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph!" That's modern Liverpool that.
Not signing anybody this month was like waving a white flag on the season. No short term fixes, we’ll wait for the players we really want, nobody wants to sell, difficult window, blah blah blah. Meanwhile, the fucking house is falling down around us and no-one seems to give a shit, because "we'll be better next season so relax, show some patience". Fuck patience. 27 years we've been showing patience, it's not in unlimited supply.
We didn’t need “Mr Right” this month, we needed “Mr Right Now”. It’s a big world out there with a lot of footballers in it, so don’t tell me there’s nobody out there who we could have brought in to help us between now and May.
We could have signed Long a year ago. That ship has sailed now, but 12 months ago it could have happened. Most of you reading this probably wouldn’t entertain the idea of signing someone like Long, but answer me this honestly. Were you worried when you saw he’d come on for the second half? If you weren’t, then fair play. If you were, then why wouldn’t you want to have that option on our bench?
This isn’t about Long specifically though, he’s just a convenient example of what my problem is. I’m sick of being sold a pup by the club about this long term plan. Why can’t we ever try to win right fucking now? 2016 ended with us in second place having just picked up successive wins over Everton, Stoke and Man City. We were in the semi final of the league cup and had everything to play for.
But everybody knew we needed more as we'd started to flag a little. This isn’t hindsight, we all said we needed a player or two so this isn’t about being wise after the event. The club did nothing though, because they’re looking at next fucking season, as usual. And when next season comes and we find ourselves in the same situation, they’ll still be talking about waiting for the right players, building for the future, not making panic buys etc.
Those journalists close to the club insist we were in for Draxler but he went to PSG “for the money” and Klopp isn’t interested in players who are motivated by money. Newsflash, they ALL go for the money, so if you’re not going to pay it then get used to not getting your targets, or only getting targets who those big spending clubs don’t want.
But I'm getting sidetracked here and it's another discussion for another day. Not that there's anything left to say about this really, so I may as well just wrap it up there. Things are proper shit now but hopefully they'll get better soon and lessons will be learned from it. I'm not holding my breath on either, but we'll see how it all plays out over the next few weeks.
Star man is Karius on the basis that he actually did something good in the game, so he gets it by default because I can't remember anyone else doing anything of any note at all. Trent was ok too I suppose.
Team: Karius; Alexander-Arnold, Matip, Lovren, Milner; Henderson, Can (Origi), Lallana; Firmino, Sturridge, Coutinho (Wijnaldum):
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