It's pretty clear that we've still got many of the problems of last season, and they're not going to go away overnight. Even during the first half and start of the second leading up to the penalty when we were generally keeping the ball well, I thought with a few exceptions our off the ball movement in the final third was poor. We only rarely gave ourselves the opportunity to play incisive football; far too often, the man on the ball only had one or two options, and we ended up recycling the ball ad infinitum. Whenever we had a chance to break and catch WBA in transition, our passing was laboured and we constantly gave them the chance to regroup and defend en masse behind the ball. Only Suarez and Allen showed any urgency, and they were our two best performers on the day (despite Luis' profligacy in front of goal). I think what the game showed is that the new system is going to take a while to bed in, and we need to be patient. We got a taste of what it can be like against Gomel at Anfield, albeit against sub-par opposition; the trouble is with the unfamiliarity of it, all it takes is for a few vital cogs to stop working properly and the domino effect starts; suddenly we look all over the place.
The full-backs are key players in this system and the difference between this game and Gomel was a massive gulf - Glen put in a fantastic performance last week, this week on the left he was average; even if you point out he's played well there in the past, he's unarguably better on the right. Kelly contributed nothing going forward and that coupled with Downing doing a textbook disappearing act meant we had absolutely no threat down our right flank. Even when our fullbacks did push forward, most of the time what happened was a quick look up, seeing no movement ahead of them and sending the ball back to our centre-backs. You don't need both fullbacks to be playing like a young Roberto Carlos every game, but you do need them to provide an outlet ball and stretch the play, especially if you're playing a 4-3-3 like ours where both Borini and Downing prefer to tuck in and cut inside. We've all seen games in which Glen has dominated the right flank by himself, and it always adds an extra dimension to our attacking play.
Moving onto our forward line, Borini worked hard on his debut, but got no joy out of their defence wherever he popped up; from what I've seen anyway, he's more someone who will get on the end of moves rather than start them or engineer openings. He's a workhorse, and that's not meant in a derogatory sense. Just look at how much Dirk Kuyt contributed to our cause during his time here, and Borini has every chance of becoming an important player for us; he's already got Dirk beat for pace and technical ability. It was Downing on the other flank we needed a performance from, and as noted already, Downing on the other side was completely abject; picked the safe option every time, looked scared to take on his man and generally just completely bottled it. If you've got two or more players with genuine creativity and unpredictability on the ball, that scares opposition defences and can lead to mistakes; if you've only got one player capable of making things happen on the ball, then it's easy to shut down the whole team if you can stop that man.
This meant that all the responsibility of actually making things happen fell squarely on the shoulders of Luis Suarez, and while he made a good fist of it with some great dribbling, there's only so much one man can do if his supporting cast is average. Luis was literally carrying our attack at times (he did last season as well) and I shudder to think what we'll look like if he picks up a longish spell on the sidelines through injury. I do think this is a contributing factor to his poor finishing in front of goal; anyone who's played football at any level will tell you it doesn't help when there's so much pressure heaped on you to make things happen and I'm convinced it's a contributing factor to his poor finishing. The stattos will tell you he's never had the best conversion rate but even taking that into consideration you'd have to look at last season as a freakish anomaly; Luis has shown he's capable of scoring goals both for Ajax and for Uruguay. It's no coincidence that our first real coherent, bright performance under the new regime came with his return to the team. Of course it didn't help that he got no protection at all from Dowd despite Olsson and Ridgewell manhandling him all game, and I can see that being a recurring theme throughout the season.
This in turn limited us in the middle of the park; Allen was the one real positive to come out of the game for me, he passed the ball well and carried it forward at times to good effect, but was eventually thwarted once again by our lack of intelligent movement in forward positions. Lucas showed his positioning is as good as ever but it will take time for him to get back to the level he was at before his injury; once he gets back into the swing of things I think he'll push on to even greater heights in the new system. Gerrard had a pretty forgettable game, but our total non-performance in wide positions meant it was easy for West Brom to just pack the middle and I thought Jakub and Mulumbu both had excellent games, imposing themselves physically on our midfield. Having said that any time we by-passed them in midfield, once again the lack of movement meant that they could get back and re-position themselves.
Of course, all of the above pertains to the portion of the match prior to the sending off, and the subsequent 2nd penalty; afterwards the game was finished as a competitive spectacle. It was a little disappointing to see how our players heads dropped and we just gave up, but it's also understandable. The only real observation of note to make is that Carragher is neither a fit to the system that Rodgers is trying to implement, nor is he good enough at this level anymore. It feels somewhat disloyal to be talking about a club legend in such terms, but really Coates should be way ahead of him. There were still some positives to take from the first half performance and even at 1-0 down, I thought we could get back into the game and even looked to be on the ascendancy until the sending off. Having said that, I never felt we were in control of the game; while we had more of the ball, West Brom still looked dangerous on the counter and the game could have swung either way even during our brighter spells. As it happens, it went theirs with a wonder goal just before half-time and then the subsequent second half madness. We haven't controlled games with regularity since 08/09 under Rafa with the Alonso/Mascherano axis in midfield, and that is something we will have to learn to do again. I think we're going to have to put up with a lot of inconsistency in the short and medium term; in some games we'll click and look fantastic, but there will be other games like this one and even worse (hopefully not too many), where subtle changes will affect our play disproportionately. The key thing to remember here is that this was our first league game under a young, talented manager who I believe is good enough to identify and rectify the problems that have taken root in the team over the last few seasons of turmoil. Take this as a reality check rather than a reason to panic, and lets move onwards and upwards to the next game.
