I’m writing this immediately after the game so I can get it out of the way and try to forget it ever happened. This was an absolute shambles and I dread to think what’s going to happen between now and the end of the season because the team looks completely broken now.
Klopp’s version of events afterwards couldn’t be further from my own but that’s fine because I don’t think he believed a word of it. He’s trying to boost flagging morale and putting the boot in and saying how shit this was is hardly going to help. He’s said the right things because the confidence of this team has gone completely and he needs to rebuild it.
There’s no way he can possibly think that this performance was fine though. It wasn’t. It was shite. Even at 1-1 before Alisson’s sabotage act this was shite. That ugly bastard in goal for City didn’t have to make a save of note. By full time he still hadn’t. It's a recurring theme now. Too often we don't work keepers enough.
We’d marginally been the better side in the first half but that’s only because City seemed to be in second gear and were possibly still gripped by their “Anfield hoodoo”, especially when they missed a pen. We hadn’t been good though. Not at all. I think we caught City by surprise by how shit we were. They were geared up for fire and brimstone and we gave them wet bogroll. Like I said last week, should change the sign to "This is NOT Anfield".
In the end City won this without even extending themselves. They didn’t even break sweat because it was so easy they didn’t need to. Forget the mistakes that handed them the points and just focus on how we played. Not good enough. This just doesn’t even look like Klopp’s Liverpool. It’s unrecognisable.
They aren’t mentality monsters currently. They’re feeling sorry for themselves and only a few of them look like they’re even still fighting now. Most of them look shell shocked. And fucking knackered. There's no energy, no zip.
Like I say, I thought this performance was meek, timid, overly cautious and devoid of all confidence and belief even BEFORE Alisson fucking handed them the game on a plate. The first half was mostly shite but it maybe didn’t seem that bad because City offered absolutely nothing themselves until Sterling won a penalty. Gundogan skied it into the Kop but ultimately it didn’t matter.
This will sound stupid but I knew after about five minutes we weren’t winning this game. One incident was all it took for me to come to that conclusion. Ederson kicked the ball straight at Mané and for a second I thought “aye aye, here we go”. Ten seconds later the ball was back with Alisson. What the fuck????? That’s not Klopp’s Liverpool. It just isn’t. It’s the exact fucking opposite of Klopp’s Liverpool.
Klopp's Liverpool don't go backwards. They go forwards. All the fucking time. Over and over and over. They take risks. They lose the ball but they win it back and then shove it straight down the opposition's throats. We've turned into a team full of Gareth Barrys. Fucking slow, boring, crabs.
It was a recurring theme in the first half. Any time we picked the ball up with City’s players out of position, we slowed it down, didn’t commit to the break and just kept possession while they got back into their defensive shape. It was slow and ponderous and safe and scared. As I say, the exact opposite of who this team is. It was soul destroying to watch it. Just what the fuck has happened to them?
And don’t tell me it’s Virgil not being there. The centre back thing is a bit of a red herring. I’m not saying it isn’t a big factor because of course it’s hurt us and contributed to some of the shit we’ve witnessed these last couple of months, but it’s far more than just that. We’ve lost three home games on the spin and we never look like scoring.
Even the goal we got in this game was a penalty after a defensive mistake. It was nothing to do with us breaking them down. Is it the midfield or is it the forwards? It’s a chicken and egg question. Do the strikers look bad because the midfield (and full backs) aren’t getting them the ball? Or are the midfield looking bad because the forwards are doing fuck all with the balls they get? It’s both but with a heavier emphasis on the front players for me.
City are much better defensively these days because they don’t commit as many players forward and they don’t leave the centre backs one v one in the way they used to. Still, they don’t play with everyone behind the ball like most of our opponents do and there were plenty of opportunities for us to create chances. We never looked like doing so though.
We had one good chance in the first half that Sadio headed over. Should have scored, but he looked way off the pace all day. He probably wasn’t fit but we couldn’t afford to leave him out as that would have meant Origi playing. Not that he could have been any worse than Firmino.
