West Brom Goal: Gabriel Tamas (3)
Liverpool Goals: Nuri Şahin (17, 82)
Games in up competitions that will showcase and test the talents of our younger players already feel like they're going to be a lot of fun. Young Boys last week was a case of absolute mayhem and once again there was a real sense prior to kick off that anything at all could happen. The prevailing sense was that of trepidation, for West Brom were playing more or less their first team. There was still hope however that our young lads be able to step up to the plate and repeat their success of last week.
With our defence of the League cup officially under way, West Brom opted to test out our concentration levels by knocking it long early. With Jamie Carragher up against a big strong Romelu Lukaku, it was going to be a long night for the stand in skipper. It wouldn't take them long to find a breakthrough either. Just three minutes had gone when Jordan Henderson's short pass off to Andre Wisdom forced the young defender into fouling Rosenborg. The free kick was looped into the box and as Brad Jones came to claim it, an arm from Jonas Olsson landed in his face. Unable to gather it cleanly, the ball fell to Tamas who had the easy task of poking it into an unguarded net. Not the start Brendan Rodgers will have had in mind.
Early on it looked like this was going to get ugly, fast. Lukaku was brushing off Jamie Carragher like he was one of those charity muggers that approach you in the street and with alarming regularity. Carra managed to get a last ditch block in for his first attempt at goal but when the Belgian forward dragged him out wide, Jamie was left for dead before it came to Fortune who forced Jones into a save. There had only been five minutes on the clock but we were a goal down and looked to be hanging on already. Some possession of the ball was needed, badly.
Things weren't going well for us in the first ten minutes and the one time we did manage to get a hold of the ball it lead to a counter that Carragher was forced to snuff out. It says a lot that of the two teams West Brom were playing the more fluid football but the fact of the matter was that we hadn't yet started the game, having been caught cold by that sucker punch (quite literally in Olsson's case) of a goal. There were signs that we were starting to grow into it however. Pretty much everything we did came down the left hand side with Robinson being a little sloppy but still trying to come to grips with the game and ahead of him Assaidi who again looked bright early on. His trickery on the left hand side of the penalty area and subsequent ball into the box could have even brought about a sudden leveller as Samid Yesil nodded it just wide. At the very least, the ball was as far away from our goal as possible.
The Baggies were full of confidence, especially in an attacking sense. Whenever it was played up to Lukaku he would make sure it stuck and allowed other people to get involved around him. In order to try and keep them at bay, those kind of balls would need to be cut out and it was impressive to see Nuri Sahin putting himself about a lot more than on previous occasions. Henderson would have been the one in there as the more defensive type midfielder but Sahin was starting to get involved all across the middle. Certainly a lot of our creative play revolved around the Turkish midfielder as everything seemed to go through him before it went anywhere else. So it would come as no surprise that he was the source of our equaliser.
Ben Foster won't want to see it ever again, almost certainly. For the first time really in the match, the ball was being channelled through the right hand side. Downing went forward before playing it back to Wisdom and there was a real patience about our play as West Brom flooded the centre. When it came back to Sahin - some twenty five yards out - there were a lot of bodies behind the ball and these are the kind of situations in which as a defence you want the player to shoot aimlessly. That his shot was on target was about as kind as you could get, but Foster wanted to reward him even further with the ball squirming underneath him at the near post as it looked for the whole world that he had it covered. Both teams had scored and neither side will have been happy in the manner of which it came about. Game on.
Just to compound matters for Steve Clarke and his team, no sooner had the goal gone in than Liam Ridgewell needing to have the physio on for treatment. A combination of having gotten back into the game and West Brom being temporarily down to ten men, the high pressing that you would ordinarily see right from the off was now very clear and they were forced deep because of it. Assaidi created a half chance for Dani Pacheo when his cross was headed out to the edge of the box. The Moroccan winger looks like he could be a very exciting player indeed for us. Without getting to carried away, his direct style and the ability he has to shift it onto either foot and go on the outside or inside will make it so that he's always going to be a threat to defenders. Certainly has all the makings of a real impact player, and he was doing just that on this game.
With Ridgewell unable to continue, Craig Dawson came on to replace him and once again get West Brom back to a full compliment of players. By now we had firmly grabbed the initiative and were seeing a lot more of the ball, Yesil and Pacheco doing their best to try and go past five players back was a measure of how the confidence was flowing. Dani Pacheco has been one of those prospects for quite some time now and the feeling is that he's got to deliver sooner rather than later. His trickery and technique are widely lauded but here it was his intelligence and industry that impressed. Finding the space in between their midfield and defence, even dropping very deep to pick it up and get on with it as well as a lot of work tracking runners and putting his foot it. All of it was very good to see from the Spaniard.
