Tuesday 14 October 2014

West Ham Match Review

Don't know what to say we were bad, very bad, all over the pitch.  I'm left feeling very disappointed, I had high hopes for this season but any hope of title challenges seems to be over before they even started.  I probably shouldn't be writing this when I feel so down, but hear goes.
Despite the problems we are having at the minute, I still have confidence In Rodgers, although I'm not happy with some of the decisions he is making at the moment, he is the man at the top and after the strides we made last season he has plenty of credit in the bank.  
    One of the main problems at the minute appears to be simply form, there are to many players not playing well enough.  Individuals are not performing to the levels we have seen and come to expect and we are struggling to replace out of form players, who are now struggling with confidence, due to the number of injuries we have picked up so early.
I still think the diamond is our best formation, we did create a little more using this formation than we have seen in previous games, but I think that we can't play Lucas and Gerrard in a midfield three together, they do not have the required energy, as is regularly the case when these two play together we were overrun with West Ham players continuously picking up loose balls and and been able to put pressure on our players.  Neither of the players have the ability to get forward and support the attack and we are therefor left short in this area as well.  There is more to our problems than this though, our defenders seem to have completely lost the ability to defend, West Ham showed these problems clearly scoring two goals early in the game by simply chucking balls in to the far post, one from a set piece where we had plenty of time to sort out the marking etc.  But we failed to defend them losing individual battles in not winning headers as well as the normal almost non existent marking.  Our goalkeeper, despite being a wonderful shot stopper appears to have issues with the rest of his game and is certainly struggling at the moment.  Our forwards are struggling to settle in my opinion.  Balotelli had another decent game but certainly didn't set the world alight whilst the best we can say about Borini is he runs, a lot, but not sure it is effective, whilst I hate to say it but Lambert is showing that he is not and never was an international standard player.
it's obvious that we a struggling with the amount of injuries we have and Rodgers probably doesn't want to play some of these young players as often and certainly has his options reduced but all teams have these problems and I would expect players to respond far better than this, we spent a lot of money on some of these players and at the moment they don't look up to the job.
Our new players do need time to settle and we always knew that that would be the case. I would expect, however, to see some signs of quality from players who cost many millions of pounds and if I am honest, I'm seeing nothing from Lallana, Lambert, Manquillo, Lovren, there were rumours before his injury about Can's poor training leaving Markovic and Balotelli who have been ok and only Moreno who has impressed.   Yes I know it's early, that the majority of them are young, need to be given time etc but I can't help it, I'm disappointed and wanted, expected even, so much more.
We allowed West Ham to totally dominate us for the first half and then In the second we were better but not pulling up any trees.  Still no great threat, no fluency, no nothing really.  
One or two players at a time loosing form and we would be ok but we seem to have nine or ten on the pitch recently and yes, I love them all, they are Liverpool players, but some fingers need to be extracted from arses and big improvements made before its to late, we have already, I fear, thrown away a prospective title challenge, but we absolutely must secure top four.

@lfclumo

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