A Bright Red Future For Liverpool's January Signings

 After yesterday's 4-0 thrashing of Wigan Luis Suarez took most of the headlines with his hat trick, taking him two goals clear at the top of the Premier League scoring chart, but there was another player who had a massive impact on the game too, Philippe Coutinho.

 In January Brendan Rodgers invested significantly in Coutinho and Daniel Sturridge, both brought in for high fees but both are young with long futures ahead of them. So far the records of the two players are as follows, Sturridge - seven appearances, five goals, two assists, Coutinho - three appearances, one goal, two assists. In short both men are at least partly responsible for at least one goal for the team per game they play, can't ask much more than that really can we?

 It's the sign of a manager who knows the game and can read how his team plays that he brings in players who fit in immediately, we've seen over the years how hard it can be for new men, especially attackers, to fit in. I doubt either man will be able to keep up their prolific contributions at the rate they have started but they don't have to, we have other players like Suarez, Steven Gerrard, Stuart Downing and Jordan Henderson effectively scoring and making goals for us too. 

 The fact that our two new signings have settled in so quickly is good for two reasons. Firstly it shows they are decent players who can cut it in the Premier League, and secondly it shows our manager can identify players who will fit into the style he wants to play. It always makes it easier for a manager to persuade an owner to part with cash for new signings if he can point to previous successful acquisitions and prove he knows what he's on about when it comes to spending money. At the time we signed both players I felt we'd slightly overpaid in both cases but I think if we were to sell on either man right now we'd get back more than we spent.

 It's only the beginning of March and it's definitely too early to get carried away with the impact of our January arrivals but the signs are all promising and their performances so far will gain the manager a good deal of credit with the Liverpool supporters.

 The match itself against Wigan was slightly odd, take a look at these two sets of statistics :

Possession LFC 57% Opposition 43%

Attempts LFC 23 Opposition 4

On Target LFC 14 Opposition 3

Compared to : 

Possession LFC 50% Opposition 50%

Attempts LFC 8 Opposition 15

On Target LFC 7 Opposition 11

One of these games we won 4-0 (yesterday) and the other we lost 2-0 (West Brom at home last month) but the match we won is the one that statistically you would have thought we would have lost, and vice versa. This clearly highlights a couple of key factors that you could see while watching the game. 

 Firstly Pepe Reina played well. He made plenty of saves, three or four of them top drawer and that will always enhance your chances of winning. And secondly we were clinical in front of goal. Downing scored only his second league goal for us, he's a player with a proven record of missing a whole lot more than he scores for Liverpool. Suarez took his first and third goals brilliantly, sometimes it takes him four or five good chances to get a goal, other times he's surgical in his precision and when he is we don't tend to lose the game. I also really enjoyed the fact we scored a deflected goal, I don't know if it's accurate or not but it feels like we concede a lot more 'lucky' goals than we score, I'm sure most fans feel like that about their teams though.

 I wasn't overly looking forward to our trip to Wigan but our clinical finishing and intelligent attacking play was a joy to watch and it gives us great confidence going into next weekend's massive fixture at home to Spurs. It will be a real test of our improvement but twelve goals in our last three outings means it will also be a big test for Spurs as well.

 YNWA