royalblue66
Player Valuation: £70m
Bleeding scroungers .
ECHO Comment: "Fears of Witch-hunt Against Liverpool FC"
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helpimonfire
Player Valuation: £35m
right Thigh?
royalblue66
Player Valuation: £70m
Or left,one of the two.
tsubaki
Player Valuation: £90m
That one at least has some logic to it - after all, its always been the case with him that he was only ever world class when he was out injured and they missed him, so when he played well at the weekend he must logically have been injured.
Saint Domingo
Player Valuation: £90m
Can't wait for all the support they'll be giving their fellow merseyside team against their 'huge rivals' Chelsea in the cup quarters. I'm sure if we win it they'll be at the trophy parade chanting 'Merseyside' like they told us they would when they complained we were bitter for not doing the same. 'If Liverpool couldn't win it I'd want Everton to', that little patronising put down will now be put to the test won't it. I wonder which way the bitter RS will go?
Saint Domingo
Player Valuation: £90m
They're used to lucky cup wins (sorry draws then penalty shoot outs) covering up their general inadequacy which is illustrated by poor league performances every year. As long as they danced with the devil every few years though to pick up a pot and Everton weren't then they were generally content. What's happened recently is that Satan has deserted them and quality has finally started telling in big finals and they've been found wanting. Suddenly they're not relevant anymore. They had all the luck they could have wished for in most of these ties yet still got outclassed by City, Besiktas, Chelsea twice. Turning up, playing rubbish in a final and hoping Gerrard wins it for you on pens is just not working for them any more and they can't stand it. Watch the peasants really revolt if we start picking up the odd pot and they're not. Absolute carnage.
BlueShark
Player Valuation: £20m
So it doesn't actually matter that they lost a cup final then?http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/liverpools-defeat-doesnt-matter-jurgen-7460958
Liverpool's defeat doesn't matter - Jurgen Klopp has imprinted his formidable spirit on this team
That this poor Liverpool team managed to take this final to penalties shows what spirit the German has given them
If hiring a German manager is supposed to guarantee one thing, it is the winning of penalty shoot-outs.
Team spirit: Jurgen Klopp talks to the players
Yet while it was a choker for the Red Army, losing on spot-kicks didn’t actually matter all that much to Jurgen Klopp’s long-term prospects as Liverpool boss. Because winning the League Cup never really matters to any manager’s job prospects.
Kenny Dalglish was sacked months after winning it for Liverpool four years ago. In the past decade, that same fate has befallen League Cup-winning bosses Jose Mourinho (twice), Michael Laudrup and Juande Ramos, while Alex McLeish also left Birmingham after relegation.
Manchester City, always forward-thinking, announced they were dispensing with Manuel Pellegrini before he’d even won this season’s final.
No true judgements will be made on Klopp’s Anfield reign until deep into next season after the German has overseen a major overhaul of a lop-sided Liverpool squad which lacks sufficient quality in all except forward areas.
And then, nobody will be looking back on whether or not Klopp won the League Cup.
Irrelevant: Manuel Pellegrini has won the cup, but is off in the summer
What Sunday did prove was that Klopp has engendered enough spirit into his inherited squad for Liverpool to go the full distance with a vastly superior City team.
Adam Lallana, very much a man of peace before Klopp’s arrival, ended up calling out the mountainous Yaya Toure for an extra-time street brawl.
The Reds finished with two midfielders and a virtual pensioner in a makeshift back four and yet somehow dragged City into a shoot-out.
And this final proved again that, despite all the Banana Splits smiles and the pratting about, Klopp is a deeply serious and decisive operator – always capable of making calls which are neither popular nor obvious.
Within 25 minutes Klopp was volubly ordering off Mamadou Sakho, with apparent concussion after a clash of heads with team-mate Emre Can.
The big defender, a cult hero on The Kop, chucked an almighty tantrum, kicking over a bottle on the touchline and burying his head beneath a coat when he returned to the dugout.
Scuffle: Adam Lallana clashes with Yaya Toure
But Klopp wasn’t doing sentiment and he sent on ancient warrior Kolo Toure in his place – he and ‘little’ brother Yaya becoming the first siblings to contest a major Wembley cup final on opposite sides.
Klopp is also adamant that Liverpool’s £32.5million striker Christian Benteke is not for him, even in extra-time in a Cup final.
And the Liverpool manager was hard-headed enough to insist on playing Simon Mignolet, ahead of the previous ‘Cup keeper’ Adam Bogdan – a call which was hardly an unqualified success with the Belgian allowing Fernandinho’s opener to pass straight through him.
Klopp has dodgy goalkeepers, average defenders and unremarkable midfielders. Only in attacking areas do Liverpool look anything like Champions League contenders, yet even there, Klopp faces question marks – with Daniel Sturridge’s physical frailties leaving him unable to take a spot-kick.
Sturridge was the first offender in a string of cynical dives which infested the first hour – Nicolas Otamendi and Philippe Coutinho were also guilty and so too was Sergio Aguero, even though the majority of football sages who want ‘dangling a leg’ classified as a capital offence, would have awarded the City striker a penalty for his tangle with Alberto Moreno.
While City thoroughly deserved their lead, there was a resilience about Liverpool and a profligacy about Raheem Sterling’s finishing, which fuelled believe the Final was still alive.
And when Coutinho equalised seven minutes from full-time, thumping home after Lallana had struck the post from a Sturridge cross, half of Wembley was euphoric and engulfed in the red smoke of warning flares.
They are a wonderfully contrary lot, Liverpool’s supporters. They boo God Save The Queen and sing the praises of Igor Biscan, years on from his undistinguished Anfield service.
Predictably they gave dog’s abuse to ‘greedy b*****d’ Sterling, who flopped after a lively start.
Sterling, like the cramped-up Sturridge, was absent when it came to the penalties – and Willy Caballero, City’s performing seal of a keeper, was the unlikely hero for Pellegrini.
Having cajoled and roused his players in animated fashion before the shoot-out, Klopp retired to the dugout watch the decisive action impassively and in glorious isolation.
He is rarely predictable, Klopp. And his unpredictability will improve Liverpool, just as soon as he has some better players.
Sound.
What a steaming sycophantic mess that article is.
Deggo
Player Valuation: £20m
Oh yeah
Didn't you see him lift his shorts for 1000000th of a second after he missed,had his excuse sorted before the ball stopped moving
Deggo
Player Valuation: £20m
Haven't read it I just like the word sycophantic
Saint Domingo
Player Valuation: £90m
Can be summarised as 'Liverpool were vastly outclassed and lucky not to be 4 or 5 down in normal time, but because they hung in there and I'm a kopite Jurgen is the new messiah'
Yorkie
Player Valuation: £35m
*thinks about Ross Barkley and smiles
AndyC
Player Valuation: £70m
They will inwardly combust if/when we beat Chelski, and heaven only knows how they'll react if/when Jags lifts the cup
The way they are going on about the RS you would think they were a Div 1/2 team, not a team who has spent millions, and millions.
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