Report by
Dave Usher
This was exactly why every Red I know was dreading this game. It’s bad enough any time we have to go there but this one had “let down” written all over it. It seemed like everyone was tipping us to win and somehow we were even favourites with the bookies.
Why? The game was at Old Trafford, United were above us in the table and we haven’t been able to lay a glove on Mourinho since he went there. Of course the bookies are only reacting to where the money is being placed, which tells me there are an awful lot of people who haven’t been paying attention. Fools and their money are easily parted.
Of course we were capable of going there and winning, but I think most of us feared there was a good chance that it would play out exactly like it did. For us to have any chance of winning the game we needed to score first, so when we gifted them an early goal that they barely had to work for, we were in trouble.
To then do virtually the exact same thing again (seconds after Van Dijk fluffed a fucking sitter at the other end) was unforgivable and that sealed our fate. Coming back from two goals down to a Mourinho team? At Old Trafford? Not going to happen.
The only surprising thing to me based on how we played was that we managed to get one back, but even that was a total fluke. If you're reading this hoping for some sort of pick me up 'we go again' type rallying cry then you may as well stop reading now. I can't do it. I'm not in the mood. I take no positives from this at all as I thought it was abject and demoralising.
It means nothing in terms of the bigger picture and this result shouldn't affect anything between now and the end of the season. It doesn't make us any worse a team than we were before and if anything it might actually help if it knocks a little of the cockiness out of us. We're good but maybe not as good as we sometimes think we are.
The reason I'm so down about it is because it's THEM, and it's HIM. I'm sick of seeing us play Mourinho sides and look nothing like our usual selves. Part of that is credit to him and what he does, but I also feel like there's a mental block on our part. We play right into his hands. Every fucking time.
The way I see it, we didn’t deserve anything from the game. It doesn’t matter what United did or didn’t do and whether you think they deserved anything, I'm just saying that from a Liverpool perspective we got exactly what we fucking deserved - nothing.
If you give away shitty goals like we did and you create fuck all at the other end, I don’t care how much possession you have or how it may look like you’re on top, you don’t deserve anything. Maybe I’m being harsh and in a few days I’ll calm down and soften my stance, but right now I’m just pissed off and hugely disappointed with how we played, especially because we had to know what to expect. Yet we weren’t prepared for it. We got beaten by a couple of alehouse balls up the middle from the goalkeeper.
It’s not altogether surprising though, The warning signs were there all week as we seemed a little too chesty in the build up and I hate that because it usually leads to a massive reality check.
Oxlade-Chamberlain has had a couple of good (not great) games against shite teams at Anfield and decided to take aim at the ‘stupid’ criticism from people like Gary Neville and Thierry Henry. He then proceeded to go out and have an absolute fucking stinker in his next match. You see Alex, performances like THIS, in big games, are exactly why people question you.
We also had Lovren and Mané talking about how well we are playing and almost sneering at United’s defensive style. Nothing they said was especially over the top, but it was just a build up of hubris all through the week that made it feel almost inevitable that it would all blow up in our faces.
Seriously, someone needs to pin a giant notice up in the Melwood dressing rooms that says “Don’t talk, just fucking do”.
Next time we play United, how about the club just issue a blanket ban on any player talking to the media. Or at the very least, stop making poor old Dejan do it. I mean really, how many times do we need to hear about how he’s ‘rebuilt’ his reputation since the Spurs game? Give the fella a break.
Much will be made of him talking the talk and then failing to walk the walk when it really matters. There’s an element of truth to that but he’s such an easy target and such an unsympathetic figure that he seems to be copping all the flak for this when there was far more to it, both on and off the pitch.
It’s not like he’s stalking around the training ground looking for reporters to run his mouth to. The club are putting him up there and the journos are asking the questions. LFC TV even did a feature with him and Van Dijk chatting with each other about how much they’re looking forward to the game and Lovren telling him exactly what to expect.
They seemed really confident, cocky even, and that’s not hindsight talking as I thought that when I was watching it. I know times have changed and players have more media duties than ever before, but I liked it better when we let our football do the talking. If you must talk, do it afterwards, not before.
I even referenced it in the weekly diary and said I’d play Matip just because Lovren was being set up for a fall. I take no pleasure in being right, but here’s the problem I have with the Lovren scapegoating. He was beaten in the air by a 6ft 3 fucking monster. Lukaku is built like a heavyweight boxer, yet Lovren is apparently expected to win every aerial battle with him, and if he loses a couple then he's fucking useless.
What right do we have to expect him to not lose a header against a man who is bigger and stronger than him? Lukaku is going to win his share of headers, but that shouldn’t automatically result in a goal every time it happens. There's an argument to be made that he shouldn't have even challenged for the header in the first place, but what if he was doing exactly what his manager had told him to?
