Liverpool 2 Blackburn Rovers 1 Sunday 24th October
I have just finished listening to this game on radio 5 live and I have to say that it is nice to actually report that we have actually won a game in the league for the first time in what seems like an age (well since the West Brom game anyway).
It did sound like rather a scrappy game for the most part, but it was one where we played much better than we have for quite a while and actually had some good passages of play and created chances and, best of all, scored two goals one from Krygiakos and one from Torres.
This was the story of the second half however as the first half wasn’t really much to write home about. We did outplay Blackburn for large portions of the first period and should really have scored but by the end of the match it wasn’t looking great for us, as even though we were playing much better and, more importantly, playing better as a team in general that we hadn’t capitalised on our play and took the lead in the match, which would have made us feel a lot better going into the second half.
It would have been very easy for Blackburn to have nicked a goal and totally changed the perspective of the entire half, and quite possibly the end result, but they just didn’t capitalise on their chances either.
In the second half we came out and totally bossed the game and it wasn’t long before we took the lead with a goal from Krygiakos who probably could have scored twice in the game. Then it all went tits up as Blackburn went ahead and promptly equalised with a really bad goal from our point of view as it was an own goal of Jamie Carragher’s chest after Martin Skrtel had kicked the ball of the goal line and hit him. There was no way he could have stopped it from going in and it was worse that it was totally against the run of play where we were totally bossing the game and looking like the clear victors. Then some mistakes were made and we found ourselves back on level terms again which was completely typical of our season so far to be frank.
We soon took the lead again with a goal from Fernando Torres, which will hopefully kick start his very stop-start season into action. It was a great goal, very typical of Torres at his best, which we certainly have not seen so far this season.
Once we had taken the lead again we started to drop off a bit and not be quite as proactive as we had been, which was a bit of a shame, as I was then hoping that we would go forward and kill off the game once and for all with at least one more goal, but that sadly never happened.
The last ten minutes saw Blackburn almost get back into the game and they could very easily have got a point from this right near the end of the match when Martin Skrtel for some reason smashed the ball back to Pepe Reina and if it wasn’t for Reina controlling it with his chest would have ended up lodged in the back of the net and lost us two precious points. Luckily for us that we have one of the best goalkeepers in the world, as most would have struggled with this. Quite what Skrtel was thinking when he did this is unknown, but he would have had egg on his face if Reina hadn’t been able to control it.
In the end we prevailed and got the full three points from the match, which was no less than we deserved after the way we played during the match. Hopefully this is the start of things to come. Hopefully anyway…