Rafa in denial as two more points dropped

‘If you can meet with triumph and disaster/ And treat those two impostors just the same’. Perhaps Rafa Benitez has internalised Kipling’s words a little too literally. It seems he can’t distinguish between triumph and disaster.

Last night Liverpool failed to beat limited, dogged - let’s stop beating about the bush - negative, dirty Everton, despite taking the lead through a Gerrard thunderbolt with twenty minutes to go.

Rather than capitalise on second half dominance by pushing on in an attempt to kill off the opposition, Benitez withdrew his star striker in favour of woeful, deep lying midfielder Lucas Leiva. The denouement was predictable from the moment Liverpool tried to shut up shop.

Everton’s goal might have been scruffy; a free kick flighted into the box from a non-existent foul, nodded in by Tim Cahill whilst Martin Skrtl looked on like the simple minded idiot in a 1920s' play. But with Liverpool’s unspeakable rivals getting into their point pilfering stride, another home draw (against a poor, poor side) underlines just how far Benitez’ side are from championship winning material.

Clearly Rafa hasn’t cottoned on. Yet.

Comments

Anonymous said…
The slide can be traced back to the interview were he predicted Liverpool wouldn't win the Premiership. And to think he believes that what Liverpool needs is for him to have even greater control, eyes roll.
20 January 2009 at 16:22
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retained a substantial haul of arms.
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro
Read more