This is how we defend. It's very much on the front foot and aggressive. If the ball is played up to the striker, our centre backs challenge for it. It's very rare you see our centre backs drop off and not challenge for a header (especially Lovren), so I'm going to assume that's because Klopp wants them to attack the ball rather than allow the striker to win flick ons unopposed, or bring the ball down and turn.
If you want to tell me Lovren needs replacing because he’s fucked up too many times, you’ll get no argument from me. If you want to tell me he’s the reason we lost this game, sorry, I’m not buying what you’re selling. There were worse performances than his.
At the risk of sounding like a Lovren apologist, I can’t pin this solely on him because nobody is going to prevent Lukaku from winning a flick on or two during a game. I have far more of an issue with what happened after the flick on, and I have an even bigger issue at the tactical set up that contributed to it.
When we played United earlier in the season at Anfield, Lovren absolutely fucking owned Lukaku. He played very well, but it wasn’t just about that. There was something that helped him massively. What was it, I hear you ask. Well I’ll tell you. Jordan fucking Henderson, that’s what.
Any time United went long to Lukaku in that game (and when we played against him in derby games when he was with the Blues), Hendo was shielding in front and Lovren challenged him from behind. If Henderson didn’t win the initial header he was always on hand to pick up the bits and help Lovren out when he made his challenge. Between the pair of them they completely shut Lukaku down.
Hendo was on the bench for this one (an obvious mistake), but where the fuck was Emre Can on those two flick ons? He certainly wasn’t screening in front of Lukaku. So that’s problem number one. Either he wasn’t doing his job or he hadn’t been instructed to do it. Klopp’s comments afterwards suggest the former.
Problem number two is the shite response of everyone else when Lovren doesn’t win the header. Trent’s positioning on the first is schoolboy like. You can’t let anyone with Rashford’s speed get inside you like that. Cover the inside and if the ball goes wide and he gets it then deal with that. Great finish, but it was avoidable.
The second was shite defending all round too, so castigating Lovren for losing a few aerial duels with one of the biggest, most powerful strikers in the country seems a bit like scapegoating to me. It was a collective failing but singling him out is easy because it's him and he's got previous.
The worst thing Lovren did in this game (apart from dropping ten yards deeper than everyone else and playing Mata onside when he missed that overhead kick) was the fucking braindead lunge at Fellaini that conceded a needless free-kick, allowing them to waste time and take the sting out of the game. It could have led to something more serious too on another day. I could have strangled him at that point. That pissed me off far more than his part in the goals.
Klopp went mental when that happened and everyone seemed to assume he was having a go at the ref. Personally I thought he was kicking off at Lovren for his total lack of composure, as he should have been. His head had gone by that point, as had those of many of his team-mates.
Throughout the game there were so many bad decisions from players who looked nothing like what we have come to expect from them. It worries me because I feel as though when the spotlight shines brightest on this team, they don’t handle it very well. The pressure seems to get to them and they make bad choices. There were countless occasions when players rushed a pass or spurned a shooting opportunity. Why? Was it because of the size of the game?
I watch these lads week in week out and marvel at some of the things they do. I've said that i think this is the best team we've had since we won the league, but there's still a big question mark there and they need to prove it. This wasn't the team I watch every week, it was a scared, jittery looking shadow of it. It’s partly about handling the pressure and it’s partly about Klopp’s approach.
I’ve said it so many times but his in game management is terrible. Everything else about him is world class and I wouldn’t want anybody else in charge. He’s great, I love his style of football and everything he brings to the table. But when a game isn’t going well, sorry but we've seen time and again that he’s powerless to turn it around.
It’s partly about a lack of genuine game changers on the bench, but it’s more than that. He had three game changers on the fucking pitch, so if it’s not working then try something different. Move them around a bit, mix things up. I don't know, he's the coaching expert, not me. What I do know is that doing the same fucking thing over and over hoping that eventually it will work probably isn't the best way to go.
That said, with better execution on several occasions we'd have been in and I'd have been lauding Klopp's approach. What I'd say is the players are mainly to blame for the first hour and then after that it's on Klopp to come up with a solution. I can think of five or six times at least when we'd have been in had the final ball been of the standard we're used to.
Yet each time, it wasn't good enough. Sometimes it was poor selection, sometimes poor execution. Klopp is powerless to do anything about that. Where he needs to have an impact is to change things around to give Mourinho something different to worry about.
What pissed me off most about it all is that the game went EXACTLY as Mourinho drew it up on his tactics board. Call it lucky or spawn or whatever you like, and yeah some key incidents went in their favour and had we come back to take a draw he'd be getting castigated for taking Rsshford off for Fellaini, but we didn't come back to get a draw so his plan worked.
