Liverpool equipped to repeat 2005 feat
PAUL WALKER
RAFAEL Benitez, the Liverpool manager, maintains that his current side is better than the 2005 vintage that won the Champions League.
By the time the club's flight returned to John Lennon airport around 4am yesterday, few of the weary VIPs on the plane would have argued with that assessment. They even applauded their heroes as they landed, knowing that only an Istanbul-style comeback from 3-0 down will see PSV Eindhoven upset the odds in next week's quarter-final second leg at Anfield.
And as the club coach glided away into the darkness, nobody doubted that it was carrying the Champions League semi-finalists - that in itself another remarkable achievement for Benitez. The former Valencia coach remained cautious, but he could not disguise a happy smile.
He said: "It is clear that we are closer and closer to what we want. Our form has improved slowly to a point when we are approaching a peak at the right time. Maybe we will play in the semi-final now, but what is important is that our confidence is growing and our form with it.
"I believe that this is a better side than the one that won in Istanbul. We have signed better players and others have gained more experience in Europe.
"But football must always be one step at a time. We know that any semi-final against either Chelsea or Valencia would be a very difficult tie for us. But I can say I am happy with the progress of the side, it's fitness and improvement I can see we are closer to our objectives.
"But we just play every game with our people fully concentrated on what we are doing. What we did in Eindhoven was almost perfect, but there is no room for complacency."
Looking at the side that won in Istanbul against AC Milan, only five were on the pitch in Eindhoven. Djimi Traore and Milan Baros have gone, while Jerzy Dudek, Sami Hyypia and Harry Kewell were not in the starting line-up and Luis Garcia was out injured.
What is clear is that Benitez is right, this is a better side. The arrivals - Jose Reina, Danny Agger, Fabio Aurelio - sadly out for the season now with an Achilles injury sustained in Holland - Javier Mascherano, Dirk Kuyt and Peter Crouch - can confirm that.
Benitez has bought better players and they are beginning to gel into a well-organised outfit, the sort of unit the Spaniard craves. He said: "We knew we needed to score, we needed to be well organised and we needed not to concede. We achieved all those aims. The first goal made us happy, the second even happier and when it gets to three, all I wanted was to get across to the team the importance of a clean sheet at that stage - any goal, any lapse in concentration would have turned a big victory into a worrying one.
"It will be difficult for PSV now."
Liverpool try to keep their feet on the ground and minds off Greece
Dominic Fifield
Thursday April 5, 2007
The Guardian
There was a mood of quiet satisfaction among the Liverpool squad and management staff who touched down at John Lennon International in the small hours of yesterday morning, yet the contentedness was born not merely from their riotous first-leg victory at PSV Eindhoven. The sense abounds that the Merseysiders have clicked into their best form of the season and their timing may just be right.
Already the talk is of the Greece capital in May, even if the players are attempting to keep their feet firmly on the ground. "We are getting that same feeling we had in 2005 when we won this trophy but I am also telling myself to slow down and realise that we have a lot more work before we can think about getting to Athens," said Steven Gerrard. "We have to be professional about the second leg but we did a really good job against PSV and we have one foot in the last four."
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The England midfielder scored the first goal in Holland, making it 15 in all and breaking Ian Rush's European Cup club record in the process. Sluggish and disjointedwhen Liverpool visited the Philips Stadium and drew 0-0 in the group stage, a result to match their sloppy early-season form, Gerrard was resurgent as the visitors triumphed 3-0 on Tuesday. Other key performers who had laboured after the World Cup - Xabi Alonso and Peter Crouch - are also finding late-season momentum.
"I was really frustrated at the start of the season," Gerrard said. "I didn't have much energy and I didn't feel the way I like to going into games. I felt lethargic and really tired from only a little rest after a World Cup that was draining not just physically but mentally too. Towards Christmas I could feel bits and bobs of my game coming back and I feel sharp at the moment. I am training better and hopefully I am peaking at the right time because there are some really big games around the corner.
"It was a different type of game with PSV earlier in the season but everyone can see how big a difference there is now compared to how we were playing back then. There is a lot more at stake now. It is all about results and not conceding. I think we were a little bit inconsistent back in September. We had a lot of big players who were maybe not on top form. If you look around our team now all the big names are performing really well - Jamie Carragher, Pepé Reina, Alonso. So it is good to see."
The Brazilian Fabio Aurelio, who was beginning to make his mark after a slow start following his move from Valencia, will not play again this season after undergoing surgery last night on the achilles tendon he ruptured in his right leg in Holland. His absence will be a blow but at least next week's return leg appears a formality before the sterner test of Valencia or Chelsea in the last four.
