Liverpool 3-1 Crystal Palace: In the hindsight

An assured performance from a still injury ridden team led to a comfortable victory for the Reds against the Premier League newcomers on Saturday. Pre-match the inclusion of Raheem sterling in the wing back position, following last weeks suspension to Lucas, led me to fear this could be a repeat of the many frustrating and fruitless performances that have littered recent seasons. However, after a couple of early scares we were able to score two goals before the 20th minute and see out the game from there, picking up an extra goal along the way in the form of a Steven Gerrard penalty. One of the few negatives of the game was the Palace goal, which came from a set piece, another run we failed to pick up similar to Hernandez’s goal in the Manchester united match.

For me this was clearly our most complete performance, a good team getting more comfortable with a formation that is getting the best out of us. At the end of last weeks match report I pointed out their were many reasons to be positive, the clinical nature of our strike force in the first half against Crystal palace should be at the top of any list. There were many examples of intricate play between Suarez and Sturridge, but their goals came from individual efforts. Suarez showed the work ethic that makes him one of the best strikers in world football, whilst Sturridge gave us another glimpse of the talent that could take him up to the same level.

Mignolet made up for his mistake last week with another solid performance, I can’t fault him for the goal. A number of decent saves in the first half allowed us to stay in control of the game whilst Palace got more than a little bit of joy down our right hand side. This takes me nicely onto our wing backs, Firstly, Raheem Sterling isn’t one. Going forward Sterling played well and earned us the penalty but he isn’t physically strong enough to play as a defensive player and I don’t think the experiment worked. Enrique on the other hand had his best game of the season so far, largely due to his link up play with Luis Suarez. The three centre backs also played well and will cause Rodgers a problem when Agger is fit enough to start. Sakho is getting used to the Premier League, Skrtel looks back to his best and Toure did fantastic to support Sterling on the right hand side.

I have recently pointed out that, due to our new formation, we no longer rely on our central midfield pairing for as much defensive support as we used to. Therefore I felt that the pairing of Henderson and Gerrard worked well, and will continue to do so against bottom half opposition. This came as a relief to me, as I had previously worried that we didn’t have any cover for an underperforming Lucas Leiva, however this game has showed that he can be rested in place of Henderson or even Joe Allen in the future. The central midfielders held possession better than we have been able to all season and gave us a solid base upon which we could build our attacks from.

Moses was as poor as he has been in both of his last appearances in this area, though as I said last week I am unwilling to be too harsh on him. He is a winger with no level of aptitude for being an attacking midfielder and he lacks the football brain or necessary technique to be an effective playmaker in that position. However he is playing this role through no choice of his own and will be taken out of the side once Coutinho is fit, so there’s no need to criticise him to heavily. My only real worry is that when Coutinho is fit we have three fast wingers (Moses, Sterling, Ibe) in our squad, but we don’t use wingers in our team, this brings about the question of why have we bought Moses in on loan? Ideally I’d like to see another attacking mid bought in in January and Ibe or Sterling sent out on loan.

As with last week, the talking points are at the top end of the pitch. A month ago the media had a field day discussing how Suarez and Sturridge could possibly play together (conveniently forgetting the months they successfully played together last season). However, in typical fashion, phrases such as “telepathic understanding” now litter the back pages of Britain’s newspapers. Whilst they weren’t up against a particularly good defensive display in the form of Palace’s, they each gave an overall fantastic performance. At Liverpool we haven’t had a proper strike partnership since Owen and Heskey 9 years ago, yet right now we have a pairing that have the potential to be one of our best strike pairings ever. Between the two of them I see nothing lacking, what one player may lack the other more than covers for and if we are to have any chance of getting top four or (dare I say it) a title challenge it will be on the back of those two players.

As with the score line, this Match report is very similar to last weeks, so I will end it on the same tone. With Agger, Coutinho, Johnson etc still to come back, we have every reason to be positive. After two good wins there is no reason to feel our form should drop, on the contrary it should pick up. Are we genuine title contenders? I don’t think so, but it’s nice to be in the position where that question is being asked. We can now go into the international break full of optimism, lets just hope we don’t come back to the same results we did last time.