This was another poor performance, and once again the finger of blame should be pointing squarely at the manager. Some will blame the players, I don't. I could go on and on about what went wrong tonight, but I'd only be repeating much of the same things I wrote after Bolton and Villa. Besides, the terrible, tragic events in America today put our 'problems' into perspective. It just doesn't seem right to be worrying about only managing a draw with Boavista when something as monumentally horrific as the deaths of tens of thousand innocent people has just happened, and for that reason I'm not really going to dwell on tonight's inadequacies.
In a nutshell, Houllier once again fielded four central midfield players, had Gary Mac playing as a left winger and found no place in the side for Jari. He compounded those errors by leaving Jari, as well as Redknapp and Fowler kicking their heels on the sidelines as the players plodded away with no inspiration or imagination once again.
Still, at least we managed to come back and get a draw out of this, thanks once again to the brilliance of Owen. The boy received one decent pass all night, and scored from it. If Michael played for a Barca or Real Madrid, just how many goals would the lad score? Let's hope we never find out, although if he did choose not to renew his contract could anyone seriously blame him?
I said after the Villa game that Jari may as well get his agent on the case in finding him a new club, and this was merely further evidence of that. No spark, no creativity, yet still no Jari. Why? If he's injured, he shouldn't be on the bench, so we must presume that he's fit. We deserve to know why he is not deemed good enough, as I have yet to meet a fan that doesn't think Jari should be playing. It seems that Houllier is the only one that thinks that, but sadly he's the only one that actually counts, and Jari must be really pissed off at the moment.
This was better than the Villa game at least, but it was still nowhere near good enough, although the fact that Houllier left Jari, Fowler and Redknapp on the bench suggests that he was actually happy with the performance. God help us if that is the case.
I'm sure anyone who has read my reports in the last few weeks will have gathered that I'm not exactly happy with Gerard's performance of late. I'm not the only one though. I don't expect us to win every game, but I do expect us to look as though we want to win, and I also expect a certain level of entertainment. At present we have a manager who insists on picking players in the wrong positions, and seems to be happy to watch piss poor boring performances. He points to the amount of goals scored last season, but despite those statistics, we are rarely treated to free flowing, attacking football.
We are almost totally reliant on Michael Owen to score goals for us, and the only other way we look like scoring is from set pieces of long range shots. Where is the team play and attractive football? None existant at the moment. Before everyone gets on my case, I'm not saying that Houllier should go, what I am saying is that I wish he'd stop being so pig-headed and admit that maybe, just maybe, his style of football is not working and that he can be big enough to change his outlook. Will that happen? Quite simply, it has to, because we can't carry on in this manner.
On the plus side, at least Stevie G was back in the centre, and he was our best player on the night, just edging out Owen. Heskey was average, Hamann did little, Murphy was...well Murphy, Gary Mac proved that he is no left winger (not that anyone thought he was) and even Sami looked dodgy at times. Greg did okay, and Dudek looked pretty good, but this is the latest in a string of games which are best forgotten. In fact, the most lasting memory of this game will be the ludicrous amount of playacting by the visitors. I thought Porto were bad last year, but this lot really took the piss.
TEAM: Jerzy Dudek; Jamie Carragher, Sami Hyypia, Stephane Henchoz, Gregory Vignal; Danny Murphy (John Arne Riise), Dietmar Hamann, Steven Gerrard, Gary McAllister; Emile Heskey, Michael Owen:
