everytime i watch liverpool i want to punch rafa benitez in his stupid face

i've had it with this shit.

liverpool are terrible. another woeful performance last night, and by rights they should be out of the champions league. instead, the imbecilic talking heads will start spewing the same fatuous platitudes that we hear every season, that champions are defined by the ability to win whilst not playing well.

this, intuitively, is nonsense. the idea of winning whilst playing badly is an idea predicated on sheer chance, as playing truly badly inevitably means conceding chances to your opposition, chances that you then rely on them to miss. so what this means is that you're winning through no power of your own, which means you have no influence on the result, which, logically speaking, simply cannot be the secret to any long term success.

and so it went last night, with multiple chances conceded to liege last night, including one in the dying moments of the second half. that would be multiple chances, like those they conceded to middlesbrough at the weekend, like the penalty they missed and the header that may have crossed the line in the first leg of the tie. with better sides, or less good fortune, liverpool would have lost against middlesbrough and been about 4 or 5 down to liege by the end of yesterday's first half. obviously, it is an idiot that somehow equates this to championship form - the sign of champions is always going to be consistently good performances punctuated by the lucky victories that most teams get through the course of a season. okay, so a team full of better players will invariably steal a couple of games more per season than a team full of average players - so whilst liverpool will get the occasional 25 yarder from steven gerrard in the last minute of a game, stoke will probably end up with nothing of the sort. but liverpool have always generated these goals and these victories - witness gerrard's strikes against olympiakos to save their champions league campaign a couple of years ago, or his last minute FA cup final goal against west ham, and the ultimate "winning whilst not playing well performance" when they beat ac milan to claim the european cup - so the idea that this is suddenly a sea change that will propel liverpool up the league table is utter folly.

instead, over the course of a year, playing that team, or a rough approximation of it, week in, week out, will leave liverpool in crisis. it was a team with no width and little pace down the flanks, little passing rhythm, no contributions from the full-backs, no passion, a strike partnership that looked anything but, and, above all, a worrying inability to tighten up defensively. the latter, certainly, should worry liverpool fans, as playing like that against a top 4 side, or even half-decent premier league teams, will see them lose many games this season. the return of mascherano will tighten them up, but his presence just add even more questions - can he really play in a midfield four? does xabi then drop to the bench? won't that damage liverpool's passing game even more? - to the already long list about width and pace. certainly, their upcoming games against villa, man united and everton will result in some answers. but i wouldn't be too hopeful if i was a liverpool fan at the moment.