There will be no fairytale ending to Steven Gerrard's Liverpool career.
The potential for an FA Cup Final meeting with Arsenal on his 35th birthday promised to be a storybook finish to an illustrious career, but it will go down as yet another missed chance for the Reds, as they fell 2-1 to Aston Villa at Wembley Stadium on Sunday.
Only in the final 15 minutes did Liverpool gain any real ascendancy.
Trailing by a goal with time winding down, they began to push the ball with more urgency and got off a handful of shots at goal. None were successful, although had Mario Balotelli not been wrongly signalled offside, he would almost certainly have levelled the score in the dying stages.
The intensity was evident, but it should never have taken 75 minutes to come to the fore.
Up until that point, they were a team that looked lethargic and rusty, constantly beaten for pace and skill by their less fancied opponents.
Fabian Delph and Jack Grealish were standouts for Villa, completely dominating a hapless Liverpool midfield that looked slow on defence and incapable of creating on attack. It was from a Delph run that Villa were able to level the score at one apiece, while he was clinical later on in finishing off a second chance.
In contrast, the Liverpool attack offered little threat. Aside from a well-worked second-chance opportunity that was finished by Philippe Coutinho , they hardly looked like scoring until the final stages of the game.
Gerrard was virtually anonymous until that late push, when he looked to create a handful of aerial opportunities but was a bit heavy on his passes. He was used in varying roles throughout the game, as Liverpool employed a handful of formations, giving their game an unsettled feel to it.
He was not alone, though.
Raheem Sterling was well-contained and rarely threatened, although he did provide a nice touch to set up Coutinho for his goal. Perhaps that is being harsh on the young man. There was no spark, no creativity to put him into space from further up the field.
Jordan Henderson and Joe Allen were both as quiet as Gerrard, while Lazar Markovic had made no impact when he was dragged for Balotelli at half-time.
Only when Balotelli entered the game at half-time did Liverpool really look like troubling the Villa defenders, but even then he was often forced to use individual flashiness.
He was unlucky not to score a goal in the dying stages, being wrongly called for an offside, but it was not the first time he got himself into such a position with the linesman. This never helps when it comes to getting a marginal call to go your way.
In a lot of ways, it was symptomatic of Liverpool's day. Nothing went right and they would have been very lucky indeed had they taken the game to extra time.
from Bleacher Report http://ift.tt/1Eil5Nd
via IFTTT April 19, 2015 at 09:24PM
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