We play Wigan at home tomorrow on the back of yet another defeat. Our cup runs at the moment are taking some of the attention away from our league results and papering over some pretty wide cracks but there’s no excuses for some of our defeats lately. We’ve taken four points from our last six league games, this form over a season doesn’t make a team relegation candidates, it makes them relegation certainties. A draw at home against a Spurs side who, despite so much media praise for their style of play this season, unashamedly played for a 0-0 at Anfield and got it isn’t a great result but it’s far from a disgrace. Losing 2-1 at Old Trafford is again not a result we’d want but it’s hardly a shocker. Arsenal winning 2-1 when they visited us, whilst not what we wanted, isn’t the worst scoreline we’ve ever had. Losing away at Sunderland and QPR shouldn’t really happen but these things do tend to come up over the course of a season. It’s the sequence of results that is scary. We have a squad good enough to have won at least two or three of these matches and there is a danger the players have already got used to losing, and that’s the worst habit in football to pick up and one of the hardest to break.
What has gone wrong with our league results this season? We have several new signings in the side this term and it was always going to take time for them to gel but surely we still shouldn’t be five points behind Newcastle who have themselves got a fairly new team. I put it down to not replacing Fernando Torres. I know he has been worse than poor at Chelsea but he still scored goals for us, even when he seemed like he’d had enough and was ready to leave. Suarez and Carroll have both had their moments (one more than the other) but neither have stuck the ball in the back of the net regularly. In the past fifteen years we’ve only had a couple of seasons without either Fowler, Owen or Torres scoring regularly for us and we’ve probably taken for granted that we’re Liverpool and we’ll have a 25 goal a season striker. We haven’t got one now and it’s crippling us. Arsenal have scored 23 more goals than us (so far) in the league this season but close analysis of the table shows something more surprising. Believe it or not it would have only actually taken six more goals for us this season, scored at the right times, for us to be sitting in third place right now. Given the amount of times we’ve hit the woodwork and missed penalties this season it’s not impossible we could have achieved that. I’m not saying that our performances have merited us being that high in the table but I can’t help thinking that if we’d broken the bank for Darren Bent instead of Andy Carroll things may be much rosier in our garden right about now.
Our season started with a missed penalty and a draw at home in a game we should have won and since then has remained pretty consistent. This story has been repeated over and over and we’re stuck in a bit of a rut. If we’re 0-0 with Wigan on Saturday with ten minutes left there’s nothing happened so far this season to give the players or fans belief that we will still win the game. I think we need a dodgy late win more than we need a 4 or 5 nil victory, we’ve shown already we can have more possession, more corners, more goal attempts and more shots on target than our opposition, we just haven’t shown that keeping going until the end will win us the match. Twice recently (Cardiff and QPR) we’ve got ourselves into decent winning positions close to the end of the game but let our opponents back in and turned what looked like victory into something else, but we haven’t been on the other end of that kind of match, we’ve not snatched anything from the jaws of defeat and walked off the pitch with that euphoric feeling that can have such an impact on how you start the next match.
A home game on a sunny Saturday against the team at the bottom of the league is surely the best possible fixture to kickstart our run in. We’ve put in some decent performances (Arsenal and QPR) lately and lost, this time around the performance doesn’t matter but the scoreline at the end of the game is vital.
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