"There's no denying we're in a great position," said Steve Finnan, who set up two of the goals on Tuesday. "We were in a great position when we beat Barcelona in Spain in the last round but we can't let our standards slip. I'd be very disappointed if we didn't go through but we have to be focused and do the right thing next week."
"What we've shown is that we can perform when the pressure is on," added Gerrard. "In some ways the Eindhoven game was just as tough as Barcelona when we won there in the last round, even if it was a different kind of pressure. Before that game, everyone was doubting us whether we could get through. This time around it was the reverse and we were expected to win.
"That brings different demands but we showed we can withstand them and perform. We have to be professional now about the second leg next week and we know that we'll have two really tough games whoever we play in the semi-final, whether it is Chelsea or Valencia. But, for now, let's just try and forget about Athens."
And for a laugh:
Sarcasm wins you sweet FA
By Jim White
Last Updated: 12:48am BST 05/04/2007
Football fans' forum
Steve Rider doesn't do sarcasm. His forte is professionalism, smoothness and calm. Actually what Rider does is autocue. And he does it better than anyone else: professionally, smoothly and calmly reading his way through sporting events with the unflustered air of a man opening his morning paper. Mind you, even were he that way inclined, Rider did not have time for sneering during ITV's coverage of Liverpool's Champions League game with PSV Eindhoven on Tuesday. Certainly not at half-time, when he had to make way for a succession of commercials for powersprays to pep up your garden fence. Plus find room for a lengthy promo advertising ITV's other major sporting properties; boxing and the Boat Race. Besides, who could find anything to mock about Liverpool's performance? Unless it was to wonder how Arsenal managed to lose in the previous round to a shower quite as inept as PSV.
Tuesday was the first appearance of top-flight football on ITV since the news broke that the company are to benefit from the FA's low opinion of their rivals' efforts. Coverage of England matches and the FA Cup is to be transferred next season and will fetch up on a channel who, when engaged in head-to-head rivalry with their main competitor, such as World Cup finals, manage to attract roughly a fifth of their audience. This then, you would think, must be entirely a financial decision. But no. According to sources at the FA, the move has partly come about because the BBC are institutionally sarcastic. And the FA couldn't wait until their product is broadcast with all due and fitting reverence, when the sustained brilliance of Steve McClaren's boys will be celebrated rather than disdained.
The fall out from these intimations of paranoia has been entertaining. A lot more entertaining, as it happens, than anything the England team have managed to serve up over the past few months. When it comes to shooting yourself in the foot, the effortlessly ridiculous FA haven't just given themselves a glancing flesh wound. They have taken careful aim with the Soho Square sawn-off and, with a single shot, precisely removed all of their own toes. Instead of being patted on the back for negotiating a successful commercial deal which extracts significantly more money to be pumped into the FA's grassroots work (i.e. paying for Wembley) chief executive Brian Barwick has been pilloried for what looks like a clumsy attempt to exercise editorial control over a media partner. The subtext is that ITV better not get all sarky over England if they want to keep the contract in future. Steve Rider: you have been warned.
At this, of all times, when the England team are suffering from their lowest ever public opinion, even to attempt such manipulation is risible. This was the sort of PR howler that even Gerald Ratner might avoid. Far from exposing the BBC's fault-lines, the FA has managed to allow the corporation to present their football coverage as the last bastion of Reithian values. Move over Woodward and Bernstein, make room for Shearer and Lawrenson, unbowed, uncowed, incorruptible, the great upholders of the fourth estate. As for Garth Crooks: give that man a Pulitzer Prize.
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The fact of the matter is, the FA could not be more wrong. Hansen apart, if anything the BBC coverage of football is too often little more than cheer leading. And when it isn't - as with Ian Wright's assault on Owen Hargreaves before the World Cup - it is the product of a glaring ignorance of the game beyond the cosy confines of the Premiership.
Compared to the written press, the BBC's approach to football is the journalistic equivalent of gently addressing the souls of their feet with a feather. Indeed even compared with other broadcasters it is more poodle than rottweiler. In Ireland, RTE's football coverage has steadily built viewing figures on the back of punditry that eschews sarcasm in favour of ritual sacrifice. Eamon Dunphy, the company's main attack dog, savages anybody and anything without fear of repercussion beyond the occasional supporter of Jack Charlton chucking a pint of Guinness over his head. Dunphy recently called the regulars on Match of the Day "spoofers and muppets" and "sycophants who think their viewers are vegetables", before adding that "sometimes they talk like they're on sleeping pills and sometimes they just spout hype, hype, hype".
What a magnificent moment it would be if, in order to prove their independence of thought, ITV hired Dunphy for the new season. Personally, I'd even forgive them David Pleat just to hear his thoughts on Brian Barwick and the FA.