West Brom vs Liverpool – My Thoughts

On Saturday 18^th August 2012, Liverpool played their opening match of the season against West Bromwich Albion. They lost 3-0, with goals from Zoltan Gera, Peter Odemwingie (penalty) and Romelu Lukaku. On the face of it, there are very few positives to be taken from this games, and lots of negatives. This is partly true, however there was more to the game than the result might suggest.

The first thing to mention is that in the first half, the game was not at all as one-sided as the scoreline suggests. In fact, Liverpool created more attacks than West Brom in the opening 45 minutes. Their build up play was extremely good (mostly), and they crafted a lot of good chances. However, the problem was once again their finishing. I have had to say this hundreds of times, but Liverpool are still not showing the clinical finishing required from a club that wants to compete for a top 4 position. If this cannot be improved, then I fear that hopes that LFC might break into the Champions League again this season are unrealistic. Despite this, it shouldn’t be forgotten that lots of attacks were made, which is a very good sign.

Unfortunately, Liverpool could not continue creating attacks in the second half. Zoltan Gera had scored a stunning volley at the end of the first half, and it seemed that took the life out of LFC. However, this was not the main reason for Liverpool’s decline in the second half. By far the biggest contributing factor to Liverpool’s poor second half was some dubious refereeing by Phil Dowd. Early into the half, Shane Long managed to break through the Liverpool defence. Daniel Agger attempted to get back at him, and Dowd deemed that he had used excessive and illegal levels of force to do so, and gave West Brom a penalty. This in itself was a little controversial, as the incident was right on the edge of the area, but that was nothing compared to what happened next. The referee sent off Agger. Now I am a massive LFC fan, but I am also reasonable, and accept that Agger fouled Shane Long. However, it was certainly not a foul worthy of a red card. Although Pepe Reina managed to save the subsequent penalty, with LFC only having 10 men and having to chase the game they were as good as beaten.

As if this wasn’t enough, Dowd then decided to award West Brom another penalty! Now I may be seeing this differently to everyone else, but to me it seemed that Shane Long came up from behind Skrtel, tackled him, and then fell over. When I saw the referee pointing to the penalty spot I thought it must be some kind of joke. Odemwingie stepped up to take this one, and unlike Long he managed to bury his penalty. This left Liverpool two goals down. There was nothing controversial about the third goal, which was simply a good header from Lukaku. However, Liverpool would probably have been able to clear it had they had 11 players on the pitch.

To sum up, it is hard to draw any meaningful conclusions from this game. Liverpool may well have come back in the second half, but the match was ruined by some shocking refereeing decisions. However, Liverpool will need to show some better finishing in subsequent games if they want to get results.