Stealing a win from Villains a great start
Football is back. How we’ve missed you. It’s five years since Liverpool won their opening game, also at Villa, but of course breaking that spell still required a few needless complications.
Several news outlets couldn’t decide who the referee was. Some said Riley, others said Bennett.
If they’d stuck to “bald and clueless” everyone could have been right.
We’d begged Gerrard to raise his game this season and you can’t deny it’s a bright opening. We bristle when we’re labelled a one-man team but sooner or later we’ll have to make our peace with it. Saturday’s goal had an emphatic but beautiful inevitability about it.
Villa aren’t a very good side but they’re precisely the sort of mid-table mediocrity we must overcome on our travels if Rafa’s fourth year isn’t to end with the same punctured dreams of his predecessors.
It was one goal but its impact on the season could be seismic. Leaving Birmingham with a point could have had calamitous consequences.
Sounds overblown I know. Would it have been unfair to dismiss our chances on day one? Of course, but what’s fair about trying to be the best? Liverpool were already battling an absurd combination of huge expectation and dismissive media contempt.
This mountain of disrespect would only have been increased by the 88 minutes preceding Gerrard’s strike. This was Rafa’s reign in a handy bite-size chunk. Hard work and occasional glimpses of talent were undermined by a vital missing ingredient — the final finish.
It’s hard to take Rafa seriously sometimes, but on Saturday his persistent gripe about adding a killer instinct to any good football we produce carried weight.
You only have to watch our players’ shooting practice before the game to see how hopeless we can be. The second half was tactically spot-on but the coup de grace could never be executed.
Kuyt and Torres both did good things but not the ones you expect from expensive forwards.
As each chance was missed by ever-increasing margins a Villa equaliser loomed larger as the quality of their football deteriorated. And it would be our ablest performer who gifted them the opportunity.
Villa fans, dancing gleefully minutes earlier, took defeat badly. We’ve never got on with them for some reason and they always seem to have a chip on their shoulders about us. Pick the irony out of that one.
A few young bucks couldn’t resist a rendition of ‘Justice for the 39’, little realising some of them might be needing some ‘justice’ of their own if they show their pock-marked faces at Anfield in January.
Elephants and Scousers aren’t species noted for their amnesiac tendencies. A coach was apparently trashed and that won’t help either.
Mind you I felt like slapping a few people myself. I’d made my peace, a reluctant truce, with ‘Fields Of Anfield Road’ and now there’s this ‘Greatest Midfield In The World’ nonsense. We need a Song Police, batons optional.
First of all, it’s not the best in the world. Secondly, it names four central midfielders and two weren’t even playing. Thirdly, Sissoko? Seriously?
Score some points for using the ‘Entertainer’ tune though, if only for the irony. But who quibbles after a win?
A result like this and the way it was achieved will have optimists strutting ominously, bellowing agnostics into submission. Yowl at us in a week’s time if you must. If you can.
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