Reds blazing a snail’s trail towards seventh place

DID I say “lazy limp to fourth place”?

Try snail’s crawl to seventh.

Doesn’t look good, does it? It’s not like our readjusted rivals won’t drop points, but anyone seeing hope of a winning streak in this Liverpool team does so through a rose-tinted microscope.

It’s Benfica who threaten a swift curtailment to the season; the other part’s done.

As doubts over Rafa’s future kick in for real, so does loyalty and fairness among those previously cold-hearted souls who’d happily have packed his bags weeks ago.

Changing the manager is like a nagging pain in your side that’s mystified doctors. The tests, the wait, the anxiety; you’d swap it all for one simple diagnosis.

Then, when you get it and it’s bad, really bad, you realise you were relatively content with the worry and uncertainty! The winning streak that normally rides to Rafa’s rescue has been nobbled. Small wonder; try as we might, we can’t convince the FA to let us play every game at Anfield.

Still, it’s not all doom and gloom on our travels. Torres just scored our third away goal in four Premier League months.

Mr Manager, you are spoiling us.

Having shown promise and potential against Portsmouth, you knew Aquilani would not get another chance.

Pardon me for the cynicism, but ‘a virus’? What, did he break out in an attack rash? Penaltyboxitis? To be fair, Lucas also made good runs against Lille, winning a penalty with one, but it didn’t last long.

It again made you wonder what these players – that everyone berates – are capable of if they were given different guidance.

We tottered on the edge on an away goal exit for a while. Caution? Tiredness? Probably a bit of both, but Torres’ class got us through. How we’ve missed him, yet how strangely he’s behaving.

He’s got his own peculiar contest going on between goals and cards, the former winning (just). That tiny act of treachery demanding four or five better players must have gone down a storm in the dressing room, and even if money were available, who would spend it? Benitez? Yeah, right.

Thanks to Riera’s selfish tantrum, Rafa now has the same calamitous three-card transfer trick that pulled the rug from under Houllier’s reign.

There’ll be no shred of sympathy for this colossal waste of space, but you’d be a fool to believe that better players are not muttering similarly mutinous epithets amongst themselves.

United will claim they scuppered our Champions League hopes but they merely hammered in the final nail, much of the self-inflicted damage done long since. We fell off our perch again.

All the talk on our end was of Torres’ voodoo hold on Vidic, and the goal only emphasised this. Instead of going to town on this obvious opportunity, we eventually shrivelled up into a ball of cowardly nothingness.

By the time more chances came his way, Fernando’s body language had long dissolved into petulant obscenity. Gerrard’s body language screamed of complete disinterest in whatever happens during the rest of this atrocious season. His fitness has long been a bone of contention, largely because most fans respect his contribution in previous years and are reluctant to believe he really is past caring.

But if your captain can’t stiffen his own resolve, what hope of him doing it for the rest? I begrudgingly respect United’s resilience after losing Ronaldo and Tevez, but I don’t regard this as anything like one of their better sides. The Chelsea result has resigned many Reds to the inevitable.

Even the Istanbul taunts seemed a bit lame, aimed as they were at a United side probably heading for its third consecutive final.

Further Evertonitis was evident when the performance of Howard Webb was discussed, if you can call foam-flecked ranting a discussion. That type of deflection normally cuts no ice with me, but for Lex Luthor I’ll unhappily make an exception. Expecting fairness from Sheffield policemen is the height of futility anyway, but we all knew what we’d get on Sunday – precisely zilch – and that’s what we got.

The current fragility of our state of mind meant we’d probably have buckled at 1-2 anyhow, but a slow systematic wearing down of morale by the official didn’t help.

He’s now infamous for bailing out United when they need it most, and Sunday only honed his reputation.

So now we’ll spend the rest of the season hoping other, better teams can do what we quite plainly can’t.

Until major changes are made at the club on every single level, regard that as the norm rather than the exception.