I am disappointed with the result, but for the first time in a long long period of time, I'm very happy with the performance. Finally, we looked like Liverpool again. And there were tons of positives to be taken from the King's first game in charge.
+The 4-5-1 (or whatever you want to call it) just works so much better than the 4-4-2. Especially, with the players we have. It give Steven Gerrard the chance to do his thing upfront, but it also gives us the option of shuffling things around a bit. Kuyt and Maxi swapping (would work in 4-4-2 as well), but also Raul, Lucas and Gerrard mixing it up with Raul going behind the striker and Gerrard dropping deeper. It just gives us another dimension and a bit of unpredictability.
+Our young players like Shelvey or Kelly are really doing a good job. No need for Shelvey to be taking that long freekick, but it's nice to see that he has the confidence to be trying stuff like that. I thought it was a bad idea as we really needed to keep possession and it was something we didn't do in the last 20 minutes. However, judging from some of our attacks, I'm not sure something would have come off that freekick had it been taken in a more conventional way.
Kelly got done by Giggs (?) in the second half and looked really naive, but all in all it was another very good performance from a very young player. He also has the benefit of being a local lad, which (and I don't like saying it) will give him a lot more leeway with some of the supporters than the likes of Insua or Lucas ever had.
+Kenny made the right subs in my view. It was worth a try giving Babel a chance to change the game with Maxi not doing much in the second half. Unfortunately, Babel (except for the shot right after coming on) did very little. I'm still not sure about him and his future at Liverpool. Raul didn't look fully fit and Shelvey certainly justified the substitution. He did well. Taking off Torres for N'Gog was also a good decision even though David had little impact on our attacking game. However, Nando didn't do very much during the time he spent on the pitch. I really hope that he'll be back to being his old self once we start playing football again. Today was a good start in that respect and I'm sure Kenny will look to build on that.
+We played football again and really tried to win the game not giving the Mancs a lot of chances to dominate. Almost everything in the game went against us right from the start, but the players still kept on going. We dominated for large periods and I think we would have deserved a draw. The Mancs had a couple of good chances (mainly after that corner or whatever that was, when Reina made those 4 or 5 saves in a row), but all in all they didn't really look that threatening considering they were 1-0 up and we were a player down.
One thing that really pisses me off is Howard Webb. You can argue all day about whether Agger touched Berbatov or whether Gerrard was trying to play the ball. It doesn't matter. What matters to me is that I'm 120 percent sure that if you switched the players this game would have ended 0-0 with 11v11 on the pitch. No way, would Webb have given that peno after 30 seconds if Nando had gone down like that. No way, would Webb have sent off someone like Ryan Giggs or Paul Scholes for a challenge like that. I'm not sure if he's just incompetent, a bottler or if he actually dislikes us, but thinking of how many times he has fucked us over I'm not sure I can rule out the latter. How he keeps on getting those high-profile games is baffling and the FA really need to think about who they're making their top-ref. Because Webb has fucked up too many times (not only when we've been involved), to be considered a top-ref.
All in all, I'm happy with today's display, even though we have to improve in terms of going forward. We did well at times, but in the last 20 minutes we just didn't get going. We didn't keep the ball and when we managed to go forward we were a bit toothless. However, I'm also quite sure that this will improve in the next couple of weeks.