Bobby’s a problem now. No doubt about it. The occasional good game gives us false hope that he’s going to get back to being the Bobby we all loved. Not gonna happen. This is who he is now and it’s pretty heartbreaking to see.
It’s not just him though. The whole team just doesn’t look right. I’d like to think that playing centre backs at centre back and freeing up Hendo and Fabinho to revert to midfield will fix it, but I think it goes deeper than that now. We’ve got big problems. I can live with being beaten by City but not like this. Not without even making them work for it.
Where is the fight? The pressing? The passion? The desire? I didn’t see ANY of those things. Just a meek, timid, scared performance that got exactly what it deserved. This isn’t Heavy Metal Football. Fuck me, it’s not even Ed Sheeran Football. I’d settle for Ed Sheehan over this. What we’re seeing is “Adele Football”. Feeling sorry for yourself, whiny fucking cryarsing shite.
No fans continues to absolutely kill us. Those half arsed breaks when no-one wanted to take a risk and instead just went backwards? That doesn’t happen with a full stadium roaring the lads on. And we definitely don’t play the game at City’s pace inside a packed Anfield. We play it at our pace. And they can’t live with our pace. We’ve seen it time and again.
This was as far removed from that as it’s possible to be. There was no intensity, no zip, no passion, no fight. It was a behind closed doors training match. Just like most of these fucking lockdown games. No wonder City are running away with it. These games suit them perfectly. They’re winning games without even having to extend themselves. They might even win the league by a record margin the way the rest of us are all going.
Not that it matters. What City do is no longer of any consequence to us. They’re out of sight beyond the horizon and there’s no point us even worrying about what they’re doing now. We’ve slipped so far, so fast, that now we have to be looking at the results of fucking Everton and West Ham. And resurgent Chelsea are right up our arses now too. I feel sick even typing that, but that’s our situation.
I don’t know how we reverse this tail spin and I no longer think Klopp knows either. It just feels like a case of getting this season over with and trying to regroup for next year. There is not a hope in hell that we can win the Champions League and it’s now just about ensuring we stay in the top four.
There’s just not really any area of the side functioning properly. Thiago is a quality footballer who looks like he’s playing in the wrong team. He looks like a Man City midfielder. He’d fit perfectly into their side but he looks completely out of place for us. He’s not playing badly as such, but he’s just not helping us in any way is he?
I don’t even blame him, it’s not his fault. It’s like putting the world’s best violin player in a rock band. The one big caveat I’d add to any Thiago criticism is that he was signed to play in a midfield with Henderson and Fabinho and that’s happened maybe, what, once? There’s no shortage of effort from him but he needs to stop picking up early bookings that mean he’s on a knife edge for the rest of the game.
Klopp isn’t helping matters with some of his changes either. Shaq for Thiago made sense as we needed a spark and Thiago was walking that tightrope. Taking off Jones when he was our best player was baffling though. I love Milner and have no issue with him being brought on to give us a bit of intensity. It shouldn’t have been for Jones though.
Get Firmino off, play Jones or Shaq as the false nine. Just do something fucking different because there was not a hope in hell that Firmino was going to do anything in this game.
It probably wouldn’t have made a difference as there was no belief in that team at all, but it couldn’t have been any worse. Hendo tried to rally them and Salah kept plugging away but even after we equalised we didn’t seem to even get much of a lift from it. Again, not having fans killed us there as it’s so hard to create any emotion and momentum in an empty stadium.
Still, at 1-1 we were comfortable enough even if we didn’t look like scoring. The only threat from City was Sterling running at Trent and Fabinho. He won the penalty doing that (definite pen for me, Fabinho shouldn’t be hanging out a leg like that) and he set up their opener by doing it. Just too easy really.
But we came back from that with Mo’s penalty (superbly taken). At that point we had no idea of what was to come. Fucking hell.
Not gonna lie, I’m fucking disgusted with Alisson. I know he’s been great for us and that everyone is entitled to an off day. I get all that. I’m not calling for him to be sold out or even dropped. I’m just saying right now, as I type this, I’m fucking disgusted, angry, resentful and it’s not something I’ll get over quickly.
