Roy Hodgson now has his first match under his belt a very commendable 0-0 against the full Grasshoppers of Zurich 1st team (at least for the first half).
This match was a potential banana skin for him pitting our kids against a team that has alreaday started their league season.
If this was supposed to be a friendly, someone forget to tell the Zurich team!
They were crunching into the Liverpool youngesters from the first whistle with some of the tackles easily warranting yellow cards that the Ref chose to ignore.
I thought this will be interesting, will our kids roll over and allow themselves to be muscled out of this match by more experienced pros ? Not at all. They started getting their own tackles in and thought nothing of leaving their own foot in. Well done, Roy must have been pleased with this reaction from them.
He must have been pleased overall with this perfomance and some of these youngsters have made his job more difficult because they surely deserve a chance with the big boys based on their efforts here. Ayala was my man of the match giving an almost faultless and very commanding performance. Roy must have been thinking why have we bought Wilson when we have Ayala? At least I was.
Some of our more experienced players looked a little sluggish which is to be expected from their first game back.
Overall an excellent start.
But there was no hiding the fact that we still have the same problem with the youngsters that we have with the first team. I just don't see where the goals are going to come from?
Ngog had a very impressive game but if you are leading the line single handedly as he had to do in the absence of Torres last season, you have to make the ball stick when it comes to you. You have to hold it up and protect it and allow the others to come into the game. Sadly this is lacking from his game. I don't see anyone else at the club who is capabale of fulfilling this role for us either. I am sure Roy realises this too and will be looking to address this problem as soon as funds permit.
Still overall as I said a very pleasing performance and I wouldn't be surprised if many of these youngsters started the Europa league match.
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