South-East London Bald Eagle Pulis vs. Your 2013-14 Premier League Champions

Glad to see the section leaders in Sepi, Stevie and Red provide a fresh light to the abomination that was yesterday.

Brendan Rodgers can learn from Jorge Jesus, who in 3 different stages was unfortunate by some last gasp instances and (literally) brought to his knees. Recovery from that inertia is devastatingly difficult not only for a manager yet to the squad who collectively have faced such incident together.

There is absolutely no excuse for yesterday, it was a chokejob and poor attitude plain and simple.

Things we learned are:

-Skrtel has his severe limits and while useful, must be complimented with a better CB who can actually read the game.

-Skrtel-Sakho is our worst partnership considering we have only 1 clean sheet between 18 games and this particular partnership only seems to focus on physical challenges and box presence yet no anticipation or awareness. Our CBs combinations bar Skrtel-Agger do not compliment each other.

-Johnson is shit. End of. Sell him.

-Lucas in his poor form is severely limited as a player and does not seem to be taking his role seriously outside his smiles and composure. I yearn for the old Lucas back who will actually screen the defence and help Gerrard rather than task him in a dual-sided role. Lucas needs to step it up or be benched.

-Allen goal aside is very much improving.

I don't get why people make it out as this was the moment we lost the league, in all honesty a draw against palace means city might get all excited and know the league is theirs, meaning there might be more chance of them slipping up imo.

Anyways the last 2 weeks have been the worst weeks football wise for me in a while, Liverpool losing to Chelsea, followed by my local WSW team losing in the GF(2nd time in a row) after being in the lead at the 86th minute and now this. FML.

Arquitescu wrote:
-Lucas in his poor form is severely limited as a player and does not seem to be taking his role seriously outside his smiles and composure. I yearn for the old Lucas back who will actually screen the defence and help Gerrard rather than task him in a dual-sided role. Lucas needs to step it up or be benched.

I would add that Rodgers should be blamed a little, too. It's been obvious from minute one for three straight games now that Lucas in that advanced CM role isn't working out. I think we would have been better off tilting the midfield round so that it would have been 2 - 1 instead of 1 - 2, with Lucas and Gerrard both playing deep in a pivot, OR Lucas being the sole holding midfielder with Gerrard temporarily moved forward. On top of that, Rodgers probably should have simply just verbally whipped Lucas to work harder when we had the ball, because by far his biggest problem in that advanced CM role is that he simple doesn't run at all, doesn't make himself available and doesn't come into situations with enough pace to give him time to turn and play forward, rather just jogs to a pass, is already closed down when receiving it and passes backwards.

Adit wrote:

Art Morte wrote:I'm happy with our CBs, I mean, what guarantee would we have that a new CB would perform better than Skrtel, Sakho and Agger? We just last summer spent £17m on a new CB.

Johnson, he at least needs serious competition for his place. Enrique, depends what his form will be (and is he actually going to be finally fit to play).

 Poor logic there art. There is no thing as guarantee in transfers unless the player is world class . What guarantee we had when we signed Varane? turned out to be by far our best CB. When AC milan signed Silva from Brazil? ...nothing.

Fact is your current CB's and fullbacks are not good enough for Liverpool's title aspirations. It is there to see. Skertel despite his scoring is very much error prone. Glen Johnson cant defend , Agger has declined and Sakho is still very very raw atm.. You does need better defenders.

Couple of defenders and one midfielder, Liverpool are set for next season.

There is more guarantee that signing a full-back, a CM and one or two attacking players for competition & depth is going to improve our team than signing a CB will. If you asked a lot of neutrals, they would put Skrtel in the top-5 CBs of the Premiership this season and not only because of his goals. If you asked Liverpool fans, a good number of them would say he has been one of our best players this season (yeah, I'm in that camp). In-form Agger doesn't need replacing and Sakho, due to the investment we put into him and due to the potential he has, needs to be playing, too.

Splashing the cash on a world-class center-back would be perfectionism that we, in my opinion, cannot afford right now since there are other areas in the squad that need more strengthening.

Just,