It's standard practice for Ferguson to wind up his opponents each year in the hope of making them crack under the additional pressure and drop points in the league. Rafa should know this only too well, and shouldn't let it bother him. So it was surprising when Rafa took the bait on Friday [youtube link] and launched into a cringeworthy diatribe on Ferguson.
To some, it may have looked like Rafa was calm and factual in his diatribe, but it wasn't really necessary. It merely demonstrated that Ferguson is really getting to him, something which the players might have picked up on also.
What's worse is that this was followed up by another woeful 0-0 performance against Stoke yesterday. Regardless of who is at fault, the front 6 players, or Rafa with his team selection, tactics, and poor substitutions. The fact remains that we've now dropped more points, also Rafa's diatribe now looks like a sign of cracking. Let's hope not for all our sakes.
24 comments:
I actually thought it was very clever of Rafa and very premeditated. Its not like he lost the plot like Keegan did.
But the match yesterday was totally shite. Lucas and Benayoun are too shite for LFC and both should have been taken off at half time. I really dont think we are good enough to win the league this year.
Forget the whole childish rant thing (before and after the game). Where Rafa really fucked up was in his tactics and substitutions against Stoke City. We should be winning games like these and everyones performance just wasnt good enough. Rafa waited too long to make any changes and then made the wrong ones. Lucas will never be good enough for Liverpool.
Too scared to risk losing to win. 2 draws against Stoke is not good enough. Benayoun must be colour blind as he never finds a red shirt.
Rafa should have been the bigger man and kept his damn mouth firmly shut. All that matters is results and winning the Premiership is the best way to answer knobs like Mr. Ferguson.
All Fergie wanted to do was anger Benitez and this was proof positive that he has accomplished just that.
Inderjit has hit the nail on the head. Forget the mind games Rafa and concentrate on picking the right players in the right positions and also on getting your tactics and substitutions right. For the first time in a long time we looked clueless and second best all across midfield. If you're going to play only one up front why choose a player who hasn't scored for two months? When Benayoun, Kuyt and Lucas are all ineffective why leave on all three and replace Riera of all people? Does anyone other than Rafa know the answers to these questions? I'm more than happy to support Rafa when he gives Ferguson a kicking but not while he's contantly getting team selection and tactics all wrong. A 10 year old child could have done better than Rafa did last night with the resources he had at his disposal. An away draw against Stoke is not itself the end of the World but it soon will be if Rafa doesn't start learning from his own mistakes instead of repeating them over and over again. The tragedy is that United and Chelsea are both crap this season so we'll never have a better opportunity to get our act together than we do now.
Paul, I agree with u 100%. I think Rafa has gone mental the last 3 days or so, and it was really was unnecessary to go out and have a dig like that. Further more the team selected, the substitions and the tactics were never going to win us the game. Lucas, Benayoun and Kuyt are no threat what so over, especially Lucas and Kuyt. Rafa's love affair with Kuyt has to stop coz he has been complete shite the last 2 months, after playing some brilliant games earlier in the year. The guy is a complete nancy when he is not in form and god knows how he is a certain starter every week. Robbie Keane is 10 times better than him, and it puzzles me that Rafa doesnt think so after spending 20 million and seeing some of the cracking goals that Robbie has scored. Lucas has played one good game against Newcastle, but other then that he is a waste of space. Too many times he commits silly fouls and passes the ball to the opposition. He is simply not up to Liverpool standard. Benayoun is ok for a substitute, but should not be starting games. Rafa has lost the plot after becoming ill. We will not win the title if the above players are playing every week. Keane and Torres must start every game if fit for the rest of the season, send Kuyt back to Holland immediately. Him and Rafa are both clowns.
Scott theres no way Rafa would ever drop Kuyt. He would rather get relegated with Kuyt playing every minute of every game than admit he was wrong by dropping him. The truth is Kuyt and Lucas are two peas in a pod. They both try really hard but in every other way are woefully ill equipped for the jobs they are expected to do. The very fact they are guaranteed to always do the exact same things in the same situations is exactly why Rafa loves them. We already have quite a few better strikers than Kuyt at the club (even Nemeth in my opinion) and the £7million we needlessly pissed away on Dossena should have been spent strengthening our right wing options so that we don't have to choose between Benayoun and Kuyt.
