As hard as they tried, Liverpool
were unable to put a dampener on the Christmas spirit this year. The previous
two Boxing Day fixtures have brought misery to LFC fans, but yesterday the team
managed to grind out a 1-0 victory at Turf Moor despite putting in a wholly
uninspiring performance. The result leaves us in 9th place going
into the final game of 2014, an important match against 8th placed Swansea .
It was immediately clear that Liverpool
weren’t going to be treating us to the same level of performance we saw against
Arsenal. Most of the players looked like they had Christmas hangovers; they
were sluggish in possession and, when they didn’t have the ball, allowed Burnley much too much space. Danny Ings came very close
to punishing us within the first 15 minutes – he hit the post, and frankly the
goal would have been deserved. Far from provoking a reds response, this great
chance seemed to cause Liverpool ’s defence to
become even shakier. The rest of the first half passed in a blur of near misses
from the hosts and abysmal play from the visitors, and being able to go in at
half time level pegging was a gift that the Liverpool
players had by no means earned.
One of the main problems of the half was the failure of
Steven Gerrard to get at all involved. Other than one good ball to Lallana
which set up our only chance of the half, he was completely invisible for the
full 45 minutes. We might as well have been playing with 10 men; it was
genuinely easy to forget that he was on the pitch. The defence also
unsurprisingly continued to be an issue – Skrtel was particularly poor in the
first half, and Toure was below his usual standard. The goalkeeping farce
reached new lows when Brad Jones was subbed off early on through injury,
marking the return of Simon “he might never play for us again” Mignolet. This
was a good thing, as despite his faults Mignolet is unquestionably better than
Jones (who wouldn’t look out of place in a League 2 outfit), but the sight of
Jones walking off and Mignolet running on in his place was comical in the
extreme. The only positive of the half was the performance of Mamadou Sakho,
who showed exactly why many Liverpool fans
have been infuriated by his lack of game time. He put in some solid challenges
and certainly inspired more confidence than his defensive partners. Admittedly
his pass accuracy was quite disappointing – 80% is fairly low considering that
passing is supposedly one of his main assets – but this can be attributed
largely to rustiness.
The second half saw a slight improvement. This was not
difficult: in a season full of “worst half I can remember” claims, the first
half of this game was definitely up there. Burnley continued to threaten, but
their constant pressure and high work rate was beginning to take its toll and
It is an old footballing cliché that ‘the three points is
all that matters’, and after yesterday’s performance many Liverpool
fans will be clinging to that. Whilst this shocking level of performance
doesn’t bode well for future games – surely any club who weren’t sitting in the
relegation zone would have punished our poor play – the fact that we were able
to grind out the win is encouraging. We now only have 1 defeat in our last 9
games; whilst this stat disguises the multiple flaws of the team, it does show
that we are slowly but surely improving. If we can force wins in our next 3
matches, all against beatable opponents, the position will be much brighter
heading into the second half of the season.
-James Martin
Follow me on Twitter @JamesMartin013
No comments:
Post a Comment