This guy is not bitter! No, no way!

[Joe Le Taxi]

What a let down!

 

It is hard to view the impending clash with Liverpool at Anfield as anything other than an absolute let down in the making.

 

I am not being defeatist - for it is not the result I am referring to. It is the football. The game. It promises so much - players such as Gerrard, Lampard, Torres, Drogba, Essien, Ngog etc gracing the turf. Two top teams locked in a titantic tussle for honour and glory. We are promised great goals, flowing football and the game there for the taking. An instant Champions League Classic.

 

But it never is.

 

Liverpool are the best team in the world, based on performances in Champions League games in the last four years, so says UEFA. What a load of ballacks. It is not performances they are ranked on, it is results. It is beating teams on penalties, which they played for for 70 minutes. It is being second-best for most of the game then St Ickle Stevie MOTM MOTD OBE MBE KBS KFC PIZZA-HUT popping up to rifle in his seventy-ninth injury time goal of the season. They play for penalties yet accuse us of being negative. They accuse their opposition of diving and cheating and time-wasting, yet are as big a proponant of the dark arts of the game as anyone. They have a God-given, some might even say media-given, talent for making very good teams, who play football and like to pass the ball around, look very pedestrian and ordinary. We have been a better side than them for at least seven or eight years, but how many times have we shown it? Very rarely. Its not because we have played badly, its just that they have not always been interested in playing football with us. It is brutally effective, you have to give them that.

 

The problem is, they are in a false position. They have one very good midfielder, one very good striker and one very good defender. So has most of the rest of the teams in the Champions League. Man United are in a different league to them in footballing terms. Even the Arsenal are a better footballing side who have more courage in their convictions to play their own game than Liverpool are.

 

Yet there they are.

 

You have to wonder how they manage it, you really do.

 

Are they really as lucky as they are? Do good teams make their own luck? I think good teams do make their own luck, and Liverpool are a good team. The problem is that they are lucky enough for four good teams - it just doesn't sit right with me. How many fluky injury-time winners have they scored this season? How many times have opponents had players sent off when the game was in the balance, in many cases hugely harshly? A few times - that is for sure. Enough said.

 

I always go into these games full of hope and with gritted teeth of determination. You sit there, beer in hand, and take in the pomp and ceremony. The theme music brings the hairs up on your neck. You dare to dream. You believe the hype from the TV coverage and then... It is just so disappointing...

 

They know that if we get an early goal we'll be able to pick our moment and soak them up, so they have been given orders to kick us off the park and stick ten men behind the ball for twenty minutes - yes - at Anfield, no less.

 

We have no width and their fullbacks are acting as extra midfielders, congesting things and making it bitty, cluttered and full of fouls.

 

One or more of our guys picks up a silly early booking - he is then targetted by the Liverpool players and fans to get him booked again. In Mikel's case, he needs little encouragement and you end up covering your eyes every time he dives in. You know what is coming and yet you still want to punch the wall when it does.

 

We only have one left-footed player, and he cannot cross a football or pass to a blue shirt. He doesnt even want the ball. He looks terrified of it and has no first touch. What is the point in playing Malouda? He is absolutely hapless. Ashley Cole is having to act as a winger, but cant because Kuyt is pinning him back. Depressingly, we have nobody on the bench who can remedy this.

 

Every time one of our guys gets free in the middle they are hacked down dozens of time and we get a free kick half the time. Alonso and Mascherano are both cynically chopping our guys down, but when Mikel does the same thing once and he is booked.

 

Ballack cannot live with the tempo and is absolutely bypassed. Lampard cannot do anything about it and is isolated.

 

Every time one of our guys makes a tackle, the Liverpool contingent roll around on the floor in a not-at-all-obvious attempt at getting him booked, so he'll miss the second leg. Everyone goes to ground within two feet of Essien because he is the one they are truly afraid of. Eventually the Ref will fall for it, which is why they do it.

 

Torres keeps running into JT and going to ground. Sometimes they get a free kick, sometimes they don't, but he is never booked for the embarrassingly theatrical diving. Drogba gets kicked in the face, booked for diving then jeered off the pitch by the 'lovely' Anfield faithful.

 

The Ref is giving us absolutely nothing. You expect it at Anfield to be honest, but we all know deep down that the Ref at the Bridge will give us nothing either.

 

Despite the deadlock in the middle we are holding our own. It has crap, scrappy 0-0 written all over it. Unless Gerrard scores in the 94th minute like he usually does.

 

You just know how its going to go. Call me a big fat cynic, but it always goes that way and we are nailed on certs for more of the same tomorrow night. They are basically the modern day equivalent of Dirty Leeds. What really riles me is that when they do us up there with a spawny 1-0 win, or batter us into a 0-0 draw, we'll have someone sent off and get nothing out of the Ref all night and they'll still be lauded to high heaven in the press as if they were the Arsenal Invincibles, instead of the hugely overrated, unbelievably lucky, cynical, destructive, not-even-slightly-interested-in-playing-football-against-us team they really are. There are few chances, and yet when Gerrard pops up to rifle an unlikely winner in in the 98th minute, after Lampard falls over after turning his ankle in an unseen rabbit hole and Essien gets beamed up by aliens to create the only space Stevie gets all game, they all say Liverpool deserved it and were the better team. Vital-Liverpool will be absolutely buzzing with both their members creaming themselves over another very questionable result against us.

