Sensitive flower: Benitez has bristled over every
criticism
Rafa Benitez must be starting to feel a bit like Tiger
Woods. That feeling one endures when you think it can’t get any
worse and it does. In Tiger’s case, they keep coming out of the
woodwork. In Rafa’s, they’re flying in off the
woodwork.
But it’s nightmares all round. With no mute button to silence
the doomsayers on this occasion,
Liverpool’s manager had to listen to the sound of yet
another defeat. The cries of joy from the away supporters. Not
to mention a few cruel jibes.
‘Thursday night, Channel Five,’ they sang in reference to
Liverpool’s demotion to the Europa League. Out of the Champions
League, Benitez needs to now accept that his side are out of the
title race, too.
That for all the second chances his side have been given by
rivals also dropping points in this most unpredictable season, the
last of them was probably squandered here when Andrey Arshavin
unleashed a stunning right-foot shot that flew home via the inside
of Pepe Reina’s right-hand post.
Six defeats in 16 Barclays Premier League games mean they have
lost more matches than Stoke City, and that is not terribly
encouraging for a team that had designs on the
championship.
Title contenders need confidence to maintain a sustained
challenge and only one team had it here. The team that responded
not just to the absence of all their strikers and a desperate first
half, but a few stirring words from a manager who thought it was
time to question their right to wear the shirt.
The same accusation could be levelled at a few Liverpool players
who simply crumbled when Glen Johnson scored the 50th-minute own
goal that cancelled out the advantage that had been secured by Dirk
Kuyt’s first-half strike.
While Arsenal overcame the absence of injured Robin van Persie
and Nicklas Bendtner with a committed, composed performance after
the break, Liverpool had not a hint of that fighting spirit and
only a fraction of the class.
Even Wenger identified the problem. ‘They do not have the
confidence of last year,’ he said after watching a team that had
dominated the first half and yet failed to manage a single shot on
target in the second.
Body language
This Liverpool side has not been right all season and it
owes much to the absence of the chap who just happened to be
sitting at the back of the directors’ box.
The chap who made the team tick before leaving to join Real
Madrid. Like Benitez, Xabi Alonso probably thought that his former
colleagues deserved a penalty before Kuyt seized on a mistake by
keeper Manuel Almunia.
But he must have been staggered by the decline of a team that
pushed United so hard in the Premier League last season, by their
inability not just to build on a lead, but also their failure to
react when Arsenal somehow got their noses in front.
A cross came in from the right from Samir Nasri and, after
taking a slight deflection first off Jamie Carragher and then Theo
Walcott, the unfortunate Johnson guided the ball past a
wrong-footed Reina.
If Johnson was feeling pretty wretched then, he must have felt
even worse when his failure to control a cross from Fabregas
suddenly enabled Arshavin to spin and score.
Great technique, appalling defending. A real horror show for
Liverpool. That the Anfield team were so lame in their response
made this all the more depressing for Benitez.
That Alberto Aquilani looked nothing like as impressive as that
aforementioned chap in the stand would have only added to the sense
of misery.
Afterwards Wenger said it was not a ‘three-horse race’
but ‘four or five’. Presumably he was not including Liverpool.