After such a joyous start, the home crowd was starting to get very frustrated. We now had a real presence in an attacking sense, with Wisdom and Robinson forward it meant that there were always four or five Liverpool players in the final third of the pitch. As such they had no time to think, let alone any room to manoeuvre. Their midfield had been forced to come deep just as an option for those at the back to receive the ball so that when we did pinch it from them there were always a lot of West Brom shirts to get beyond. Yesil was working very hard up front and looked like he had something about him in the way of persistence and close control. At the other end Romelu Lukaku who had started the game off on fire had been starved of any service and with his supply line completely cut off we looked a lot more comfortable as a defensive unit.
Their frustration boiled over as we approached half time. Youssouf Mulumbu recklessly diving in on Jordan Henderson, with his studs going into the Liverpool midfielder's shin. It was an absolute shocker of a challenge that unbelievably went unpunished. Play went on some time after the incident and by the time referee Michael Oliver got back to it, perhaps the delay worked in Mulumbu's favour. Certainly it merited a yellow card at worst and could even have easily been a red. Just to put this decision into context, Mulumbu did receive a yellow moments later for a challenge on Nuri Sahin that was barely even worthy of the name foul. As far as some of the decision making we've seen with regard to fouls being punished recently, it leaves a lot to be desired.
Though our play on the whole was very balanced, certainly the fortunes of those we had on each wing could not have differed any more. Assaidi looked like he could create something every time he got onto the ball and was a real thorn in the West Brom defence. Stewart Downing on the other hand was practically invisible. As far as I'm concerned with Downing this season, I have no problem whatsoever with him being used as an auxiliary left back in certain games and that will add a certain presence in the attacking part of the field. Having him as one of the front three will only hinder our creativity up front however.
It was a half that had began badly and ended in frustration. For the last five or so minutes there was something of a lull in our appetite and it's possible we were just trying to sit in and wait for the break but the Baggies wrestled some initiative from that and exerted a little pressure as the half came to a close. There was one chance for us on the break with Samed Yesil, who was caught on the edge of the box but no free kick was given before they cleared it away. It's wrong to criticise any player for being honest but it does seem counter productive that referees do not reward this kind of behaviour, instead ignoring it in favour of those who go down at the slightest touch. Half time then and despite going a goal down early, Liverpool had come back strong with the game now level at one each.
As the game got going for the second period, it was clear that the West Brom players had the managers words ringing in their ears. Right from kick off they were a lot sharper and pressed the ball as hard as they had done all night, but even then the first real chance incident was in their own penalty area. Assaidi picked up from where he'd left off and left his defender trailing. His cross was half cleared and the shot that came back in resulted in an appeal from the crowd for handball. Directly from this Lukaku picked the ball up and had a run at goal himself as an indication of how much the tempo had already picked up. This was all in the first minute.
One thing that is very clear is that these players despite some of them lacking real experience, there's a huge amount of confidence in the way we play the ball around. For a good few minutes it was passed between defence and midfield with Robinson at the heart of the play, looking for an opening. He was under pressure a lot of the time but kept playing balls into Sahin or Henderson then back to Carragher, all the while waiting for an opportunity to get forward. In a flash we were at the other end of the pitch. Robinson's pass to Assaidi was laid off perfectly allowing him to drive at the heart of their defence. It was eventually half cleared to Yesil whose powerful effort forced a save from Ben Foster but yet again it was far from convincing. Despite appearing to go straight at him - much like Sahin's opener - the ball wriggled away for a corner. Dani Pacheco had obviously been paying attention to this as when he received the ball on the edge of the area from the resulting corner, his first thought was to test the goalkeeper and his dipping effort just clipped the bar. Wouldn't be a Liverpool game without hitting the woodwork.
At one point in the early stages of the second half, both teams were suffering from the same problem. Romelu Lukaku who had earlier been pushed up right on Jamie Carragher and near ripped him to pieces earlier on in the game, was now coming deeper and drifting wide to try stop our midfield from cutting the ball out to him. What this did is add another midfielder into the battle, which did help West Brom gain some more of a territorial advantage but in turn allowed either Robinson, Wisdom or one of the midfielders to double team him along with Carragher or Coates and as such made him less of a threat. Likewise we had no real presence in the penalty area, although most of that is down to the inexperience of Yesil more than anything else. It did become especially frustrating though as Assaidi continually had the beating of his defender only for no-one to be on the end of whatever he'd produce.
