This season we've seen Fabio Borini, Andre Wisdom, Raheem Sterling, Nuri Sahin, Jose Enrique, Joe Allen, Daniel Sturridge and Philippe Coutinho all score their first goals for Liverpool. We've lost Maxi, Dirk Kuyt, Craig Bellamy and Joe Cole but all in all we're up on goalscorers. Added to all of this we've got Luis Suarez, a man who hit the woodwork regularly last term, who has fine tuned a lot of his finishing and is currently second in the Premier League goalscoring charts. Daniel Agger, Martin Skrtel and Glen Johnson have chipped in, and Steven Gerrard has also been on the goal trail regularly.
It makes it much harder for teams to play against you if they don't know where the goal threat is coming from (though performances like the one against West Brom where it looked like WE were the team who didn't know where our goals were coming from have appeared too often) and as our attacking players get used to each other things will improve even more. Coutinho's goal against Swansea was the perfect example, Suarez went out wide for the ball and three opponents went with him, a quick turn and pass inside and the Brazilian was away with half the Swansea defence stranded to make it 2-0 and game over.
It hasn't clicked for us going forward in every match, but when it has it's looked very very promising and you can see where the work has been put in on the training pitch. What's more it's evident how much the attackers are loving being part of it when we're firing on all cylinders. Luis Suarez looked pretty annoyed when he was substituted on Sunday even though we were 5-0 up, the game was won but the Uruguayan wanted more goals. The way Gerrard allowed Sturridge to take the penalty for our fifth goal shows how much the players are enjoying playing with each other and how it's about the team, not the individual.
I'm not yet totally won over by this season's team, but I've actually enjoyed watching more of our games than I seem to remember doing for a long time. This has to be tempered with a mention of a number of performances we wish we could forget but in general I think we've been good and watching us hit the back of the net regularly has been a joy, long may it continue.
Another big factor I think is the midfielders and even full backs getting to grips with the way the strikers play. The fluidity of the attacking formation means that sometimes there isn't a target in the box, so Rodgers has been drilling into them the need to get bodies into the box. I think the Enrique goal was a perfect example - Suarez, Sturridge and Coutinho were all dragged (effectively as it turns out) into the left wing position, but Enrique bust his gut to get into the box, and Downing and one more (can't remember who) had also made got themselves into the box. Please can we play like that every week? 3s.
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