It is not the points that worried me last night or even the performance. We are essentially through unless an amazing set of unlikely results occur. What worries me is the loss at Anfield and the psychological impact on us and as important on the opposition teams. We've all heard and said winning is a habit Last season that habit lasted a long time and brought us an unbridgeable gap very early. This season we could see the confidence is not the same with patchy results. Brighton is an important game for us. 3 points essential but should be no problem.
Good Lord, that was painful to watch. Quite arguably the worst performance I have seen (and I include Villa!). We didn't even look close to scoring at any point - 3 shots all game!! The defence was ok for most parts but ultimately caught out at decisive moments. But the midfield and attack were atrocious. Midfield offered nothing on the ball whilst the attack kept giving it away. Neco Williams simply isn't good enough and I just don't see him ever making it at the club. He needs to go out on loan. The plus points are that there are no injuries, Alison was as solid as always and Kostas - I think he was really solid and is a nice plug and play option to rotate with Robbo. We desperately need something similar for the right side. I am annoyed with the result and performance but it's not the end of the world. We're still in prime position to qualify top of the group, and our focus should be on the PL.
Exactly. I said last night that I'm not worried - I'm annoyed. I'm annoyed that they saw fit to dish up a performance like that - if there had been fans there it would never have been allowed to happen. I agree that it was worse than the Villa game - it wasn't even as though Atalanta played well ( I could accept that) it's just that we treated it like a training match and never gave them a game. Anyway - I'll get over it. We'll be very different on Saturday I'm sure, and it would take a complete disaster for us not to progress from the group stage. It's just that last night's performance was very unprofessional imo.
I think there was a definite attitude at the start of lets just do the minimum necessary and after that they never could find the required intensity .
I know I'm going on about this a bit but... Whenever we start a game in a half-arsed manner, we're never able to pick it up part way through. You can tell within the first 5 minutes what sort of a game it's going to be, and that's one reason why it's so frustrating. Sometimes things fall into place and we scrape a result, at other times it's like last night. It doesn't happen all that often, but often enough for us to know by now that that attitude just doesn't work.
I agreed with whoever it was that said Atalanta started out looking like the home side. We should have come out full throttle and taken the game away from them. There was no sense of urgency. I thought at the time that the appearance of the four subs was a mistake and I didn't like being proved right. Tsimikas was Robbo-lite and did a job. Young Rhys didn't put a foot wrong and did well for his age and in the circumstances but he didn't have the forward drive that we're used to seeing from Virgil and Joe. Neco, for me isn't as good as Hoever and I wish we still had both options. I would have preferred to use Milner again on the right with Fab in midfield, then switch him when the subs come on. They always make us sweat it out in the group games, good old Liverpool
