Terrace Talk

Disclaimer: UTD fans will have to forgive me for using “we” and “our” in reference to Liverpool - hence all my posts are in the “away from home” section. Cheers - T.
When asked this week whether he thought Liverpool are serious title contenders this year, one of Rafa’s biggest critics during the period when rotation headlines were ubiquitous responded :
“Contenders-most definitely and thats the very least I’d expect. Will We Win It-not sure probably not this season still need to strengthen in a few positions namely left full, right midfield and upfront.
However since my original post where I stated we will never win the league under Benitez,there has been a significant improvement in the teams performances especially going forward and also an improvement in tactics and team selection though I still feel we could use the ball better at times and pass it more….
Also I feel in a way our injuries have helped us more than hindered us,I’m not saying we don’t miss Alonso, Agger, etc. but due to injuries we have been forced to pick a more settled team with less changes which in turn has led to more familiarity among players which has added to fluidity and attacking play theres a better sense of cohesion among the players because they are getting used to playing together!!!
We are a better team without the likes of Sissoko, Pennant and Voronin playing. “

This sounded distinctly like an attempt to exit from the back door. (Let’s ignore the fact that Voronin played a key role in our 8-0 demolition of Besiktas and has featured regularly in our last 8 matches unbeaten with 7 wins). Yes, our form has improved since this guy’s statement that Liverpool wouldn’t win under Rafa - but that’s because he made a major doomsday prediction when our form wobbled a bit and set himself up for this by getting carried away with the pessimism and negativity after a home draw or two.
As far as the more settled squad - I can understand why people would think our squad is more settled (given the absence of squad rotation headlines when we are winning - as I predicted would happen when the rotation bashing was the fashion, during our lull in form). But they’d be mistaken, since the media tend to talk about rotation only when we’re losing.

In reality, Rafa has “rotated” 41 times since our last defeat (against Besiktas) - thats 41 changes in 9 matches. That’s an average of about 4.6 rotations per match, no fewer than he did before (in fact, above his average for the last 2 seasons). In fact he made 5 changes from the team that drew 0-0 with Blackburn, and had we not thumped Besiktas 8-0, we’d have seen headlines about squad rotation. He then made no changes to this team against Fulham, and there was all sorts of amazement that the tinker-man extraordinare had kept the same line-up. 6 changes were made to the side to face Newcastle, and had we not won 3-0 (and perhaps should have won 6-0 if Torres had taken his hat-trick of clear chances) again we’d have seen Alan Hansen and the other rotation pundits going on about Rafa’s rotation. 5 changes followed that match as we hosted Porto, and again, you can imagine the headlines had we not won 4-1. 4 more changes were made this past weekend, and our 4-0 win again kept the critics of squad rotation silent. So I’m afraid the injuries haven’t done anything to stop Rafa from rotating. In fact, Agger was almost never rotated before his injury, and Xabi was rotated no more or less than Mascherano, Momo and Lucas have been since his injury (in fact Lucas didn’t get many matches at all prior to Xabi’s injury and the rotation was between the other 3, while now with Xabi injured, Lucas is being rotated in and out in Xabi’s place). Our strikers are still being rotated as much as they were when the anti-rotation headlines were a fixture on the back-pages.
So our improvement has nothing to do with a more settled side. It is simply the big players starting to pull their weight (most notably Steven Gerrard), the team finally converting chances into goals, and a general improvement in attitude and confidence.
If you believe the scaremongers, you would have thought zonal marking was a problem in the past, and then suddenly you would forget about it once the team adapted to it and started defending well (best defensive record in the premiership). Similarly, if you believed the nonsense the lazy journos were printing about squad rotation, you could also have made similarly (in)famous statements about Liverpool never winning under a rotation-obsessed Rafa. Now that we are putting together good results - squad rotation still withstanding - and the lazy journos have conveniently shut-up about squad rotation, it seems the Rafa-rotation-critics are attempting to back-track and find the back-door.
The moral of the story? Lazy journalists and knee-jerkers are half-brothers. When results don’t go our way, they all start shouting “the sky is falling” and looking for simple, short answers to our problems - be it zonal marking or squad rotation. When results go in our favour, the doomsday headlines disappear, and people quickly forget that zonal marking is not the way to defend set-pieces (after all, empty spaces don’t score goals - men do! So why are they marking empty space??) and that you can’t win with squad rotation (how are players going to learn to play with each other? - never mind the fact that they train together 6 days a week!).