He identified a weakness in us that he exposed (the channel between Trent and Lovren) and he came up with a plan that completely nullified the best front three in Europe. I don't know what he did, I'm not a qualified coach, but I do know it wasn't just a case of "ok lads lets all get back behind the ball and defend". Whatever he did, however he positioned his players, they were able to stop us getting the ball in the areas we do most damage, and they were able to reduce Salah to an absolute non-factor.
Four times we’ve played against his United side now and the only goals we’ve scored came from an inexplicable handball that gave us a penalty, and the freakish own goal from Bailly in this game. De Gea has been their saviour in some previous meetings but they could have had Massimo Taibi in goal for this one and they’d still have won.
When Mourinho said afterwards his team were controlling the game in the second half, it wasn’t just the typical shite he comes out with just to wind people up. They DID control that second half because although we had the ball they had control of us. Don’t be fooled by the fact the game was played almost exclusively in their half or that we had virtually all of the possession.
We weren’t ‘pushing them back’ or ‘keeping them penned in’. They CHOSE to do that. Mourinho loves nothing better than doing that in fact. They came out after half time with a 2-0 lead and they shut up shop and had no intention of trying to add to that lead. What that meant was we were camped in their half. When an attack was repelled, the loose ball was almost always picked up by us.
Occasionally they may have wanted to counter attack but by and large we denied them any opportunity to do that, so at least that part of our game belatedly clicked into gear, but for the most part they weren't arsed about coming out of their defensive shell anyway, and why should they? They had a 2-0 lead.
There is no moral victory here. We didn’t outplay them; they let us have the ball in areas where they knew we couldn’t hurt them. Yes, we play much more entertaining football and I’d hate to be watching their turgid displays every week, but that’s not our concern. How they play and whether their fans put up with it is up to them.
I’m focused on what we do, and frankly what we did in this game was crap. Call that harsh if you want, but I thought we were shite and at no point did I ever think we looked like scoring. The goal we did get was a one in ten thousand type of freakish moment. We created fuck all ourselves.
Yes, we had a few penalty shouts (I’ll get to those shortly) but in terms of chances, what did we create? A few nearly moments from corners and that was basically it. The only efforts on target we had were a couple of fucking pea rollers from distance that were almost an insult to De Gea. You think you’re beating him from there? Get to fuck.
Firmino worked tirelessly and did everything he could to get us going, but too much of what he did was miles away from the goal. Mané was poor and gave the ball away countless times, but I’ll take what he did over Salah any fucking day of the week. Mané spent the whole game looking for the ball and trying to make things happen. It wasn’t working for him but he never let that stop him from trying things and he was still picking the ball up and carrying the fight to them right up until the final whistle.
What was Mo doing while all this was going on? I’ll tell you what he was doing. He was snuggled up nice and warm in Ashley Young’s pocket. ASHLEY FUCKING YOUNG!! We made the cunt look like Paolo Maldini. He was the best player on the pitch because Mourinho set up his team to make sure Young was never exposed and always had help.
That’s partly on Mo and partly on Klopp. There was a rampant arrogance about how we approached this game. Mourinho KNEW what we were going to do and he knew how to stop it. He’s the best in the business at stifling free flowing attacking teams.
Yet here we were, swaggering into Old Trafford, dicks swinging, and playing exactly the way Mourinho is expecting and exactly the way he’d planned to stop. And stop it he did. I lost count of the amount of times the ball was played into Salah, who turned inside away from Young and ran straight into Matic or MacFuckhead or whatever the manc faced cunt is called.
It was EASY for them. They were never in any trouble at any stage. When we got it back to 2-1 there was plenty of time left and we had some momentum going, yet what happened? They just spoiled the game completely. Bailly went down immediately after the goal and ‘needed’ treatment for about three minutes.
We just wanted to get the game started again and try and build up a head of steam, but instead the wind was taken out of our sails and we never got it back. The last twenty minutes or so was mostly them winning free-kicks, feigning injury or just giving it to Fellaini to waste time. And it worked.
We can look down our noses at it and it’s fair to say that a team with their resources and tradition shouldn’t play the kind of shithouse football they do, but it’s up to us to overcome it and in four games now we’ve failed to do it. We were a little unlucky in some of those, but not in this one.
And I say that even though we had three decent penalty appeals, one of which for me was a stonewaller. I wouldn’t have given the one on Salah even though it was a clear foul. Mo didn’t go down and if you don’t go down in that situation you’re never getting the decision. Besides, the ref’s view of it was obscured anyway, and you can’t give a penalty if you don’t see it, unless you’re fat Jon Moss of course.
The Valencia handball was one of those that could go either way. It was more of a pen than your typical ‘ball to arm’ crossing situation but I wouldn’t say it was a cast iron penalty kick, and certainly not away at Old Trafford.
