Poor starts have almost become a tradition at LFC, how many times have we seen our teams start off poorly, losing when we should be drawing and drawing when we should be winning in the earlier stages of the season? This season, by luck or design, we have weathered our bad performances, wining in spite of them.
I suppose the contrast in the standards set by the second half of last season was primarily to blame, I knew our team was capable of more, especially in midfield. Thankfully Rodgers said it himself a couple of times, which extremely encouraging and quashed any fears of the team being rudderless. But, seriously, why weren’t we controlling the games like we did last season?
"it's always good to develop while you're winning games"
I heard this from Martinez on match of the day yesterday and thought: that's exactly what we have been doing. We were (and still are) developing; what’s more we were developing while winning, bonus. I’m not saying that every game has seen improvement, after all progress isn’t always linear, but last season there were problems, problems that were maybe harder to define in the second half of the season, neatly summed up by the fact we finished seventh, however, improvement was more than apparent yesterday and thanks to our pragmatic approach we already sit tight in second place. Looking back on Rodgers' complaints earlier in the season, particularly at Palace where reporters seemed surprised that a manger was kicking water bottles over despite his team was winning 2-0 and criticising the performance despite them winning 3-1. I loved the fact that here at Liverpool Rodgers wasn’t talking about fixing something that was broken; instead he was talking about improving a system that was already producing results. Despite these results, however, it was plain to see that we needed urgent attention in midfield.
Midfield Improvement
Blame the formation, the combination of players or whatever you want but our midfield has played poorly this season, our dynamism and pressing have been more than questionable at times. Thankfully all but one of the displays was against teams that didn't have the verve to capitalise. There was a sense of worry, albeit overly dramatic, on these boards. We were worried that our midfield was doing enough to get through games but was basically being buoyed by our attack, goalkeeper and great defending at times. In short we were worried we were going to be found out.
Yesterday, however, Liverpool looked very good in mid-field and this where I saw the greatest improvement. Lucas and Gerrard provided great stability and were good in possession. The most important factor for me though was that we pressed well and better than we have in any other game this season. Now I'm no tactical guru and I do lose track of the players in-game position but if my memory serves me correctly this was the first time this season Henderson started and stayed in CAM, where he was fantastically dynamic, he continually harried, chased, tackled and closed down the opposition and was in my opinion a big factor in our improved midfield game. The energy of Henderson assisted by livewire Suarez helped whittle our famous second half lull down to the few minutes after they scored.
So yes, yesterday was our best performance but let's not rest there, long may we keep developing while we are winning.