'The worst I've seen'
By Alan Hansen (Filed: 24/01/2005)
Liverpool's performance in the first half against Southampton was the worst I've seen in the 14 years since I left the club and as a committed supporter you wonder where it is going to end.
They have got progressively worse. They didn't play that well against Norwich when they won there in the league. They were outplayed at times by Watford when they beat them in the first leg of the Carling Cup semi-final and their performance against Manchester United a week ago was their worst home display of the season.
The biggest thing is that if you are struggling for form you go strong with your team selection. Every manager I have played under would without hesitation have gone strong in the situation Liverpool were in before last Tuesday's FA Cup third-round tie at Burnley - but Rafael Benitez did the exact opposite in going in with a weakened team.
Win the next match is the key when a team are out of form. A victory at Burnley would have given Liverpool greater rhythm and morale to take them take into the next set of fixtures.
Winning restores confidence and once you get the confidence back then you may have been able to rest certain players. I think that if Liverpool had beaten Burnley their performance against Southampton would have been 100 times better.
You can't go on to the pitch playing badly and then come into an important league match and think that does not matter. The consensus of opinion before the Burnley game was that Liverpool were in big trouble because of the team Benitez had picked.
And one thing leads to another. The backlash was there for three or four days and it affects everybody. No matter who you are you will feel pressure. Liverpool therefore went into the Southampton match under a lot of pressure and it showed.
Where does that leave them? They are out of the FA Cup and they are not going to win the Champions League. The Carling Cup is a bonus but the priority is getting back into the Champions League by finishing at least fourth in the Premiership.
They've got to go nine or 10 games undefeated to get back into contention for that fourth place and they don't look like a team who can do that.
The worst-case scenario is that they don't finish fourth and the captain goes in the summer. If you look at Steven Gerrard he is the heart and soul of the place. You take him out of the team and see what happens.
In fact Liverpool's best three players over the last five years have all been English - Gerrard, Michael Owen, whom they allowed to go to Real Madrid, and Jamie Carragher.
Carragher has been their best defender by a mile for the last few seasons but now even he is starting to make mistakes. That is because the rest of the defence are in disarray.
Carragher has been unbelievably consistent in the centre of defence. They move him to right back to accommodate Mauricio Pellegrino - a player who is alarmingly short of pace alongside Sami Hyypia, who is also not quick - and all of a sudden Carragher looked out of sorts.
If you play in a defence that's all over the place, it affects you as well - it does not matter how well you are playing individually. Everybody is entitled to a bad game. It is significant that it comes for Carragher when Liverpool are under enormous pressure trying to bring in one or two new players.
In defence of Benitez, he has given the Liverpool supporters belief again. The belief that they are going to Anfield to see entertainment, goals and attacking football. I think that is why a lot of supporters will give him the benefit of the doubt.
However, he is suffering from the Gérard Houllier regime when a lot of mediocre players arrived at the club. Unfortunately, Houllier as a Frenchman went totally French in the transfer market, shopping in an area he knows best. It didn't work out for him and Benitez is in danger of making the same mistake by going totally Spanish. Between the two of them they have created a conveyor belt of mediocrity.
Xavi Alonso is a good player and Fernando Morientes is obviously a good player, but the jury is out on the rest of them. Apart from anything else, Liverpool could not afford any more average players to come in because of their wage bill.
The top three Premiership clubs have tremendous strength in depth. That's the difference between them and the rest. Liverpool, like some other teams around them, have six or seven players who can compete with anybody but it is not about your first XI any more it is about 19 or 20 players.
What Liverpool have failed to do is replace quality with quality and it is now a major problem for them.
The most important aspect for Liverpool is that the players Benitez brought in had to be good enough to be in their strongest starting XI. That has not happened. He went for foreigners when in all honesty he should have gone British, inasmuch as you know what you are going to get by shopping in the home market.
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