KopTalk.com Forums Football Liverpool FC Forum Why do we.....

Agree with you mate that pre-season he was our best player, problem is he couldn't settle in England so think he wants to stay in Italy judging by what has been said which is why he was loaned to AC Milan. It wasn't performance based but personal.

agreed

If he is willing to play for us again then I would love him to return instead of making his move to Milan. We need a player of his quality and these players don't come cheap.

Time and again Dalglish has stuck with 4-5-1 and this year it has been largely unsuccessful outside the win against Norwich. the difference between the Norwich game and the FA Cup final was that Gerrard reverted to playing DM against a highly unadventurous Chelsea side low on gas after all their games. The result? I think Suarez touched the ball fewer than 5 times in the first half. A formation is just that - a formation. How you use those players is called tactics.

I can understand the desire to keep the same team that beat Norwich because we dominated the game, but the decision to pull Gerrard back was stupidity. How many games have we won using 4-5-1 when he played but did not do so as a number 10? Not very many, bordering on zero, in fact. So once again we pick poor tactics for a critical game, and ended up losing, disallowed goal or not.

I'm really getting tired of saying it: Andy Carroll has been our best player since the turn of the year, bar none. The Carroll I saw for half an hour in the final was the Carroll I saw playing for Newcastle, and in half an hour did more than any other player in our starting XI did for the entire match. I was also notable that the disallowed goal would have been a Suarez assist - they CAN play together.

So why bench Carroll and instead play 4-3-2-1? It's like we're just not learning where our strengths are. Gerrard is an attacking midfielder - play him there or don't play him at all. Carroll and Suarez must both start. Is that really too hard to understand?

The other thing I can't figure is why Enrique and Downing (when played on the left) have no problems getting forward, but Bellamy and Johnson cannot or do not. So when Downing plays on the right we get no end product from either flank, because Enrique can't cross, and Downing can't get forward. Another simple lesson through observation that we simply ignore.

There are more such things, but it's increasingly clear that the brains trust is understocked.

excellent post mate

The whole idea with the starting line up yesterday was surely to get Gerrard to push up alongside Suarez very much like he did against Norwich. My point is that the formation wasn't the problem it was the fact that for the best part of an hour the personnel just didnt perform and as result Gerrard had to drop deeper and deeper to try and influence the game. Dalglish can put out at team and tell them to play to system but it's not his fault that Spearing (our only def midfielder) played like a bag of [oops] (as did others) or that our keeper let in another dodgy goal.

Its easy in hindsight to say we should have started with 2 up top but against a team like Chelsea I think they would have run us ragged in midfield. It happened in the first half in the semi where for the first half of the game Suarez and Carroll hardly touched the ball. Yes we played far better when he changed the system and Carroll was fantastic when he came on but who knows if he would have had that influence if he had started.

Regardless of the formation and tactics the players just didn't show up for the first hour of the cup final and that always going to be a problem if you want to win a game.

Mate, people get what your saying. But they just don't agree. We've used the same formation most of the season and played like crap, so why continue using it? Is that the players fault or is it the managers fault for choosing the formation and the players? A bit of both, at the end of the day it's insanity to try the same thing twice and expect different results.

It isn't hindsight, I expected this result from this formation once I saw who was playing. I bet that I'm not the only one.

Awesome, is that a moon face?

Exactly.

That's what we bought all the players for, that's the formation that's given us nearly all our wins - Carroll was finally on the losing side in a game he started in midweek, having been unbeaten in 10 or 11 previously, and mainly because the rest of the side didn't show up. So what do we do? Start BOTH of the midweek games worst performers (Spearing and Henderson) and leave out our best player (Carroll).

You couldn't make this up.