Rodgers subdued as Liverpool lose to Saints

Liverpool 0-1 Southampton

It was a match Liverpool fans will want to forget on Saturday afternoon as the Reds fell to a Southampton side that very much deserved their 1-0 win. Brendan Rodgers bizarrely made the decision to start four centre backs but despite this, Liverpool still managed to concede from a set piece. It was a poor performance all round from Liverpool and many disagreed with the starting line up.

Interestingly, the last team to beat Liverpool before they went on their run was the Saints and Pochettino certainly set his side up to apply real pressure on the Reds. Southampton worked very well as a unit and on too many occasions were allowed through in to dangerous positions by Liverpool.

Liverpool looked very uninspired from the off and had a very disappointing first half performance. Without the likes of Glen Johnson and Jose Enrique it was clear the Reds had drastically decreased their supply line. There’s often a fan online who will criticise the likes of Johnson and Enrique to the hilt when they are playing but it was very interesting to see how many were calling for them yesterday. Especially the likes of Glen Johnson, who was sorely missed. With Sakho and Toure acting as full backs there was no real movement forward at all, this also created another problem that concerned Simon Mignolet.

The amount of times in yesterday’s game that Mignolet was fed a pass back under serious pressure was ridiculous. Mignolet came under criticism also for his poor distribution but I feel that he wasn’t the one to blame, if Johnson and Enrique were in that starting XI, the ball would have been brought forward and into play, not constantly given back to the goalkeeper because, essentially, Toure and Sakho didn’t know what to do for the best.

For me, without Mignolet our scoreline could have been a lot more detrimental and his three saves in a row alone more than made up for his perhaps shoddy distributing display. The stats show that Mignolet made 34 passes against Southampton, only finding a player on 17 occasions.

In the first half, Liverpool had no real highlight aside from a Steven Gerrard free kick just after 20 minutes that was parried away by Boruc. The most important moment for Liverpool of the whole game also came in the first half after Daniel Sturridge was challenged in the box by Southampton’s would be goalscorer Lovren.

It was a penalty I thought and many seemed to agree, yes it may have changed the game but I hate relying on these sort of decisions and the fact is, if Liverpool continued to play as they were even after converting a penalty, Southampton would have found the back of the net.

I don’t feel we had enough in our game to really take all three points, maybe if we had the penalty we could have seen out a draw but this is all guess work anyway. Fact is we weren’t given the decision and we still had plenty of time with the game at 0-0 to do something about it.

But we didn’t.