Newcastle 3 Liverpool 1
Ok, so that’s another away defeat in the league, against a team that we really should have beaten, but for really bad defending on a few occasions each of them leading to a goal scoring opportunity for the other team. On both occasions Martin Skrtel was culpable in at least two of the goals. He really had a shocking game in the second half, missing tackles and giving the ball away on several occasions.
Unfortunately each time the opposite team scored rather than squandering their chances as we all hoped they would. We went behind in the first half to a rather soft goal from a free kick which Joey Barton took, Andy Carroll headed down without so much as a by or leave and Kevin Nolan hit home giving Newcastle the lead totally against the run of play. We had a couple of good chances in the first half but more often than not gave the ball away cheaply from passes that should have reached one of our team members rather than a member of the opposing team.
We started the second half well and were soon level with a good goal by Dirk Kuyt who went straight through the Newcastle defense virtually unchallenged and scored a well taken goal which was less than we deserved as far as I was concerned at that moment. We should have gone 2-1 up soon after when Torres had a really good chance and it could have been 3:1 after Maxi had a great attempt as well.
For quite a while in the second half we were much better than Newcastle creating lots of chances and having the majority of the possession but we didn’t make the chances count, which would have had a major impact on the final score. Newcastle made a substitute halfway through the second half and it seem to galvanise them and they started playing out of their skin and soon had their noses in front, after some bad defending on our part (again). Then near the end of the match Andy Carroll received the ball about 20 yards out and there was no defenders anyway near him, so he had a go, and he hit the back of the net and it was game over.
I don’t think that Newcastle were a great deal better than us in this game but they took their chances when we didn’t, and they didn’t make as many defensive errors as we did. That was what lost us the game in the end, sloppy defending, and we need to get it sorted out as other teams will rip us apart if we carry on defending like that. It was the same story as the Stoke game and the Tottenham game, our defending let us down and that is our major problem at the moment.