 

So we head up to the dogsh*t strewn streets of the European Capital of Culture (and benefit fraud) knowing exactly what awaits us - and i'm not talking about illiterate schoolkids with no teeth and automatic weapons "guarding" your car or "interesting" meetings with the pale, emaciated locals hunting in packs across Stanley Knife Park. Or even the gob in your dog burger. Or the gob raining down from the stands of the massed ranks of the Bestest Football Fans in the Werld Eva, like. They only know two songs and we know the words better than most of their fans. Its all very familiar. It comes round more often and with such laughable predictability - a bit like Pepe Reina's regular phonecall to the home insurance company. We know what is in store. Can Hiddink come up with a way to counter their not-at-all obvious battleplan? Can we at least try to impose ourselves on them? Can we please try to keep possession rather than squandering it faster and even more predictably than a Scouser with his Monday methodone parcel? Even if we do, will it make any difference? It will be a crap game and a cynical advert for all that is wrong with the modern game. I'm not bothered about the result really - to be honest I'd take a 0-0 or even a 1-0 defeat right now as they are definitely beatable in the second leg as we showed last season.

 

I long for a free-flowing, open game. Lots of chances, and lots of goals. No diving, no controversy, no trying to get our guys sent off. No constant stop and start whistles because of niggly fouls designed to stop us playing. I long for a honest, decent, brave performance from a truly impartial Ref. I long for the nasty air to the whole thing to be lifted and for both teams to actually get on with playing football. Sod the rest of it - can we just have a good game please?

 

Of course they wont do that, because then the best team might actually win. I suppose we should be flattered - supposedly the best team in the world, the greatest players in the world, have a game plan designed solely to break us up, stop us playing, disrupt our game and to nick a goal on the break.

 

I'm sure Bill Shankly would have been delighted to see his beloved Liverpool stoop to such lengths. Hardly 'pass and move the Liverpool groove' is it? How can you seriously give it as large as they do, about being the best in the world (they won it five times you know) when they cannot play football against decent teams and smother them to death instead?

 

Barcelona, you aint boys.

 

Here's hoping for a good game!

 

CAREFREE!!!

 

http://www.chelsea.vitalfootball.co....e.asp?a=513962

[liverpooltj]

HAHAHAHA fuck them they cant even win a european cup on pens the mongs

[L.F.C]

Didn't read all of it but what i did read, i fucking hope we smash them.

[Pdool]

HAHAHAHAHA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Good one.

[Joe Le Taxi]

Class saying we have only 2 songs. What the fuck are their's then?

 

Chelsea! Chelsea! Chelsea! Chelsea! Chelsea!

[el nino laff]

stopped reading after seeing Ngog

[Xherdan]

Only read the first two paragraphs.

 

They are in for a surprise tomorrow night.

[Shabado]

He has a point in that the matches with Chelsea have tended to be tense, close affairs that aren't great for a neutral. Saying that, we were by far the better team at Anfield last year and they were terrible.

 

I hope Hiddink has them come to win, because I believe we'll walk it then. Mourinho and Grant have, much like Rafa, results first approaches which is why the games were so dire. Not a critism of any of them mind, results first is the only sensible option in the Champs. League.

[Magic Sponge]

We havnt done too badly considering we have only got one very good defender, one very good midfielder and one very good striker. What a fuckin bellend. Sounds like hes making excuses before a ball has even been kicked.

[Magic Sponge]

stopped reading after seeing Ngog

 

Haha

[Stu Monty]

Stuff like that is just embarrassing for the writer though really. It just shows their lack of objectivity and knowledge about the game. That article will make anyone with half a brain laugh at the author, even Chelsea fans with half a brain I'd imagine.

[Scott_M]

Only read the first few papargarphs.

 

That was enough.

 

Idiot.

[Joe Le Taxi]

Dave should rip this guy to fuck in his magazine. :p

[chris71]

I could nearly sense his fingers bleeding with the ferocity of punching the keys typing that. Oh yeah,bell end.

[Redexile]

Stuff like that is just embarrassing for the writer though really. It just shows their lack of objectivity and knowledge about the game. That article will make anyone with half a brain laugh at the author, even Chelsea fans with half a brain I'd imagine.

 

Is correct . It's the sort of stuff a bitter school kid would write about the school up the road that they never seem to be able to conquer on the sports fieild.

[Guest Ulysses Everett McGill]

Fear breeds hate

 

He and they are shitting themselves

[john23liverpool]

This joker obviously hasn't got a clue about football.

 

Stopped reading that shite after the first paragraph.

 

As my signature says, if I wanted to hear the opinion of an arsehole I would fart.

[Herp McDerp]

4-0, 4-1, 5-0.

 

Prick

[tokyojoe]

Class saying we have only 2 songs. What the fuck are their's then?

 

Chelsea! Chelsea! Chelsea! Chelsea! Chelsea!

 

You forget 'Blue is the colour', blah, blah, blah etc.

[Lupin]

You forget 'Blue is the colour', blah, blah, blah etc.

 

Don't forget their lovely renditions of the Horst Wessel lied.

 

Shitbags they are.

[dirty_sanchez]

I like that he says that we only win by smothering teams when in three of our last four games, we stuck four goals past Real Madrid and Manchester United and five past Aston Villa and in each of those games, we proper went for it.

 

Also, does he not remember how Chelsea played under Mourinho?

[RedinSweden]

"stoop to such lengths"

 

mong. That article is ace. It is so far fetched. I would be squirming if one of our lot had written it. Nice to see malouda held in such high regard.