Hallowe'en saw Liverpool have a nightmare and crash to a frightening 3-1 defeat at Fulham.
This means that, inevitably, the blood-thirsty press and brain-dead fans will be clawing at Benitez' door as they clamour to put him in his coffin and hammer in all the nails with the gusto of an over-excited undertaker.
Fans foam and fit on radio phone ins while pundits paw-over and analyse every move made by Benitez, stopping short of examining his stools for further fault.
But is the Spaniard really to blame for this latest result.
No. Not for the most part. Even people who have half their brains eaten by a zombie should be able to deduce that.
It was not so much a freak result as a freak set of circumstances.
Fulham, at Craven Cottage, are a hard team to beat, as Manchester United will testify after last season's visit. Roy Hodgson has built an extremely resilient side who are more than capable of claiming the scalps of big teams.
Make no bones about it, they are a tough side to play against with a full strength side. So imagine going into the game with a whole starting XI's worth of players out. To make it more complicated, more than half those players pulled out the night before with a virus.
Very rarely are teams picked on the day. A match will be planned for almost a week in advance with the team in the managers mind on the Friday. So most of the changes would have been made the morning of the game.
Gerrard, Johnson, Riera, Kelly and El Zhar were already missing through injury while Aquilani dropped out with a virus on Friday morning. Then it began.
Seemingly overnight Liverpool lost Cavallieri, Agger, Skrtel, Aurellio and N'Gog to the same illness.That's a half decent Carling Cup side all ruled out in a matter of hours, the majority of whom would have featured in either the starting line-up or on the bench.
The patched up side Liverpool sent out didn't play particularly well but did dominate the game for the most part, until Fulham scored the second. Where they came unstuck was lack of alternatives on the bench, almost entirely down to the sudden onset of a virus.
The bench resembled more a creche than a substitutes bench. Dossena was the oldest of the lot at 28 while the next oldest was Ryan Babel at the decrepit old age of 22.
The lack of depth from the bench could be, in part, attributed to a lack of squad depth. Something that Rafa could be at fault for. However, despite distorted reports from many media outlets, the Spaniard has not been able to spend vast amounts of money on players or, indeed, wages. Something highlighted in, prolific Red's novelist, Paul Tomkins' article about his recent meeting with the former Valencia boss.
Benitez was questioned about taking off of Torres but the striker is still carrying an injury and was always going to come off. If he had been left on and got injured for a month then Benitez would also have been chastised. The substitution of Benayoun was questionable but one that was probably made with the make-or-break game against Lyon in mind.
Going down to 9 men, with one debatable red card, did not help Benitez. He can hardly control moments of madness by players, injuries and illness.
Don't expect many 'experts' and jerky-kneed fans to take note of such common sense, though.
Why believe that when you could believe that Rafa could have possibly injured Gerrard and Johnson himself, purposely withheld Limsips from the those laid low by the virus and even paid off the referee to send off his players.
No comments:
Post a Comment