Liverpool FC

Paul Tomkins:

Normal service is resumed. Well, kind of.

The win at Bolton had the hallmarks of last season all over it: twice coming from a goal down to win late on, albeit after hitting the woodwork and with the aid of a red card to an opposition player.

(Then again, if you commit a trip to stop Liverpool with a chance of scoring on the break, having persistently fouled, then you run that risk. Bolton weren't nasty, but they made numerous late or clumsy tackles. By all means be physical, but don't moan when it oversteps the mark.)

And, of course, more debate on zonal marking.

Whether zonal or man marking, Liverpool are inevitably going to be edgy at set-pieces at the moment. Do anything wrong a couple of times at the back, and it plays on the nerves. It becomes a vicious cycle (remember Chelsea's man-marking disasters last season?).

What I've noticed in the past is that the run of zonal marking mistakes usually coincides with a new defender being introduced into the team; it takes time to get everyone up to speed, but once there, it usually works for the most part, with the majority of goals conceded in these clusters.

Liverpool's defensive changes due to injuries, allied to new players bedding in, can't be helping. And the Reds have faced teams descended from Land of the Giants in these opening four fixtures.

For the most part new boy Kyrgiakos excelled in the air against Bolton, so that bodes well, but as I've said plenty of times, Liverpool are not a particularly tall team at the moment. At the very least, the Greek adds depth to the squad, and, er, height.

Perhaps because they were not from headers, people may fail to notice that Liverpool themselves scored from two corners at the Reebok (and three so far this season). Torres was man-marked but still managed to head to an unmarked Gerrard to smash home the winner. And where was Stoke's marking against Kuyt for the goal Johnson volleyed in?

Maybe it's the lighter balls that move more in the air, making judgement for keepers and defenders harder. But so many set-pieces look dangerous these days, with plenty of own goals, too.

Patience

I can be critical of impatient Liverpool fans during difficult times, but I want to be clear that it is not a problem specific to this club. Far from it! It's just impatience and kneejerkism (hereby a new noun) in general. It's bugged me for years.

I've been amazed at the criticism Martin O'Neill has received from Villa fans since last March. “He's taking us nowhere” was a common refrain a week ago; and yet they had become a top-six club again in recent years.

Criticism of O'Neill really started when Villa lost in Russia in the Uefa Cup last spring. While I understand the frustration of fans who'd travelled that far only to see a heavily rotated side, the fierceness of their attack on the manager showed a lack of understanding of what he was trying to do.

If anything, Villa were paying the price for rotating too little up to that point. Having studied the rotation of all the big sides' managers for ‘Red Race', I could see that Villa had by far the least altered team on a week-to-week basis.

Consistent selection might have helped them stay in the top four until after Christmas, but then they paid the price and ran out of steam. However, in the end, they finished up roughly where they should have been when having a very good season; it would have been a remarkable one to finish in the top four.

Part of ‘Red Race' involves an in-depth look at where teams ‘should' be finishing, based on a number of realistic current-day factors, not on history or expectation, which cloud judgement.

I was also amazed at the criticism Arsene Wenger was receiving last season from Arsenal supporters. While some of it will have been valid – no manager can get every aspect of his team, his squad, his tactics, his substitutions right – it ignored a lot of the context.

Injuries to big players certainly weren't helping, nor were some stars who had, or were, agitating for moves elsewhere. Chelsea had also experienced a lot of injuries in the previous two seasons, but now they have more-or-less everyone fit, they're stronger again. While deep squads win titles, no team can compensate for the loss of key players for extended periods.

Despite all this, I feel that Wenger gets a much easier ride from the media than does Benítez, and have often pointed out how Wenger, this acknowledged master of the English league, has a worse record than Benítez since the Spaniard arrived here.

But for me, the relative failure of Wenger in recent years when compared with 1998-2004 shows how difficult it has got at the top.
He knew what he was doing in English football, yet he couldn't get close. It's easy to suggest “he's lost it” (that overused, thoughtless phrase of the disenchanted), but do world-class managers really just forget how things work, or lose the ability to adapt to gradual change? It makes little sense.

Then there was the tirade directed at Hull's Phil Brown; suddenly their fanbase knew better than him, as their team went on a poor run – but it came so soon after he had got them into the top flight for the first time ever, followed by the best first half of a season imaginable. Maybe it's the short memories that I object to.

So the fans of all clubs hand out over-the-top criticism to their manager when things aren't going well. But what I like about Liverpool is this core of supporters who defend its honour, who preach patience and who never chant for managers to be sacked or chorus “you don't know what you're doing”. It's still a great club in that sense.

