Newcastle Undone

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth a million. So I won't spend too many trying to describe the major incidents of the match against Newcastle when you can watch them instead:



Video courtesy of Youtube.

It was great to see Kuyt get off the mark, and we'll gloss over the small matter of the Newcastle defender getting the last touch on the ball, as Kuyt's initial touch had ensured it was goalbound anyway. The Dutchman has already proved popular with the Anfield faithful for his workrate and attitude, and now he's in the scoring my bet is that he'll go from strength to strength.

Alonso has hit efforts from his own half with either foot within the space of nine months, and must now hold the world record for the most distance travelled by the ball in two consecutive club goals (his last effort being the left-footed strike against Luton from his own half).

Most of all though, it's great to see the team getting a scrappy three points. We didn't play well: we regularly squandered possession and looked far too nervous. But after a run of bad form, it was just what the doctor ordered, and with more of our team looking like they're returning to form and fitness it's a good time to face two more home ties against Tottenham and Galatasaray.

If we can get a run of form going, hopefully it will snowball into the kind of form we saw in two great runs last season. If that happens then our season will have started a week or two earlier than last term. Progress of a kind.

If we can avoid the mini-dip we suffered after new year as well then we will undoubtedly be closer to the title than last season. Whether that will be enough remains to be seen, but looking at our last seven fixtures compared to Chelsea, there is still a slim hope ...

The End of the World As We Know It?

Much has been said of Liverpool's league season being over, but when all of the three sides mooted as title challengers have lost one game, with Liverpool only having lost two, it seems a silly statement to be making after just four league games have been registered, in a season where we have brought in six new players after a nearly twelve month run of games for some of our players who featured in the world cup over the summer.

As far as yesterday's game goes, and it's hard to be definitive with Chelsea playing forty minutes with just ten men, it was our best performance in the league against Chelsea in the Benitez reign. Still something was missing, and we seemed to lack drive and confidence. Chelsea were willing to run at us with the ball and create far more movement, whilst we seemed to want an extra few seconds on the ball during our attacks, and often looked bereft of ideas with Chelsea getting nine or ten men behind the ball after they went one up through a Drogba wonder goal.

Our finishing still appears to be suffering from the same malaise as in previous seasons, but with two new forwards trying to gel into the team this was perhaps to be expected at this stage. Still, on another day Gerrard might have taken another touch or sidefooted his best opportunity past the keeper, instead of blasting it straight at him, Kuyt's sizzler might have crept in under the bar, Crouch's header might have been two foot either side of the keeper, we may have been handed a penalty for Lampard's shove on Gerrard in the box, and we would not have such hysteria in the press or from Liverpool fans.

To the same extent that we handed Chelsea six points on Sunday, we could take those six back at Anfield on the return fixture. With Man Utd dropping points to a struggling Arsenal, perhaps their run has also been overhyped against weak sides this season.

I don't see anyone tipping Pompey for the title, so perhaps we should take it like we did in the old days pre-Sky, and wait until ten games have passed before pronouncing judgement on the season.

We have now played two of our hardest away fixtures, and though the results have not been encouraging, there is still time for this side to click and go on another unbeaten run like the two last season, especially with two notionally easier home games coming up where we can hopefully pick up maximum points and make our league position look more realistic.

p.s. for fair comparison, here's my reaction immediately after the match on RAWK, which has been tempered somewhat since through time and alcohol:

When Drogba scored, my reaction after the initial disappointment was "at least we'll have to have a go at them now". When Ballack was sent off, I thought "ok, so now we can really attack them". Ten minutes later I was still waiting for it to happen. We had our chances, and on another day we might have scored. But I never really felt that we attacked them with urgency.

That's what has disappointed most. We didn't really unsettle them with pace and movement for me, even when we went one man up. I think it's probably the best performance we've seen at Stamford Bridge in the last few seasons, and perhaps our best performance this season, but it was still some way short. People will say our finishing let us down, but I thought it was our drive. Every time they got the ball they ran right at us and moved it, whereas I felt we always paused for a second or two when we regained possession.