The one on Sadio though was a nailed on penalty. Fellaini steps away from the path of the ball and into the space Mané is running into, and he brings him down. Definite pen, and Pawson is a cunt for not giving that because he saw it. It was the one decent move we put together all day and it should have seen us get a pen. Not that I'd have been confident we'd put it away like, but that's another story.
Pawson was a disgrace all day though. Rashford went into the crowd to celebrate yet escaped a booking. Sorry, that’s not a judgement call it’s just an automatic yellow card. There’s no room for interpretation, it’s a yellow card.
Same thing when Sanchez deliberately stopped us taking a quick free-kick by sticking his leg out backwards and blocking it. You don’t get to decide if that’s a booking or not, it just fucking is. Both of those decisions showed where that cunt’s head was at.
Then there was the chest high studs up assault by Valencia on Mané when he was running clean though. That’s a red card. No ifs or buts, it’s just a red card. Pawson bottled four or five clear decisions and every one went in United’s favour, which says it all.
From that perspective you can argue we were unlucky, but I feel it’s important to separate what the referee did with just how toothless our overall display was. We didn’t lose because of Pawson, we lost because we conceded two terrible goals and we posed no real threat at the other end.
It’s not easy breaking down a team who defend like that and in the second half United basically did what Swansea did, except they were doing it with much better players. So it’s difficult, I get that. But it’s a hell of a lot more difficult when you keep doing the same fucking predictable shit time and after time.
I don’t need to look at heat maps and whatever else to know that virtually every attack we had went though the middle. Anyone with eyes could see it. It was exactly the same shit we tried against Swansea and it didn’t work that night either.
The space is out wide, so fucking use it. That’s what Man City do. A wise man once rapped "there’s only one way to beat them, get round the back". I made the exact same point after that Swansea game and we’ve clearly learnt fuck all from that game. On the rare occasions we did use the space out wide we threatened, and it actually led to the goal, fluke though it was.
Earlier Robbo had got in behind them and drilled a great ball across the six yard box that should have had someone on the end of it. Instead, Salah was just loitering half arsed behind Young and allowed him to clear it. You can’t score from there Mo, you have to get across him. It summed up his performance though. Actually no, the pathetic last minute volley into orbit summed up his performance.
He’s been a revelation this season, we all love him and he’s entitled to a bad game now and again, but let’s not sugarcoat it just because of who he is; this was a fucking stinker and it came at the worst possible time. He had his chance to stick it to Mourinho for not giving him a chance at Chelsea, but he blew it. The whole team blew it. Klopp blew it.
Not because we didn't win. Because of how we played. Had we created a load of chances and been thwarted by De Gea it would still have been hard to take, but not as hard as not making the fucker even make any kind of save at all.
It feels like we never learn. Mourinho will be laughing his tiny little cock off today, and why shouldn’t he? He gets what he wants against us virtually every fucking time because we do exactly what he expects every time. I’m sick of it. I hate him and I hate United, and I feel massively deflated and pissed off.
This game was basically Mourinho holding his hand on Klopp’s head, laughing while keeping him out of range as Klopp tries to throw haymakers at him.
Some of our fans are wanting to get United in Europe to get revenge. They think ‘we’ll get ‘em next time’. Are they fucking mad? If we never had to play this game spoiling cunt again nothing would make me happier. I’ll take anybody left in the draw other than these fuckers, because like it or not Mourinho has our number. The law of averages says we'll beat him eventually, but I don't want to have to rely on that and so would rather just avoid them at all costs.
We can also say goodbye to second place now too. Five points is a significant gap at this stage of the season. United will drop five points or more I expect, but we’d have to win virtually every game. Not gonna happen.
We’re below Spurs now too. Thank fuck Chelsea just rolled up into a ball and begged City not to hurt them last week. If they’d somehow managed a result there we’d really be sweating now.
We’ve still got to go to Stamford Bridge, and I really hope they aren’t within striking distance of us going into that game because as well as we’ve done this season, and despite the obvious strides we’ve made, this team has done nothing yet to make me feel confident they would win in a high stakes ‘one off’ type of game away from Anfield.
We need to just beat up on the shite teams we face between now and the trip to Chelsea and if we do that it will be immaterial anyway.
Star man is…. fucking hell I don’t know. Where do I even begin? Some were less shit than others but nobody was good. Fuck it, I don’t even have the inclination to pick anyone, I’m too pissed off. Roll on next week when we can get this shit out of our system.
Team: Karius; Alexander-Arnold (Wijnaldum), Lovren, Van Dijk, Robertson (Solande); Can, Milner, Oxlade-Chamberlain (Lallana); Salah, Firmino, Mané:
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