{"id":4592,"date":"2022-01-12T15:25:32","date_gmt":"2022-01-12T15:25:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/?p=4592"},"modified":"2022-01-13T23:47:15","modified_gmt":"2022-01-13T23:47:15","slug":"wake-up-call-at-anfield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/?p=4592","title":{"rendered":"Wake-up Call at Anfield"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Our visit to Anfield on Thursday evening should be for the second leg of the Carabao Cup semi-final against Liverpool. Scruz laid out the case for why the Scousers’ appeal for last Thursday’s scheduled first leg to be postponed should have fallen on deaf ears. To add insult to injury, Jurgen Klopp has now said Liverpool’s Covid outbreak was not as widespread as first indicated. Only Trent Alexander-Arnold was newly infected; other test results were false positives. However, the EFL will let sleeping dogs lie. I may have reversed the order of the last three words.
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Yet, we must dismiss all that from our thoughts. What is now the first leg is also the middle game of a critical run of five difficult matches that has started badly. If we do not reverse our fortunes immediately, our hopes for the season will be at risk of severe harm. As every manager says, the most important thing after a loss is to win the next game, or two losses quickly become three, or four or five.
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The FA Cup tie at Forest should have been the restorative win after the City defeat. Yes, we had nine players unavailable because of AFCON, Covid and injury. Yes, the tie was a potential banana skin at a rising Championship side where we have slipped up before. Yet the sloppiness of the performance, collectively and individually, was utterly deflating.
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A midfield three that danced round the multi-millionaires of Eastlands were left flatfooted by a team valued at less than any one of nine City players. This has been our Achilles heel: bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, to mix a metaphor, against the big sides; but against inferior opposition, suspended in a somnambulant state, as Dr F so alliteratively put it in his match report.
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Arteta’s cultural revolution at the club aims to eliminate such inconsistency and set an expectation of high performance at all times. The Forest game suggests we are earlier in the revolution than we had thought. 
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We now look to recruit players with ‘a champion’s mentality’ to the same end. That attribute is, I suspect, crystallised by actually winning things. Of what many in this fine establishment would consider Arteta’s first XI, only Tierney, Gabriel, Xhaka and Partey have won domestic league titles — but only one, Partey, has done so in one of the five major European leagues, and none in England.
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A win at Anfield is doubly essential, not just to ‘get back on the horse’ after falling off so embarrassingly on Sunday, but because the League Cup is our last hope of a trophy this season. That is not to belittle the importance of holding onto fourth place, which would be tremendous, but it would be a trophy in the Wengerian, not the silverware-in-the-cabinet sense.
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The History<\/strong>
I may be clutching at straws in hoping that an Anfield semi-final will bring out the vibrant Arsenal, not the torpid one. History is against me.
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In sixteen League Cup games going back to 1968, including two-legged semi-final ties and earlier-round replays, we have beaten the Scousers just six times and only twice at Anfield. 
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The first of those victories was in January 2007, three days after dumping them out of the FA Cup. Julio Baptista hit a hat-trick (and missed a penalty) as we cruised to a 5-1 lead. With ten minutes to go, that lead had been reduced to 5-3 before the Beast tapped in his fourth to secure a 6-3 win. It was the first time Liverpool had conceded six at Anfield since 1930.
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The other victory came on our most recent League Cup visit, in October 2020, a game played behind closed doors because of Covid. Scoreless after 90 minutes, largely thanks to a string of saves by Bernd Leno, it went straight to penalties. We won 5-4 with Joe Willock’s softly hit winning spot kick squirming under Adrian’s body. The ball barely reached the back netting.
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The previous season had seen a 5-5 in the dying throes of Unai Emery’s time. We had let slip a 4-2 lead. A 25-yard Willock screamer put us ahead 5-4, only for Emery to make some baffling substitutions and Origi to volley his second equaliser of the evening in the 94th minute. The hosts won the penalty shootout.
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The Opposition<\/strong>
We can expect Klopp to play his strongest available side. His false positives will be fresh, having sat out the cup tie against Shrewsbury. Allison may well return in goal, leaving the aforementioned Alexander-Arnold as the only Covid-afflicted member of the squad.
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Origi and Thiago are injury doubts. Nat Phillips and Harvey Elliott, neither regular starters, are ruled out. Salah, Mane and Keita, thankfully, are at AFCON.  
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Klopp still has plenty of quality to call on. Expect a midfield packed with experience in both the light and dark arts to exploit our constrained choices in that area of the pitch.
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The Arsenal<\/strong>
NLD three days later or no, Arteta will also play his strongest available team. This game is that important. That means Tierney and Lacazette are straight onto the team sheet along with Gabriel, back from suspension. Leno might expect to play as the cup keeper, but Arteta needs Ramsdale’s vim and vigour on the pitch. Tomiyasu (calf) and ESR (groin\/pelvis) face late fitness tests. Xhaka has had Covid. Partey, Elneny, Pepe, Auba and Rekik are at AFCON. Balogun is off to Middlesborough.
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Unless Xhaka is deemed sufficiently recovered to play, the taxing question is who accompanies Lokonga in midfield. Patino might be best served by being withdrawn from the line of fire, at least as a starter. \u00d8degaard could drop deeper, but at the cost of his creativity and energy higher up the pitch. ESR being fit enough to start would mitigate that. However, if I decode Arteta’s gnomic pre-game press conference comments correctly, ESR might not even make the bench. Kola could get a start, so stretched is the squad.
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Arteta could also tweak the formation, matching Klopp’s preferred 4-3-3 or mimicking the 4-3-1-2 that Leicester twice used successfully against ‘Pool. If Tomiyasu is out, and given Soares’s sorry Sunday showing, he might switch to the 3-4-2-1 Chelsea deployed with White, Holding and Gabriel behind Saka, \u00d8degaard, Lokonga and Tierney.
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With the availability uncertainties, predicting the team is a lottery at the time of writing, but I would expect some permutation of:
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Ramsdale<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tomiyasu\/Soares, White, Gabriel, Tierney<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00d8degaard, Lokonga, Xhaka\/Smith Rowe\/Kolasinac <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saka, Lacazette, Martinelli<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bench: Leno, Holding, Tavares, Xhaka\/Kolasinac, Soares\/Chambers, Patino, ESR\/Salah-Eddine, Hutchinson, Nketiah\/Biereth
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The ‘Holics Pound<\/strong>
The bookies have a Liverpool win at evens. The classic 1-0 to the Arsenal is available at 14s and 2-0, which has some historical resonance for us at Anfield, at 22\/1. I’d take either.
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The performance and the result will matter a lot beyond the end of the 90 minutes. Arteta cannot let his team sleepwalk through any of our next three games, nor indeed until season’s end.
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Enjoy the game, ‘holics, near and far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our visit to Anfield on Thursday evening should be for the second leg of the Carabao Cup semi-final against Liverpool. Scruz laid out the case for why the Scousers’ appeal for last Thursday’s scheduled first leg to be postponed should have fallen on deaf ears. To add insult to injury, Jurgen Klopp has now said […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4592"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4592"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4599,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4592\/revisions\/4599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}