Gutted after that because I felt we had a real chance to take at least a point. Time for a drink.

YNWA

This is an absolutely outstanding montage. A must watch:



Youtube

Results And Expectations

I haven't trusted myself before to write about the Derby result and I still don't, so I won't.

Last night's Champions League fixture away against PSV was a source of some concern. PSV have an excellent home record in European competition. Koeman fancied himself to get a result for them after guiding Benfica past Liverpool 3-0 on aggregate last season, and to top it all Rafa started the game with a largely second string outfit.

I was pleased in a way to see him so obviously focussing on the league this season, with a huge away game at Stamford Bridge coming up which could shape our season's expectations. But to the extent that you're only as good as your last game, there was a worry that we could turn in another poor result and leave ourselves short of confidence for an important fixture.

An away point then, in possibly our toughest tie of the group, represented a good, if not an outstanding result. If you can win your home games in Europe and draw your away games, you're going to the final. We likely won't manage that feat this season, and frankly I would rather improve our league performance anyway, but it's a good start to a campaign which has value in terms of a good run bringing in some cash to improve the squad in January or next summer.

A clean sheet was vital going into next weekend's game, and another outstanding performance from Agger, along with the makings of a partnership between Kuyt and Bellamy stand us in good stead, as well as the fact that our first team for the Chelsea fixture will have had a longer rest than our opponents.

Seasons are rarely made or broken in the first few fixtures, but with the Reds misfiring in our opening games, we need a good result on Sunday to galvanise our form.

I'm not going to try too hard to predict the exact lineup, except to say that the fittest players should probably start. Happily these will also likely be our better players, and if we can start to click against a side we've already had a decent result against this season, we might be able to put them on the back foot and sneak it.

A draw would be an acceptable result at this stage, but obviously a win would turn our slow start on it's head and could fire us on a charge up the table. Let's hope Benitez and the lads are up for showing the world what they're made of and re-igniting our pre-season title-challenging hopes.

We Love Yer Baldy Head

Youtube.

A Review of The Red Review

Statistics in football are often vilified by fans without much forethought. Most of us are not trained statisticians, and so it's difficult to tell when the stats are being manipulated to deceive us. Politicians misuse statistics in this way regularly. Scientists on the payroll of various international business conglomerates massage the evidence to earn a quick buck. The latest fad diet or quack cure is pushed on us with so-called evidence that would never stand up to peer-review or thorough analysis. Yet no modern football manager would dare ignore the backing the figures can give him when collated, analysed and presented properly.

Benitez in particular is a proper statto. He doesn't just watch videos of all his opponents, he has them analysed by a computer program which puts all the information at his fingertips. Stories abound of him being able to look at a team photo of his Real Madrid youth squad of years ago and unerringly recite the height of each player, of converting Sissoko to a midfielder after realising he ran half again as far during a match as most midfielders, when trying him in the position whilst forced through injury during a friendly. Of being able to call the numbers for opposition teams and build a strategy around their weaknesses. He is a master of the detail, and this is one of the ways in which he works so hard to achieve success.

Statistics aren't the be all and end all of football analysis. We can watch a game or a number of games, and come to similar conclusions on a lot less evidence. That's one of the marvels of the human brain: it's expert at taking shortcuts to reach effective conclusions. And yet it makes mistakes. If used properly, statistics can be a powerful evidentiary weapon to back up those conclusions, and can also pull some surprising facts out of the bag which we may not otherwise have spotted.

Oliver Anderson, a statistician by profession, but also a trained football coach and an ardent Liverpool fan, has been collecting statistics on our beloved Reds for years. Paul Tomkins, who many of us know well from RAWK and other Liverpool websites, is a football writer employed by the club after spending long years writing in-depth, insightful articles on the team. His previous two books have been well received by both Liverpudlians and the neutral, also receiving favourable reviews in the national press.

