TERRACE TALK: Reaction from the weekend’s top Premiership action

Our weekly round-up of what's being said on the terraces after another weekend of Premiership action. 

Liverpool: Too many fans beginning to believe in fairytales

“Once upon a time Liverpool beat a Swiss team called Basel to go into the Champions League knockout. Then they went to their bitterest rivals and won there. By beating Bournemouth they got into a semi-final and then put Arsenal to the sword and lived happily ever after”.

There’s your Monday bedtime story. Sleep tight…

Those of us without drooping eyelids are however suiting up for yuletide jeers. Only people with gold medal ambitions for the world straw-clutching championships think any of this is going to happen, never mind all of it.

The evidence of one’s own eyes tends to be pretty damning. True, fans wanted Rodgers to do something about the defence and they’ve let one in all week – and Mignolet could do nothing about that.

Seven points out of nine make the situation slightly less parlous but the state of the opposition must still be taken into account.

Arsenal fans, punched in the kidneys at the Britannia again with Arsene Wenger actually looking grey in the face nowadays, may argue with the grading of Stoke as poor but away from home they’re like Bruce Banner with a bad cold. Even then Liverpool needed The Miracle of Glen Johnson Looking Halfway Bothered to snap up the points. Leicester prop up the entire league and went down to 10 men but they were still giving us problems.

All that crying about Gerrard being dropped is trapping Rodgers between a rock and a hard place. Suddenly the skip’ rolls a sitter into the net and becomes world class again. There are too many supporters who believe in fairytales nowadays.

Rodgers doesn’t help himself though. He’s got the unmitigated gall to claim he never puts Borini on the bench for football reasons, while everyone places money on Balotelli’s injury lasting as long as the unrated, unloved Sakho’s.

And to think people thought this would be a quiet year because Suarez left! Poor old Mario; thrown onto the same ‘never left the 50’s’ boat as Wigan’s antiquated chairman.

Balotelli’s dip of the tootsies into Jewish stereotyping was blamed on (c)rank stupidity but it’s really the same bloated arrogance at the core of it all. The rich chairman and the feckless young footballer who’s never once had to take responsibility or suffer any consequences of his actions. Someone else will always pick up the tab.

So you’re starting to notice I’m not mentioning the Sunderland match very much, yeah? While my editor still refuses to indulge me with a one-word capsule review, you’ll have to pardon the waffle.

If anything this first-half was worse than last week’s.

One of these days, football supporters will wake up and discover the fraudulent ride they’re being taken for most weeks. Mind you I’ve said that for 20 years and the game becomes even fatter and greedier on the gullible’s gold.

To be fair to Poyet he’s doing the same as Rodgers, trying to correct huge defensive flaws and so any game between the two was bound to be less than captivating. There was the odd bit of magic from Sterling but apart from that and the unpunished dives of Conor Wickham there was little else to wake people up.

A club that’s spent €150m is struggling for options, can you believe that? They’ve played Rickie Lambert alone up front for five games in a fortnight. The young superstar that England’s manager must apparently rest has done exactly the same. Both will start against Basel.

It reads like farfetched fiction but sadly for us every word is true. Markovic came on for 12 minutes and again might as well not have bothered.

Gerrard came on a little earlier than that but there were no miracles this time. Maybe he’ll have better luck tomorrow?

Arsenal: Potteries pain inevitable after backline tinkering

Welcome to life as an Arsenal fan, where one step forward is quickly followed by two steps back.

After an impressive victory over Dortmund, we weren’t particularly convincing against an impotent West Brom and we scraped a somewhat fortunate victory in midweek against Southampton.

Nevertheless with three successive clean sheets, we were just beginning to regain some composure at the back and to gather some momentum.

But it all went out the window at the weekend, in the most painful fashion

If Koscielny is still being plagued by an Achilles problem, I can fully appreciate the necessity to avoid overplaying him, but it was utterly unfathomable that Arsène should choose one of our most arduous away days of the season for such a substantive defensive reshuffle.

It’s not rocket science and no coincidence that up until recently the two most consistent teams in the league were those that fielded the same seven of their 11 players in every match. Mercifully, Matic’s absence appeared to take its toll upon Chelsea at St James Park.

Having been unable to avoid increasingly focusing on the exploits of the Blues with each passing week, fretting about the looming spectre of Mourinho erasing Arsène’s only exclusive “Invincible” achievement, their defeat was such a blessed relief that getting anything out of our outing to Stoke was only every going to be a bonus.

Truth be told, in Koscielny’s absence, most of us had been crying out for Wenger to give Chambers a run at centre-half instead of Monreal and for the twinkletoed Bellerin to be let off the leash at right-back.

