Rafa must cure the away-day blues

BE ever so careful what you wish for. After months, possibly years, of complaining about stodgy result-first football we had another seesaw match that gets people talking.

Benitez picked a team to face Galatasaray that was designed to go for the jugular whilst a tad inconveniently forgetting to protect our own.

If our season is beginning to look a trifle weird that’s because every summer signing prefers to go forward. Even Aurelio, one of Rafa’s Valencia stalwarts, is imbued with the kind of gung-ho spirit that once seemed alien to this manager.

Which made the first 20 minutes of last Wednesday’s match absolutely riveting. I’ve had to rebuke players before about defensive incompetence, but under the last two managers rarely have I seen defensive invisibility. It wasn’t that Garcia and Aurelio made a complete hash of things, they simply were never there.

So it looks like Rafa’s teething problems will go on, but on last week’s evidence we’re sure going to have a lot of fun watching him sort things out.

The Kop dusted off its long-neglected sense of humour by asking the visitors “Where were you in Istanbul”, but with 20 minutes to go the possibility of that night’s ‘miracle’ being duplicated on home soil had most of them in panic mode. It’s hard to bite your nails when your jaw’s slammed onto the floor.

Going forward though we were pretty damn good. Rotation is now the big debating point again, as it was in the early Houllier days, but Pennant and Crouch both came back in determined to prove a point.

The sneering pundits call it tinkering, in the old days we used to call it “fierce competition for places”. Get a shirt and prove you belong in the team, otherwise pick up your nice fat juicy cheque and take up interior decorating with all that spare time.

I’ve always been loath to turn on the ‘experts’ who attack managers. It’s too easy to say “what do you know about it”, especially to the dozens of ex-players who sidestepped management for the jauntier task of telling everyone where they’re going wrong. Anyone who’s read this column for any length of time knows I’m quite happy to be a risk-free smart-alecmyself.

But there’s been too much emphasis on these 94 games of ‘rotation’. For a start it implies that Rafa’s playing some football equivalent of musical chairs, or the blind chance of Pin The Talisman On The Left Wing.

The changes are rarely wholesale unless there are injuries, but the real riposte is obvious and shouldn’t really need stating.

Does that 94 games include Chelsea and Istanbul? The FA Cup? The 82-point season? Did he do it in Spain for his two titles? He did? Well tell you what: how about cutting the guy a bit of slack because it’s just possible he might know what he’s doing? And then you’re sat in the car coming back from Bolton calling him all the fools going. We can be treacherous bastards sometimes, but so much for Crouch proving his worth.

It would take three columns to list everything I hate about Allardyce and his gormless clan of shit-kickers, but why bother? It’s hardly news is it, and this was Rafa’s third attempt to come up with a strategy to neutralise them. Once again he failed dismally.

“Control” has made an unwelcome return to the post-match inquisition, though we did hit the woodwork for the umpteenth time this season. The linesman was not only wrong, he was suspiciously wrong in a way you couldn’t even begin to see how he made such a mistake.

Yes there have been similar tales of woe from Goodison and Stamford Bridge, but bad luck is the eternal lament of The Loser. A little backbone’s required at times like these and Liverpool simply don’t have it.

The manager also needs a serious reality check if he thinks asking for a game of “real” football will cut any ice with Bolton or the referees. Like sharks smell blood, the air was filled with the pungent aroma of weakness. How about sorting out some of our own problems first? The goalkeeper’s been flapping like a leper in a gale for weeks now. It’s true he was wronged on Saturday but diving behind his wall in the opposite direction of the shot snuffed out any sympathy heading his way.

As for Gerrard, search parties will soon have to be sent out to find his form and the countless hacks burrowed so far up his backside they may never see the sky again.

What’s really going on here is the army of idiots labelling Liverpool ‘the main threat to Chelsea’ in August having to back track furiously. Their prediction appears to have gone awry early on so they have to blame something and they’ve latched onto Benitez.

The next away games are Bordeaux, United, Middlesbrough, Arsenal and Galatasaray. Away win by Christmas? It’ll be a nice present if nothing else.