« on: October 16, 2021, 11:35:00 am »
Watford vs LIVERPOOL FC - Vicarage Road 12:30pm Saturday 16th October 2021 live on BT Sports
Saturdays Officials courtesy of 4pool
Referee: Jonathan Moss.
Assistants: Marc Perry, Timothy Wood.
Fourth official: Tony Harrington.
VAR: Stuart Attwell.
Assistant VAR: Darren Cann.
Well thank fuck the international breaks almost done and we can finally look forward to some proper football again. And as we’re annoyingly first up at 12:30 on Saturday, we can hopefully use our annoyance and capitalise by getting a head start on the rest.
So to Vicarage Road we go. My first ever experience of watching Liverpool live was on New Years Day 1985 at Vicarage Road, it ended 1-1 with a late equaliser from, well Ian Rush, obviously! Also thanks to my grandad being based in North West London at the time we saw the same fixture in January 1986 which resulted in a far more enjoyable 3-2 victory with goals from Rush and a double from Paul Walsh.
Hopefully the pitch will be a little more playable on Saturday.
Anyway in more recent times the games that stand out in my mind aren’t necessarily the good ones. When I tried to think of particular games for this I recalled the match with Bogdan in goal which was early in Klopp’s time and wasn’t good at all. Then of course there was Salah’s first game where we somehow contrived to draw 3-3 allowing them an equaliser with virtually the last kick.
And of course last time we played there in the season we finally won 19 they broke our unbeaten run with a 3-0 victory not long before Covid really took hold.
Not sure why those games stand out because on the whole we have a decent record there. Aside from the games mentioned above there were a couple of defeats in the eighties and the famous 1970 FA Cup loss that was the beginning of the end for a number of Shankly’s first great Liverpool team. We’ve won every other visit there outside of that new years day game in 1985 and an FA Cup game in 1967 (we won the replay).
In terms of this season after winning at home on the opening day they lost three in a row in the league before winning at Norwich, since then they’ve gone out of the League Cup at home and managed a draw at home to Newcastle before losing to Leeds 1-0 in their last game. All of which leaves them 15th in league, so in some ways you could consider not the worst start for them as I’d imagine they’ll be happy just to avoid relegation. Despite that the Watford board have already replaced the manager, and will be hoping Claudio Ranieri is more Leicester less Fulham form wise.
Troy Deeney has now departed so he won’t be sniffing round Virgil at least. Their top scorer is unsurprisingly the regularly linked with us Ismaila Sarr and their other most likely danger seems to come from the other wing in Emmanuel Bonaventure who’s also managed to get a couple so far. They seem to line up in a 4-5-1 type formation with two holding midfielders behind Bonaventure, Tufan & Sarr with Joshua King up front. However it sounds as though King may be out for this game.
So onto us.
On the whole it’s been a really positive start, although consecutive draws before the break was a little frustrating, but we’ll never stop enjoying Mo’s last goal as long as we live. What a player, one of the very best to have worn the liver bird on his chest.
It sounds as though Jota & Trent will be available but Thiago is still out, and given they won’t be back until Friday Fabinho & Alisson are considered unlikely. While I expect Fabinho not to play I do wonder if Alisson will – but we’ll likely have to wait until Saturday morning to find out. As things stand I think we have the majority of the squad available and it just depends how the boss wants to play it with two massive games to follow.
I’ll leave it to others to speculate on how we may line up, but we certainly should be taking the 3 points here despite the difficulties regarding the kick off time and international break.
COME ON RED MEN!
PS Massive thanks to Hazell for the help in finally being able to embed the video, I'm now an expert and can help others with this...NOT!
Edit: may have spoken too soon, the video looked to work on my PC but can’t see it on my phone
I think it may be due to Safari not supporting flash but it appears others can view but if you can’t you’re not alone!
« Last Edit: October 16, 2021, 02:17:33 pm by TepidT2O »
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