If it was just a case of being beaten by shots he should be saving I’d feel differently. But what he did was cocky, reckless, irresponsible and just fucking stupid. I hope something is said to him. Publicly Klopp and his team-mates need to back him but privately I hope they tear a strip off him as there’s no excuse for this.
I don’t know what the fuck he was doing. He was flirting with that shit even before it happened. Taking forever on the ball and inviting pressure. I noticed it in the first half. Just too fucking casual and cocky. Was he trying to prove a point to Ederson that he can play with his feet just as well as him? Because he fucking can’t.
As great as Alisson is, when it comes to his ‘footballing ability’ he’s massively over-rated. He’s decent, that’s all. Nothing special with his feet at all. I thought he was when he first arrived because that was his reputation and I bought into it. Truth is though, he’s not that great with his feet and his passes often go astray.
Which is fine. I don’t expect him to be Xabi Alonso and in goalkeeper terms he’s definitely above average with his feet. He’s clearly not as good as he thinks he is though, as we’ve just seen, much to our embarrassment.
He didn’t learn from the close call in the first half and even after he got caught and conceded a goal he carried on doing it, the tit. I can’t get my head around what he did.
We’d got back into the game and who knows, maybe we could have sneaked a winner. City weren’t doing much, but then Alisson took an age on the ball, got it stuck under his feet and almost got caught out. But he got lucky and when the ball came back to him a second or two later he should have just been launching that. Instead he played some shitty casual half arsed chip straight to Foden and just like that it’s 2-1.
And then, unforgivably, he did the exact same thing a few minutes later. A shitty pass to Fabinho that put him under pressure, and then seconds later a pass straight to Silva who set up Sterling to make it 3-1. Unbelievable. And if that wasn’t enough, he then allowed a Foden shot to fly past him to rub salt in the already seeping wound. Even I’d have saved that. It was straight at him. His head had completely gone though.
This is the worst individual goalkeeping performance I’ve ever seen from a Liverpool keeper. It was worse than Karius, not least because at least Karius had the excuse of a concussion. It was marginally worse than David James against Coventry too, although I may be allowing recency bias to influence me there. James cost us a title. This title was lost weeks ago.
I know that our keepers are instructed to play out from the back but that’s just not an excuse for what he did. You have to be able to react to the situation and the opposition. Playing out in those situations, when City were smelling blood and you’ve already been caught, it’s just not acceptable. Fucking get it as far away from your goal as possible and then clear your head.
I also blame the defenders for continuing to pass to him though when his head was clearly up his arse.
You know what though, fuck this, I don’t even want to talk about it anymore. It was another miserable experience in a miserable fucking season. And I’m getting sick of these bummings we’re letting City give us too. That’s three in as many seasons now. A team as good as ours shouldn’t be letting this happen so often.
I just don’t know where we go from here now. I said a few weeks ago after we lost to Burnley that it probably wasn’t rock bottom. I had hoped that the Old Trafford defeat in the cup might have been the low point, especially as we won the next couple and looked to have our mojo back. But then came Brighton and now this. Have we hit rock bottom now?
My gut feeling is no we haven’t. I feel like it’s going to get worse. We might even lose the derby, even though Everton are shit. We’re shit too currently. They’ll never, ever, have a better chance to win at Anfield. I mean let’s face it, every pother cunt is winning here now so why not them?
Hopefully I’m wrong and Klopp can make the most of a full week’s training with no midweek game to fix things. I understood the logic in playing Henderson and Fabinho at the back just because it was Man City. Against anyone else I wouldn’t have been in favour of that, but I could see why Klopp went with that for this one game.
Now though? Fuck that. We’ve got nothing to lose now. This isn’t working so let’s change it. Play whichever two you like from Phillips, Davies and Kabak in defence, get Fabinho and Henderson back in midfield and let’s see if we can start looking more like Liverpool again. This title defence has been fucking embarrassing.
Star man is Jones.
Team: Alisson; Alexander-Arnold, Fabinho, Henderson, Robertson (Tsimikas); Wijnaldum, Jones (Milner), Thiago (Shaqiri); Salah, Firmino, Mané:
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