But there's this new breed of supporter who doesn't yet understand this. (There's nothing inherently wrong with new people, young and old, becoming fans – we all start out as novices.)

If Liverpool fans are getting their information only from certain media outlets, then of course they will be influenced. Some will see through the clichéd responses, but not all will, and you can't really blame them. It's easy to spread ignorance if that's all people are exposed to.

All big clubs suffer overreaction and criticism in the media, but a lot of neutrals have said to me how they feel Benítez gets more than his fair share.

Why is this important? Surely we should just ignore it?

Well, it feeds the frenzy. Other managers, good and bad, ‘get away' with the same methodology, the same tactics. They aren't scrutinised as assiduously.

No matter that Alex Ferguson rotated far more than Benítez last season, or on average over the past three seasons; only one man gets stereotyped for it.

Harry Redknapp can leave expensive strikers on the bench, and nothing is said. Yet as soon as Benítez does so, there's outrage; criticism which was never more illogical than when Robbie Keane, admittedly finally in form, was rested during the busy Christmas programme last year and in his absence the Reds won 5-1 at Newcastle. So even success does not exempt Rafa from criticism.

Benítez was often criticised for leaving out Crouch and Keane (even though the Irishman started most of the first 30-or-so games), and yet now one of that pair will warm the bench at Spurs. Will there be an outcry?

Benítez was slated for playing Robbie Keane on the left-wing, yet it amounted to 20 minutes out of the 28 games he played. God help him if he'd had the chance to play someone like Wayne Rooney on the wing.

Let's note that few managers would have persevered and shown faith in Crouch and Keane as long as Rafa did when both started their Liverpool careers with serious goal droughts. Does he get credit for that man-management? No.

Keane never really came good, but Crouch did, before Torres was bought to be first choice ‘spearhead' striker, and Crouch was where he is now, on the bench. There was little praise for Crouch further blossoming at Anfield under Benítez's tutelage, or for the manager making a profit on a player many felt wasn't good enough to even be at the club in the first place.

Surreally, I'm now hearing retrospective criticism of Benítez for letting Crouch go, but the striker wanted to leave for first-team football, and had only one year left on his deal, which gave him the balance of power. That made getting £11m for a player who had cost £7m all the more impressive, given how values drop in the final year.

And if he had kept Crouch, it would have been in the knowledge that Torres and Gerrard – both better players – were his first choice. On the evidence of last season, that was the easiest decision in the world. Instead, despite injuries to five of his first team players, he gets told how good the Spurs bench was on the opening day.

If Crouch had been on the bench Liverpool, Rafa would have been criticised, yet if he ever rotated his strikers or rested either Torres or Gerrard – you guessed it – Rafa would have been criticised. While all managers get criticism, with Benítez you sense he can never win, even when he wins.

You can see why he thought that Michael Owen wouldn't be happy on the bench at Liverpool, not least because the media seems to make a bigger deal of Benítez omitting a player (because of the automatic ‘rotation' hysteria) than other managers doing the same.

Benítez is castigated when he spends money on the squad, and yet when he strengthens the first team, that too is considered the wrong way forward.

The stick he got from some quarters for buying Glen Johnson was laughable, even before, with the exception of Markus Babbel, he became Liverpool's top-scoring right-back in almost 20 years ... in just four games! (I can't think of any of Rob Jones, Jamie Carragher, Steve Finnan or Alvaro Arbeloa scoring more from that position in that time.) Johnson has also had a big hand in three other goals.

There are other examples.

Andy Gray will point out how Benítez rarely makes substitutions before the 60-minute mark, as if the manager isn't flexible enough to make bold half-time alterations.

And yet I like that Benítez gives players the chance of 10-15 minutes to get their act together, after some harsh words, encouragement or tactical advice at half-time.

Let's not forget that Liverpool scored more late goals than anyone else last season, which suggests good fitness, great mental strength, but also that the players on the pitch at the end of those games, whether subbed on or kept on, were the right ones.

Watch a game on TV, and every time the opposition win corner, zonal marking is mentioned. Really, it is almost literally every single time. Therefore it's at the forefront of everyone's thoughts when a goal is conceded.

It becomes “I told you so”, as if the same wouldn't apply had it been brought to mind with foreboding every time a team defended man-to-man. (I still recall the Boro vs Norwich game from 2004/05, when no fewer than seven goals were conceded due to bad man marking.)

Being a football fan is all about second-guessing the manager. But be careful which experts you listen to, otherwise you could end up parroting what are already lazy clichés and stereotypes.