Liverpool Travel To Oldham In The FA Cup 4th Round

 It’s Oldham away in the FA Cup on Sunday afternoon and it’s never easy when you’re away against a lower division side. What you really need in games like this is an early goal, but we managed this against Mansfield in the last round and still ended up with a nervy finish. Probably need two early goals, just to be on the safe side…………..

 We played Oldham in the cup last season as well, at Anfield, in a game best remembered for accusations of racial abuse from an Oldham defender who claimed a member of the crowd had called him something inappropriate. This was front page headline news, made the top of the national TV news and took up the first half hour of Sky Sports News every hour for a day. If you used your magnifying glass properly you may have found the two lines written in the papers a few months later when the police cleared the accused after studying video and enhanced audio of the incident. Not that I’m suggesting the reporting was sensationalistic and one sided……………………..

 The match itself was a straightforward win for the Redmen and it would be nice to repeat that in front of the TV cameras this weekend ahead of back to back tricky Premier League fixtures. I’d be surprised if we put out a full strength side given the trips to the Emirates and the Etihad that immediately follow the cup game. I expect the likes of Jack Robinson, Sebastian Coates, Fabio Borini, Jonjo Shelvey and Suso to start, keeping a few regular first team players such as Suarez, Johnson and Gerrard on the bench in case of emergency. It would be nice to give these players a complete rest but I don’t think it would be wise to leave them out of the squad altogether. It’s not a big journey to Oldham and it’s important we progress to the next round, a good cup run in his first season in charge would help as Brendan Rodgers looks to build a squad capable of challenging for top honours.

 There are no real big clashes in this round of the FA Cup so you would expect the big guns (and Everton….) to all progress so if we get past Oldham there’s a strong possibility of a glamour tie to follow. And we all love good proper knockout football against one of the top sides, especially at Anfield.