Talk is cheap and goals hard to come by
Before my ass is dragged into The Hague’s courts I’ll keep wielding the hammer until captured by the forces of Optimism. And maybe Hell will freeze over eventually. It’s certainly cold enough.
I needn’t point out what our response would have been in August, once offered first place and comfortable European qualification by December.
All of it without finding top gear, nor the cure for Fernando’s ever-twanging hamstring.
Yet severe doubts remain. Last season we’d only mention Owen and Torres in the same sentence for the right reasons. Now we’re remembering the five or six games the littlest backstabber would be out, followed by the three or four he’d need to hit top form, by which time we were Premiership also-rans again.
It’s time for Keane to step up, and yet there’s little confidence he will do so. He’s new, nervous, a boyhood Red playing unfamiliar roles in bite-size chunks and our city’s love of all things Emerald is legendary.
That’s all that stands between Robbie and a torrent of abuse.
Gerrard (of course) put us into the knockout stages early, but by God visiting Anfield has become hard, cold, tedious work. If it weren’t for the walking car-crash Dossena and the plummeting temperatures, slumber would have been the obvious preference.
It was one of those evenings Liverpool face the Kop end rather than attack it. The French weren’t a rollover by any means but our inability to keep the ball longer than five seconds was disturbing.
We’re tiring already. We haven’t been helped by the authorities finding ingenious new ways to grind our players into the soil. It’s the same for everyone else at this level of course, except we’re new to this and the nerves make it worse. We deserve to be challenging but the luck has been sliced thickly thus far and you do wonder if it’s run out.
A free weekend gave us time to gauge the threat from above and below. Football being infested with knee-jerkers, the rush to exclude Arsenal and even United from the title race was hardly surprising and it will be Chelsea’s turn soon enough.
Having failed to pierce two teams notoriously weak at Anfield (45 years since either won here) we’ll no doubt be written off too.
I’d love to announce that LFC reducing ticket prices by one whole pound meant thousands were locked out of Monday’s game, but sadly the club’s munificence was not rewarded.
In fact there were thousands of empty seats and not all in the away end. Some people are just born ungrateful. You’d think this team wasn’t entertaining or something…
The official match magazine questioned whether Zola would even have a job come the end of the evening, an act of ignorance simply begging to be punished by the visitors.
It almost was too. One wonders if that was our fault as well? All week long there’d been underhand quotes about fans’ anxiety making it impossible for the poor dears on the pitch to even function against the mighty Fulham.
When the annual sacrificial lambs from the East End also stroll out of here with a point then anxiousness is understandable, surely? Some people do get what’s coming to them though. In the pub beforehand there was far too much talk about West Ham being too open to hurt us.
Even if they weren’t it didn’t matter how we won as long as we did so — as if we ever did things any differently.
What was that someone said about not seeing the wood for the trees? 15 games, 21 goals. We have a good defence but we don’t score nearly enough. Benitez won the Spanish league with the lowest ‘for’ tally ever.
Do you think these things happen by accident? So “we won, stop complaining” suddenly becomes “we’re top, stop complaining”.
Let’s hope we’re not to be subjected to the perennial Christmas & New Year lapdog faves “we’re still in the hunt”, “well, looking at it mathematically” and “how can we compete with United and Chelsea’s millions anyway”.
* For information on Steve Kelly’s “Rotation Rotation Rotation: a season at Anfield”, visit www.ttwar.net
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