But why would anyone (in their right mind!) wait for the cauldron-like atmosphere of the Britannia, to give these two a baptism of fire?

The anxiety-ridden environs of the Potteries certainly wasn’t the place for the sort of wholesale tinkering that left our backline playing like a bunch of tentative strangers. The stat of one successful tackle during the course of the entire 90 minutes just about says it all.

With the comparatively sedate atmosphere at our place, I adore the far more fervent experience on the road nowadays. But our annual outing to the Britannia is probably bottom of the list as the least preferable away outings, with Stoke having become such a bogey side in recent times.

Bizarrely, the Stoke faithful seemed to have turned around our own lingering fury about that Shawcross tackle on Ramsey, somehow making themselves out to be the far from innocent victims. Mark Hughes is a wily old campaigner and after his side were unfortunate to have nothing to show for two decent performances on the road at Anfield and Old Trafford, by pouring fuel on the animosity between the two clubs, the Potters were fired up to produce the necessary intensity to get under the Gunners’ skin (yet again!).

It’s as if this encounter has become a class war, where putting one over on the lily-livered landed gentry from the capital has become a much vaunted feather in the cap for their more agricultural brand of football. But it’s hardly as if the home side’s burning desire should’ve come as the sort of surprise that saw us capitulate within seconds of kick-off! If the Gunners were to get anything out of this game, we needed to be bang up for it.

Instead of which, witnessing our positively feeble, faint-hearted efforts in some of the 50/50 challenges, it felt as if the majority in red and white on the pitch shared the same lack of relish for this outing, as those of us singing “we wanna go home” on the terraces.

I’m still uncertain why Stoke’s fourth was disallowed, but this did at least save us from the ignominy of being totally embarrassed. The sight of Alexis’ potential goal of the season bouncing back off the post summed up our disappointment. Yet, if there was some consolation, it was that at 3-0 down I looked around the pitch and couldn’t see players with the strength of character to try and muster a revival. While there might have been an element of good fortune involved, I’m delighted that they proved me wrong.

Hopefully the fact that we came so close to a remarkable recovery will stand us in good stead and we can bottle some of this spirit. It’s bound to be required in the hectic travails of the relentless festive schedule.

Chelsea: Jose needs quick cure for Blues’ travel sickness

I’m obviously not happy we lost in Newcastle, but I feel this “Invincibles” talk was beginning to become a bit of an albatross around our necks.

It looked against Newcastle that we were scared to lose until the realisation hit at 2-0 down that we actually WERE going to lose. Then we threw the kitchen sink at them but by then it was all too late.

It was such a lethargic performance and without the protection of Matic some of Cahill’s shortcomings were laid very bare.

The bizarre thing is how often we play like this up there — no matter the era. It was just so different to the Tottenham game, where we systematically took them apart, roared on by a Stamford Bridge crowd who demanded nothing less than a total humiliation of our other North London rivals.

Our away form is beginning to worry me and with City now breathing down our necks, Mourinho needs to quickly work out what is causing our travel sickness.

Of course blaming the ballboys was one of Jose’s diversion tactics but Newcastle’s time-wasting was taken to another level (which they nearly paid dearly for). But should a team of our quality be so affected by that?

And then there was Costa’s totally avoidable yellow card — talking yourself into a booking is just unacceptable.

The thing that struck me as I watched from the St. James’s crow’s nest is how many passes we put together or more specifically, how many pointless passes we put together. We just went back and forth, and then side to side a few dozen times before working the ball back to the goalkeeper, eliciting howls of frustration from the Chelsea fans. This was partly down to Newcastle’s defence but we do have the players to unlock these rearguards and it looked at times that as we got more frustrated we just opted for the easy pass.

Jose also needs to take his share of the blame. He left it too late (which is unusual for him) to go route one and we also didn’t ask enough questions of their young third-choice keeper. Given his inexperience we should have been putting him under pressure from the second he came on, running at him, forcing him to make those split second decisions. But, as with the Sunderland game, we were happy to take ridiculous off target pot shots.

There were the usual Chelsea fans who blamed Mikel of course — even though he did absolutely nothing wrong (bar taking one of those ridiculous long-range pot shots).

Of course the media is now full of the title race being “blown apart” and the big question is how are this Chelsea team going to deal with that.

The side that won back-to-back titles under Mourinho previously had enormous mental strength as well as their obvious physical prowess. This team is generally younger and less experienced. Mourinho will need all his Svengali powers and also make use of the likes of John Terry and Didier Drogba to ensure the usual November malaise hasn’t simply slipped to December.