The combination of Paul’s careful, yet incisive style and Oliver's outstanding analysis (often using completely new techniques to bring out the numbers in a way which simplistic Opta and Actim stats and sparse "games played, goals scored" stats cannot) combine to give an irresistible account of the Reds last two seasons under Benitez.

Each area of the team, each individual, all the combinations of partnerships used, are analysed exhaustively to present a clear picture of where we were, where we are, how we've improved, and where we have not, over the last season under Rafa.

This is not a book which simply presents dry, cold numbers in tabular form, although those numbers are there to be pored over for the statto. The evidence is clearly analysed and presented in an accessible way which should allow even the most uninterested mathematicians amongst us to see what the trends reveal and what the future might hold. I have a fair amount of statistical training, and I was delighted to find that the evidence is presented in a clear, unbiased fashion, which allows the reader to follow the conclusions of the authors without feeling they are being led down the garden path.

This book is a godsend for those of us who like to understand the state of the team and the performance of our favourite, or least favourite players. All the evidence is undeniably given to back up our reasoning and not get lost in the hurly burly of emotive reasoning.

What is Gerrard's best position on the pitch? Did Alonso have a better or worse season last year? Who is our most productive goal-scorer? Can Finnan really be described as a complete fullback? What is our best midfield pairing? Just how many of Garcia's lost passes contributed to opposition goals? How do we compare to our rivals at the top of the table in every area of the pitch, and how do we need to improve to win the title?

These questions are debated regularly on Red forums or in the pub, but without the evidence to back our arguments up, the discussions often end up going round in circles, or descending into personal insults and shaken heads.

The Red Review is the kind of book you will read once and then dip into throughout the season as you look for the real facts behind your case for the defence. Or the attack. Or the midfield. It's a book which breaks the usual genre of football writing, where we are often subjected to lazy journalism and little better than well-written personal prejudice couched as expert knowledge. It should make a number of journalists and pundits (you know the suspects) sit and think about how expert their writing or TV journalism really is. But I doubt it will, given their entrenched bias.

Still, it’s a breath of fresh air in that nothing is stated as a fact without the evidence to back it up. When the evidence is thin, or could be skewed by unusual circumstances, the writers take pains to point it out and explain why the figures could be misleading. The book produces inescapable conclusions and will be a great resource to all those fanatical fans who aren't content simply to go with the herd of opinion.

Available exclusively from www.paultomkins.com, priced £11.99. The Red Review will not be released in shops and online stores until 1st November.

The Big One

Derby day on Saturday, and already the adrenalin is kicking in. I don't have much time for those who count games against Manchester United and even Chelsea (who?) above these.

The argument often goes that Everton can't be our rivals because rivals would have to be competing with us on level, or near level terms. These people miss the point, wallowing in their semantics: in footballing terms, Everton are our enemies.

There's nothing like a derby. Every pass, every kick, every crunching tackle draws a reaction from the crowd. This is more than winning trophies, for those ninety minutes. For Merseyside Reds, this is bragging rights, not turning up for work on Monday, or turning up to wonder how you're going to gloat when the other side have all stayed at home.

Anyone who knows me knows I'm not based on Merseyside, but these are still the ones I look out for first on the fixture list. The passion is addictive.

Everton look to be playing well coming into this one whilst we have perhaps struggled to click into our best form, but the form book is the first thing to go out of the window in the derby. Shortly followed by decorum, sanity, any sense of reality, and the cat if we lose.

On paper, we will be at a slight disadvantage, having more players involved in the international "break", but we have a strong squad and I trust Rafa will pick a team which he thinks can do the job in hand. He likes to pick the locals for these, so expect Warnock, Gerrard and Fowler to feature, as well as Carra if fit.

The key to winning these games will be to compete at 110% in every position on the pitch. If our players can get themselves up for this as much as the fans, our quality should tell. No chance of a clean sheet in these, and expect a flurry of yellow cards to come out, accompanied by at least one red.

I'll be thinking about nothing else but this game all week. The palms are already sweating in anticipation. Can't wait!