by LFC2007 » Mon Apr 05, 2010 4:15 pm
Nobody can argue that the situations Ngog found himself in would have been exactly the same if Torres had stayed on, but ffs, with Torres' quality, and with the play stretching and with a bit of urgency finally beginning to creep into our game, he would have found himself in similarly good positions with similarly good chances to win the game and he would have been much more likely to put one of them away. I'm probably crazy for thinking that we might have done better by subbing somebody other than our world class striker.
That decision didn't necessarily 'cost us' the game, but it surely made it decidedly more likely that we wouldn't win it.
Otherwise, our underlying deficiencies persisted in a game that we really needed to win. We had nothing to lose by going for it, and Birmingham had little to gain because of their league position. Why then weren't we pressing high up with intensity from the off? Why didn't Gerrard support the play more often, and why didn't our fullbacks push on until late on? Why couldn't we have taken Lucas - who was pitiful - off earlier, and sent Aquilani on? Our whole approach to the game wasn't bold enough.