Judging by todays display the only player stopping us completely dominating midfield for most of the game was Gerrard. I think the effect will be rather like Arsenal losing Viera you will be a weaker team for it. Very difficult to replace such quality.
You thought Gerrard stopped you dominating midfield? I don't think anyone in the middle performed well which is why it was so end to end as neither sides CM got hold of the ball.
Disagree we pretty much dominated the play for most of the game with Liverpool causing problems with fast counter attacks. Your midfield were absent apart from Gerrard.
Now now feller, the Palace fiasco was the killer last season for us, if you're gonna cite the slip you might as well add The Toure backpass at WBA, Allen skying a sitter over the bar at Goodison from 3 yards out and many more. Fair play mate, just saw your "like"
The stats were very even, but Liverpool created the better chances, I thought. My critique was that we shouldn’t have played our usual style since Liverpool’s plan was to pounce and break behind us. On the other hand, once we went behind, we looked like scoring. So you could say it was in our players’ minds. It definitely looked like that half pressing which has gotten us into trouble so often that cost us every time the game was even. I think this may be the least gutted I’ve been for any meaningful loss. I was proud of how hard our team tried, and glad that this was another good advertisement for football, like the NLD. I think I also realized we had a train wreck of big matches and ties beginning with Sheffield, and this is the one I least mind losing. The order of importance, to me: 1. Cup Semi 2. Cup Final 3. NLD 4 and 5. Europa tie/West Ham (can’t make up my mind) 6. Liverpool
I think many of us are not as upset as we usually after a loss because we can see the progress that the team has and is making. After a long period of false dawns we are at last moving forward in a serious fashion.
Until very recently, our problems were obvious for anybody to see. We scored far too few, and conceded far too many - not a great recipe. The emergence of Kane & Eriksen, especially, has seen the former on its way to being sorted. However, the latter remains a problem. We have conceded 34 goals in 25 games. The most of any team in the top half of the table. That needs to be fixed, quickly.
Good game of football last night, a shame about the result as I don't feel either team deserved to lose it, but costly errors at the back (surprise, surprise) ended up being one too many on the night. Thought Ibe and Sturridge as well as Lamela and Dembele were the standouts. Sturridge's movement caused our back line problems and Ibe's direct running at us made things uncomfortable. You wouldn't have thought Lamela had played in a NLD on Saturday with the energy he had last night, at one point he made a tackle at LB despite playing RW! His assist for Kane was very well worked too, MOTM for me. Dembele showed signs of the player we've wanted him to be since joining, he was going forward with the ball and making a few forward passes (hooray!). Thought Mason, Bentaleb and Eriksen had their worst games of the season, all 3 could barely string passes together for most of the match and were polar opposite to Lamela - it looked as though they definitely played in a high intensity derby at the weekend. The subs were a bit off as well, Paulinho just didn't offer anything (again) and I'd have brought Chadli on much earlier for one of Mason/ Bentaleb and dropped Mousa back a bit whereas bringing Soldado on to grab a goal is... Well... Need I say more . The performance overall would have been good enough to beat most other sides, but as I mentioned to a Pool fan yesterday, going to Anfield is one of the trickiest fixtures for any team in the country, so going there and giving Liverpool a good game while having more of the possession in attacking areas shows that we're definitely on the right track and with such a young squad, the scope for improvement is massive, especially as Poch is still in his first season with us. For the first time since Redknapp's 1st and 2nd season, I feel there's a true sense of direction within the club under Poch and last night's defeat was simply a blip after what had initially been a good run of games for us. Taking into account the amount of games we've played this season, plus coming off the back of an exhilarating NLD, to put in the performance like we did last night is encouraging (minus the errors) and although disappointing to lose, I'm not as disheartened at a loss like that against a good side in Liverpool than I was earlier in the season against some of the lesser sides where we looked all over the place. We've got a decent break now until Fiorentina next week, a lot of time to recharge and work on improving the areas that seem to let us down (defence!!!).
Can we please...everyone stop using the term "we dominated the game"..... There is only one way to dominate a game, and thats by scoring lots of goals. To clarify, having 65% useless possession and not putting the ball away, is not "dominating" a game. (not saying thats what happened per se in this case, I just wish people would stop using that phrase).
This ^ Least important of the games we had over this period and we would likely have been beaten no matter what. No tears here. Well done 'pool. I guess that answers the question earlier in the thread about who has been the biggest disappointment this season, Ballo or Ade!
Big improvement the last two games,except in one area,defence,once that is sorted we will be a lot harder to beat,we simply give to many goals away cheaply
Not really. We dominated against Arsenal despite only having 56% of possession which is hardly a huge majority. The reason we dominated against the Goons is because they were on the back foot all game, we controlled the tempo, were first to the second balls and Arsenal were just sitting ducks apart from the odd counter. Personally I don't think that happened last night, we made too many sloppy mistakes on the ball to really dominate.
I'd have Liverpool above West Ham in importance because they're closer to us and more likely to challenge for the top 4. West Ham fans are annoying when they win but at least they won't be able to go on about their double/treble nonsense like last year, beating Liverpool would've really had their challenge for top 4 wobbling and West Ham's chances are pretty much already gone. I'll be cheering on West Ham tonight though, hopefully they and Burnley can do us a favour.
Agreed. Dominating the game is **** all to do with possession. If Arsenal get 65% possession and are just pinging it amongst themselves in front of the opposition back four, then what exactly have they dominated? For me "dominating" is A) Scoring more goals and b) Having more shots on target.
Even that can be misleading, especially b) if you're just having loads of potshots from distance. I just think it's an accumulation of everything. The trouble is that people try and draw their conclusions from stats, which is in part down to clueless pundits reinforcing it. After the United 3-0 against Liverpool all Carragher kept talking about for weeks was how many shots Liverpool had(20+ or something) even though the vast majority of them were total **** and wastes of possession. Ultimately what it came down to was that Sterling wasted 2 great chances and they made it too easy for United to stroll through them at the other end. You can "prove" anything you want to with stats but the reality is often what it really tells you is not the story of the game but the style that both teams played. Under AVB at the start of last season when he was getting criticised our stats were amazing. We were enjoying 60% possession on average and taking more shots, getting more on target and still ending up needing a penalty or whatever to win the match. The problems were that we weren't actually creating a lot of real chances and we were far too open to the counter and they simply weren't addressed for a long time. I've no idea what we were practising on the training pitch but the system wasn't wrong, it just needed to be adjusted. In the end AVB scrapped the whole thing and we looked more comfortable but it was too late as he was one crap result away from the sack as it proved with the Liverpool game at home.
Over the years Liverpool and Spurs have shared some good matches with close score lines and it's only recently when they've been scoring high against us because of wrong and too many managers. Now last night we gave them a good match again which tells me we are back.
Dominating possession in my opinion isn't about the statistics/ percentages. It's about who's getting the ball into the right areas and creating the chances more than the opposition. As Bodanki has mentioned, if you knock the ball about in your own half and stats say you had 65% possession that's a false description of the match in terms of "domination", if you only had 35% but had most of that in the opposition's half then I consider that to be dominating the possession. Possession in football means **** all if you don't make use of it. In terms of Pool and Spurs, I'm not sure what the stats were though I think we had slightly more of the ball in their area but I felt it was an even game in terms of dominating the play, both teams created chances, Pool hit the post, Mignolet pulled of a worldie save and both teams had shots on goal, the difference simply being Pool finished one more of their chances. A good advert for English football, just a shame we couldn't convert one or two more shots.
An idiot on the Chav board though one of our goals was offside,hope he goes to get some glasses today
