After what seemend like only a few minutes, I was gently awoken by my wife. I grabbed my mobile which these days doubles as my trusty alarm clock. Crap. It was 3. Either I hadn't set-up the alarm properly or I was too exhausted to even notice that it had been going off playing Rage Against the Machines' Wake Up
(how's that for a wake-up call, eh?) for the past 2 hours or so.
One hour to kick-off. After taking into account that I badly needed a shower, the traffic and the time needed to actually do the shopping, I quickly came to the conclusion that there was no chance that I was going to be able to watch the whole Birmingham v. Liverpool match that afternoon. And, there was no Plan B either. It was a choice between my kids starving at school on Monday (with a follow-up visit from the Social Welfare folks) or comfortably sitting in my living room with the match streamed live on my laptop. Hmmm...
Fortunately, the kids have a mother so, off I was to the nearest Dunnes Stores to get ourselves some much needed supplies. A quick detour and I was standing right in front of a row of LED tellys in Currys, right in time to catch Liverpool's teamsheet for the afternoon.
Konchesky gets his first start, Lucas partners Poulsen in the centre of midfield in a seemingly more cautious away day set-up. Sktrel gets the nod ahead of Agger to partner Carragher while Maxi Rodriguez gets a start in Dirk Kuyt's absence. New boy, Raul Meireles gets a seat on the bench. No surprises really.
Remembering that I had some shopping to do, I quickly got that over with and we were on our way home. I ignored the urge to go to the loo and headed straight to my computer and loaded up the match. The second half had just started and seemingly, other than two world class saves from Pepe Reina, I didn't miss much.
Konchesky looked decent on the left, like a physiscally stronger version of Insua with less hair but other than that, seeing that it was his first game, it's too early to judge him any further. The same could be said about Meireles who was introduced in the second half. He looked eager going forward although on evidence of the few minutes this time around, he'd probably need to get used to the more physical aspects of the English game sooner rather than later.
As opposed to previous games, the team had a bit more fight about them but it still wasn't enough to pull them out of the overall lacklustre performance throughout the match. As the title suggests, it was a point gained rather than a missed opportunity to bag three...
Oh, and thank God I didn't choose my kids over this match...
4 comments:
The team was so depressing to watch throughout the whole game except the last 15 minutes when that new portugis boy came on....
can't still understand why rafa & hodgson seemed to like Lucas very much...he offers nothing at all...
I disagree. Lucas offers quite a lot from a manager's perspective.
He is tactically very disciplined and has very good positional sense for a player his age. More of an off the ball player, if you like.
In that sense, he is quite similar to Didier Deschamps when France won the WC in 98. Nobody knew what the hell he was doing on the pitch full of very technical, very gifted players. But, take him out of the team and France would struggle.
can't remember seeing any shots on goal on the first 45 minutes apart from torres 3 metres wide aside...
the team could be 3 goals down in the first half...they should be thankful to super pepe for those saves.....
if the team keep on playing like this, they could lose a big time in old trafford this weekend...
Agreed. The only positive I can see from this is that Liverpool are actually performing as expected, from a results perspective.
Realistically, I would've taken a draw against Arsenal any day. We were always going to struggle against Man City anyway whereas we haven't actually beaten Birmingham at home in the past 7 seasons. If we didn't beat WBA at home a few weeks ago, I'd be awfully worried but we did. So, all is well, no?
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