Between Lukaku and Assaidi, the game did become very stretched at times. So much so that there were times in which we'd simply keep the ball in our half and ask them to come and chase us for a while, trying to tire them out and quieten down the tempo. Conversely they were trying to force the pace on every occasion and this led to a lot of misplaced passes and an overall pattern of play that was very disjointed. The few chances that we did create were now coming on the break. It was clear by now that Assaidi had the beating of his man every single time and the game came to life whenever he was on the ball. Dani Pacheco was also running himself into the ground whenever West Brom had the ball in their own defensive third and made sure they didn't have a moments peace. He nearly scored after clearly having made his mind up about the night that Foster was having. Once again it proved to be correct as the ball didn't go cleanly into the goalkeepers hands. It was beginning to seem like a wonder he'd only conceded once.
In much the same way that some boxing matches tend to go through the motions a little in the middle rounds, so too was this game. Both teams were content with throwing little jabs but there were being no real punches thrown. Nuri Sahin was the one player in the middle of the park for either side who really stood out in terms of his ability to change the gear of a move, this both being a testament to his ability as well as him understanding his role in the team. Their main threat was on the break and the occasional flurry of set pieces meanwhile. Steve Clarke showed his hand a little by taking of Lukaku and bringing on Shane Long. As understandable as it was to rest the big Belgian for the weekend, they could easily have left him on and gone for a riskier change in shape in the hope of overpowering us at the back. They weren't about to go all out in search of a winner however, making the question of our ability to cut through them all the more important.
Time was running out in terms of finding a winning goal in the allotted ninety minutes and though West Brom were getting the ball in good areas it would fall down completely as they tried to play the killer pass. Certainly pretty much every cross played into the box in the second half was like catching practice for Brad Jones. A lot of the way in which they went about finding a winning goal was tired, uncreative and incredibly ambitious. Most of the time instead of attempting to play it down either channel, or even drive into the penalty area it would be a ball fizzed in to the forward in an attempt to try and split the defence from about thirty yards. On the few occasions it wasn't cut out, they rolled harmlessly back to Jones in goal.
One of the things having watched the game now and really paid attention that mystifies me completely is the balance of the team in spite of the fact that we only ever used one side of it. At no point was the shape lop sided or were we caught out on either flank, but the ball simply didn't go near Downing for long periods of the game. You'd be forgiven for thinking we were a man light again. It was painfully illustrated in a five minute stretch in which Dani Pacheco injures himself clearly and then goes on to do much more positive work for the team before he comes off than Downing could manage in the entire game. This isn't to say he had a bad performance. There were only about three or four bad touches from Downing the entire ninety minutes. My problem is that those were the only times I saw him touch the ball.
Into the last ten minutes and with extra time looming, changes were afoot. Pacheco and Yesil came off for Suso and sixteen year old Jerome Sinclair. I've said all my life that I'll know when I start to get old when the players I'm cheering for are significantly younger than me. Sinclair is - only just - sixteen, born a whole ten years after I was, making me feel like an absolute dinosaur and in the process breaking Jack Robinson's record of being the youngest ever Liverpool player.
Whether it's coincidence or not, this marked the second time in four days that following Suso's arrival onto the pitch we score. Both instances were actually set in motion by the Spaniard himself. This time he had a more direct part to play, picking the ball up and running toward goal with it. With everyone expecting a shot on the edge of the area, his shift over to Assaidi on the left hand side caught out their back line and the subsequent ball across was as good a ball as he'd played all game. This left Nuri Sahin with the simplest of tasks to slot the ball home for his - and Liverpool's - second of the game. Time was now against the home side. Almost immediately Fortune hit the post after he brilliantly volleyed Jonas Olsson's deep cross. Their frustration was now being sounded out amongst the crowd, but wasn't loud enough to drown out the sounds of the Liverpool fans behind the goal. There was a whole lot of bluster in the remaining minutes but no real chances of note that in any way worried Brad Jones or the defence. Carragher in particular seems to thrive in these passages of play where a side is running out of ideas and all he has to do is get something in the way.
We were a little too deep at the end as the fourth official indicated the three minutes of stoppage time. It got very scrappy in the end with Jerome Sinclair way up the field doing his very best to make an impression but being closed of by the West Brom defenders. An eventful game came to an end and progression to the next round was sealed. Our defence of the League Cup continues where we have been drawn at home - finally - against Brendan Rodgers' former employers; Swansea. Another performance from the youngsters at Liverpool to savour, it's becoming a joy to watch some of these kids blossom right in front of our eyes and really makes me hopeful for the future of the club. A future that needs to include three points against Norwich.
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