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Club Focus - Liverpool - Internationals rescued, time for some F.A.B. Attacking
Liverpool fans, touch any nearby wooden tabletops, pinch yourselves and cross your fingers. None of your players have come back from playing for their countries nursing any knocks, a bizarre development after a couple of years in which international injuries have become the norm. Fans woke up on Thursday morning fearing the worst, yet it never happened. An odd, but welcome occurrence.
Injuries are of course the easiest things to hide behind - Liverpool and Rafael Benitez can be accused of frequently doing that this season - but they are also crippling blows that can derail a campaign. Perhaps it is a coincidence that Fernando Torres has suffered three bad injuries whilst playing for Spain in the last two seasons, but it doesn’t feel like it to Liverpool. Every time they let their prized asset out of their sights to go and play for their countries problems seemed to arise. Not so this time, a perfect tonic ahead of the final months of the campaign, not that there aren’t any injured Liverpool players right now. Martin Skrtel’s broken metatarsal in Bucharest keeps him out for two months, Fabio Aurelio’s groin strain against Blackburn sidelines him for three weeks and Daniel Agger has heavy bruising to his knee, making him a doubt for the short trip to Wigan on Monday. Glen Johnson is slowly making his way back from a knee injury and should be seen within the next two weeks. It is an important fortnight for the Reds, one that will see their action confined solely to Monday and Thursday nights.
The DW Stadium is the first port of call, fresh off the back of an important 2-1 victory over Blackburn Rovers, the latest in the bi-annual ‘winding up of Sam Allardyce’ event that Liverpool supporters have come to enjoy. The Blackburn boss' comments about Liverpool going ‘back to basics’ in their performances in the recent weeks and months certainly has a lot of truth to it. Indeed this column has used the very same phrase to describe the Reds since that FA Cup loss to Reading – but never have Liverpool descended to the type of bullying tactics that Allardyce teams are synonymous with. Functionality over flair has always been viewed by Liverpool’s supporters as a means to an end, the right approach to stop the Reds being as easy to beat as they were during the first half of the season. With some degree of normality restored, and a fit Torres and Steven Gerrard finding the net, it feels like the right time to let the shackles off. Whether they’ll come off in the next fortnight remains to be seen, but it would be a welcome sight for many supporters who’ve grown weary of solidity over style.
At Wigan, one man likely to be charged with helping the Reds rediscover an attacking flair will be Maxi Rodriguez, the free transfer Argentinian who has made a quiet but efficient start to his Liverpool career. It was Rodriguez who set up Torres for the winner against Blackburn, and it is that quality and experience, his - to coin a Benitez phrase -‘game intelligence’ that persuaded the Liverpool boss to bring him in during the transfer window. Paul Robinson was well out of his goal as the ball broke to Rodriguez, but he calmly picked out Torres, who did what he always does. Cup-tied for the Europa League, the Argentinian will be an important player for the Reds as they seek a top four finish in the Premier League. Able to play on the right and left hand sides, he appears to have leapt above Albert Riera in the Benitez pecking order, with the left sided Spaniard reportedly facing a tough fight to rescue his Reds career.
It will be a tough fight at Wigan’s DW Stadium, thankfully now featuring a re-laid pitch, but the Reds will fancy their chances of making a winning start to their short period of Monday-Thursday encounters. An attacking outlook would help that, and seeing as all of his international performers have been rescued safe and sound, Benitez will be tempted to go for it in the coming matches. Rafa’s Thunderbirds are go? Let’s wait and see.
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