peewee wrote:i know people have different opinions on this and thats their right, but i have developed a bit of a catchphrase on here now which is "the facts dont lie", just look at the figures and they show the real story.
i have also had to defend my thoughts in the gerrard thread, this season also started to come good when gerrard was moved to his preferred and most effective central position
Three to four months on and I'm still hard pressed to account for our poor form at the off this season. I think that means that it was never any one factor but a combination of several, each with knock on effects.
I'll now concede, with the benefit of hindsight that some of Rafa's team selections were not particularly clever (selecting Zenden at CM whenever 2 of Gerrard, Alonso and Sissoko are fit is simply folly, IMO). Having said that I will still insist that quite a few of Rafa's rotations were imposed by injuries, niggling or otherwise. The fact that Carra and Riise took it in turns to keep the physios busy in the first few weeks obviously was going to present problems for the entire team. We're still missing Kewell, IMO, and this was compounded by injuries of varying duration to Gonzales, Aurelio and now Garcia. So, given that we haven't had a stable left side pairing all season, I think Rafa can be somewhat forgiven for some of his experiments.
But, it wasn't just injuries. Gerrard, Alonso, Reina, Finnan, Hyypia, Carragher and Riise all looked varying degrees of jaded to start the season. Was this due to the World Cup? In Stevie's case, was it playing out wide? Was Reina unsettled by the defensive frailties in front of him? Were the defenders spooked by Reina's eccentricities behind them? Fook me if I know. All I know is that too many of the returning lads were out of form at the start of the campaign, which certainly did not help the likes of Pennant, Gonzales and Pennant settle.
And then there's the fixture list. It sounds like a flimsy excuse at times but it was a big ask for us in a way that it wasn't for our rivals. Given the aforementioned factors, we certainly could have used more games against the likes of Watford and fewer games against the likes of the Mancs, Chelsea and Arsenal away.
So, was it rotation? No. Not exclusively. Nor was it any one of the other factors. It was a perfect storm of obstacles that prevented us from getting out of the blocks well. Some were avoidable and let's hope that Rafa and the players have learned their lessons from those. Others, though, were not avoidable and that's just football.
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