General Mirth wrote:
DK Gooner wrote:
- That we have had three great results without actually playing particularly well.
Well that's clearly bullshit, we were superb against Spurs and Milan.
Liverpool was a smash and grab.
I think it was Ewan Fanning who made that comment. I didn't necessarily agree with it because I thought we were very good against Spurs because of the situation we were in and how we turned it around, but I thought we good, but not great against Milan. The result looks comfortable and seems to restore a measure of pride, but we rode our luck heavily both in attack and defence and came up with a result that still saw us knocked out of the competition. We did salvage some pride and I'm hopeful that the players look at the 3-0 win as a positive to go into the next game rather than dwelling on the fact that they got knocked out of the CL.
Milan looked nervous from the off and we were helped tremendously by the referee (rightly as well) to book Mark Van Bommel early. It may have cost us a couple of soft bookings, but it meant MVB was far more restrained in his challenges and allowed our midfield to function more freely. We attacked with impunity and capitalised on some horrendous mistakes for our first two goals. However, we gave away 2-3 really good chances which should have been buried by Milan - notably El Shaarawy, Ibrahimovic and Nocerino. The El Shaarawy chance in particular changed the dynamic of the game. That opportunity forced us to be less gung-ho and more aware of their threat. As a result our attack became less potent and despite us only needing one goal to level the tie with a lot of time left, we could only fashion the one decent chance. We were fine when we had nothing to lose, but when when the opportunity become more tangible, the team came up short. In mitigation, we suffered a couple of debilitating injuries in areas we didn't have sufficient bench cover.
I was happy we drew Milan for the tie rather than a supposed weaker team that could have assured us of a more likely place in the QFs. I thought then that we had a team capable of beating them, and even now I still feel that. They have some good individuals, but they are no closer to European elite than we are. This was a team with a CL pedigree that had we beaten would provided us with that "glorious victory" rather than the likely "glorious failure" that afflicts us when we face the really top teams. This wasn't a tie where there was a clear favourite. We lost due to a number of reasons, of which many were our own fault.