Kuyt is great on the right where his poor touch, lack of pace and poor passing can be mitigated by his excellent reading of the game, decent crossing, hard running and good finishing. He's not a Premiership strikes and if we want 2 play with a working system we have to play with a Torres like striker who I suggest is a strong, pacy, skilful player with a good finish. Sounds like Babel to me.
IMO The best way answer to mind games is silence or a simple brush off. No point in Analysing "facts". If he did it at the end of the season after winning the title it would have been a great dig at ferguie.
Lucas/Benayoon should have been taken off at half time and replaced with Babel / Keane. Lucas, Benayoon and Kuyt Faff around too much with too many (bad) touches of the ball. It was a game where Liverpool needed more physical and direct players.
J.
Desi, I'd have to disagree with you about Kuyt being good on the wing. Pace and dribbling ability are essential in a winger so that we can stretch the opposition and Kuyt has absolutely none of either. I also think his finishing is poor too and he has never been a reliable goalscorer in England no matter where he plays. People will laugh at this but I honestly think Kuyt should be competing with Mascherano for the defensive midfield slot. Think about it. All Kuyt's talents are purely defensive. He gets in tackles, is tactically disciplined and almost invariably stays behind the ball which are all essential attributes for a defensive holding midfielder. I don't think you could play both Masch and Kuyt at the same time because the team structure would be too defensive but he would be a useful alternative to Masch. However, IMHO he is not and never will be an effective attacking player because he simply doesn't the god-given ability.
@roger - fair enough, each to their own, but the league is in ManUre's hands now.
@inderjit - gotta agree with you there, including about Lucas, even though I really wish Lucas would consistently show us what he appears to be capable of.
@mark brown - sad but true
@scott d - as much as i like Keane, I think he justified his position on the subs bench cos of his dismal performance against Preston.
@desy - unfortunately for Babel, he suffers from a lack of consistency which is routinely reflected in his performances, which is why I reckon Rafa doesn't trust him more often.
@j - agreed, that's the perfect way to deal with the mind games.
Paul, I did not see the Preston game but surely you can not judge Keane on one game. I watched the recent Bolton and Arsenal games and he was fantastic. Since then he has played in the Preston game and been dropped for Newcastle and Stoke. Being an Irishman yourself surely you agree that Keane is a much better striking option then Kuyt. On recent form is plainly unfair and ridiculous to play Kuyt instead of Keane. Robbie is a proven striker with over 100 league goals over the last 6 years or so. Dirk Kuyt has had one purple patch at the start of this year, but other then that his contribution as an attacking player has been a big fat zero. He continues to get a game every week though.
@scott d - i'm certainly not judging him by one game, like i've said many times i like him and rate him very highly - but it was sadly clear that something wasnt right against Preston, which was very surprising given that he had looked like he was finally finding his form before that game.
If only Rafa was as brave on the pitch as he is in the press room then we would be a dozen or so points ahead of United (who now look like winning the fecking league).
Hello all
I'm quite struck by the sense of doom following our draw and man-ures win. Clearly getting the points at stoke would be preferable, but having watched the game, we didn't play well enough to win, so in some ways i'm grateful for a point given how we played v stokes performance. I also think that what's been labelled as "Rafas rant" was quite smart in some ways..after all..how many people are talking about Steven Gerrard now? He has taken the full brunt of the medias attention to enable his players to get on with the job in hand. Some have said that the "rant" may backfire as it has put pressure on the players, those players are playing under pressure all the time, I think it would be an idea to trust them and see what happens.
In Rafa we trust ...right?
And the doubters are back. Look at Spain, Barca who are running away with the league nearly lost to bottom side Ossasuna last night only for Messi to save them in the last 10mins. Shit happens, Rafa was right with his rant
i think Rafa is mad, instead of concentrating on team selection he wasted time preparing dossier against Mr frog, i dont mind you dig at anybody as far as we are winning. but mistakes again and again is not liverpool way RAFA. shut up and get on with thing which we waited for 19 years and there will be no better time than this year, don't throw away hard work which we had done to get in such a strong position.
Gary, Rafa may have been right with his rant but he was dead wrong with his team selection, tactics and subsitutions. Which do you think is more important in winning the title ??!!
Tactically speaking, Pulis out-foxed our tactical genius, it can't be denied. The marking on Gerrard was very tight, as it needed to be from a Stoke point-of-view. And this had to addressed asap, but wasn't, and left me so frustrated as a screamed at the telly. And it's not his first day at the rodeo regarding this tactic of man-marking Gerrard. On other occasions where this happened he moved Gerrard back to midfield so that the marker would be pulled out of position, holding his cock, thus creating space in front of their back four bank. He sometimes made Gerrard mark the oppositions play-maker, leaving them not knowing what to do. Without Alonso, it was madness to play Gerrard in his new role with two holders behind anyway, maybe try it for 15min, but not persist for the whole jaysus match. Someone once said, "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result each time".
What to say about Kuyt that hasn't been said before. I just don't get the persistence with him. I cringed when I first heard the Heskey rumour, but on reflection, he is streets ahead of Kuyt in all respects. We should bring back Crouchy at this rate. Dirk Kuyt is a man who seems to be able to be the essence of headless chickenry and still retain his spot. Keane tries just as hard, has as many goals as Kuyt (W Rooney too), but with fewer games, greater pressure (20m worth) and a settling-in period to contend with too. I just don't get how Rafa doesn't reward good form or punish bad form.
Above, most criticize Lucas but I have to dissagree as Masch was our weak link. Lucas was getting his man and was keeping it simple, where as Masch kept playing cross-field passes to nobody, and was far too cautious, or generally negative. He seems to lack pace too these days. So Masch was the villain imho, not Lucas, (as he was making the odd forward pass when the chance arose) for giving away the ball too often.
Regarding Rafa's comments on Fergie - ill timed and needless. He should have brushed them off by saying something like, "Mr Ferguson said what? Oh, Mr Ferguson seems obsessed with LFC. Maybe he is a closet fan". Or, better stil, "Who's Simon Bird? You're a c*nt".
@jessica - hmmm
@gary - each to their own, but i just wish he had chosen to rise above it and ignore it
@aiyic - that would have made for a neat brush off ;-)
Pulis and Stoke managed to strangle the creativity by tight marking on Gerrard.
While Kuyt was the single forward in our convincing win against Newcastle this formation relies on pace from midfield to get behind their back line (which we didn't have) and winning the ball high on the pitch (which we didn't do).
Factor in that Benayoun didn't look as up for it as he did at Newcastle and that neither Mascherano/Lucas are effective passers against low defences and you have the first half. Credit to Stoke, they made it difficult.
As aiyic suggests, it was really obvious that we needed a playmaker in midfield and since Keane can play in Gerrards role we wouldn't have lost too much shape by taking out one of Lucas or Mascherano and make those changes. Step two for me would have been introducing Torres and switch Kuyt to the right for some pace up front. Third move would have been Babel for Riera in my head.
I don't think it is fair to slag off the initial selection as Torres could not have started (needs to be eased back) and the selected 11 was similar to the one who performed well vs Newcastle.
However, when it turns out it doesnt work as intended i agree that Rafa should be more flexible to change approach especially when we actually have talent on the bench!
For what its worth, there was a lot of pressure on the referees after Rafas outburst and perhaps the assistant manager hesitated a bit extra to give the perfectly good corner Man U scored... it's just that they were so much better than Chelsea that it didn't matter in the end but what if Chelsea would have somehow gotten the first goal instead?
Even if Rafa hadn't said anything about old whiskey nose, the onus would STILL have been on him to go and pick a side with the tactics to beat Stoke. Not for the first time, he failed miserably.
We've been dropping points as often and as cheaply as a two-bit whore drops her knickers but because we've somehow managed to stay top of the league, most fans have been happy to ignore these repeated, frustrating failures. It's the same rose-tinted view of this latest setback - shit happens, all teams drop points etc. - that will further undermine us.
Sure, every team will have the odd dodgy draw and 0-0 etc. but we have our fair share already and a few more to come no doubt, and still we never learn.
United's title, unless the leopard changes its spots. And it hasn't changed them, ever.
DO NOT give benitez a new contract!! He hasn't got a clue!!! Send him packing to Spain before he gets us into the UEFA Cup!!! F...ing USELESS!!!!!!!!
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