Well, that defeat was hard to take. I've had a F***ing gutsful of people laying into Gerrard, it's doing my head in. Every time we lose it's the old ' Gerrard's legs have gone' and the classic ' he can't do it anymore'. This is the same Gerrard that everyone was praising last Season and hanging out of his arse at any opportunity.
We have lots of issues this Season, Gerrard isn't one of them i'm afraid. Our main issue is in defence, it is a massive problem and has been for some time. If Colin Pascoe's boy wasn't courting Brendan's daughter he'd be gone. What the F**k is he doing here? We need to get Steve Clarke back in to sort us out. While i am full of praise for Brendan and his attacking philosophy, it is abundantly clear that there is absolutely no evidence of any defensive nous at all, whether that be from himself or those around him.
It's all well and good scoring goals for fun, that's the football i want to see, but if your defense has more holes in it than an antique F***ing sieve then you may as well try to ice skate up a hill. Mignolet has been F***ing shocking, he has no presence and his distribution is poor. He was kicking balls ten yards short and wide of their targets last night. He has no direct competition and it is showing. If we had a top class keeper here he'd have been dropped by now and he knows it.
Our centre back pairing changes game after game and that's not healthy either, we need consistency to allow partnerships to grow and that's not happening either. Brendan knows who his top 2 centre backs are and he has to stick by that. I'm fully aware we have brought in a lot of new players but we have to play our best team.
Then we have Gerrard, oh i forgot, he's sh*te and he's past it. He's so sh*te that Aston Villa and West Ham went to the trouble of singling him out for special treatment via Agbonlahor and Downing. Why did they do that? F**k me, you would almost think and believe that they saw him as our biggest threat and attempted to nullify him. They wouldn't be that stupid would they, man marking a dinosaur with no legs? Surely not.
There's also the issue of players not stepping up. If the opposition man mark Gerrard out of the game then surely the onus is on the players around him to capitalize on the situation and exploit the space and gaps that this situation creates?
The only time we've looked anywhere near the form of last Season was against Spurs, when we played two up top with Sturridge and Balotelli. With Sturridge out why are we not trying Borini or Lambert up top with Balotelli. We're not stretching defences with the lone striker and opponents are finding it easy going. I'm not a fan of Borini and the fact that we were prepared to offload him to Sunderland or QPR makes the decision to start him all the more bemusing. He fancies himself as a main striker so why not give him the chance to pair up with Balotelli and see what he brings? It annoyed me that he played Borini on the right side of the trident when we've just signed Markovic, who was on the bench.
Then there was the decision to play Lucas alongside Gerrard and Henderson when we had Lallana on the bench. We were screaming out for creativity but by the time Lallana was introduced it was too late.
Three defeats in five is not the best of starts and i know we will turn this around but we have to start at the back first. We have to tighten up fast with 2-3 games a week, the state of our defence is shambolic. We need healthy competition for Mignolet. We need a defensive coach and we need him fast.
Another problem i think we have is that we've bought too many players and are trying to integrate too many too soon. I'm confident we'll put it right but for now we have much bigger concerns than Gerrard, much bigger
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