The Daily Antoine 12/3/2010 LFC News Digest

Torres is frustrated at the MEDIOCRE refs we are faced with. I lost count of all the incorrect decisions and the Lille players diving all over the place. More officals on the pitch than any other football match and they are all useless.

Lille played better Sandball..

Why are the Arabs not buying out LFC..these clowns are doing nothing..Where is Purslow..Why is he going so slow..???

The pitch was awfull, but it seems the refs are noticing Torres’s constant whinging of late! And he got booked for it last night! It is like him, but he’s got away with it for so long, if a desicio doesn’t go your way he should be conentrating on skinning the lad who’s just brought him down, not diliberatly swearing at the Referee.

He’s frustrated, but a player of his caliber should be able to deal with it and get on with it. They go after him because he’s one of the best in the world, it makes sense, the way when we play Everton they set out to keep Gerrard out of the game. It make sense from there point of view!

To be honest as a performance last night it wasn’t that bad for the tie it was, the goal if you watch the replays the guy who Carragher was marking, raised his hand and took it away seconds before the ball passed him, could be classed as off the ball obstruction, but lets not argue the toss.

I’m going to pick out the small things that really got on my nerves last night. I don’t care if he’s just come back from injury but Johnson, was getting turned inside out last night, and for someone who goes forward so fluently his back tracking ability is awful, he has the turning circle of a bus, exaclty the same as Insua, and it’s not good enough for wing backs. Also Gerrards attitude still isn’t good enough to be the captain, is shows on the field and has done for a while. He played in two roles last night from what I can tell he did very little back tracking. I understand this must be frustrating for him, but it’s his role to spur the team on and not happy with all the blame being put to Rafa, when Gerrard should be taking some of the flack. I do believe Gerrard is a fantastic player, and will go down as one of the greats but of late it has become really disheartening to watch him look so uninterested, pinging balls in hope and general not the same alert Gerrard we know and love.

But we all know what could happen in the return leg, we’ve seen great comebacks over the years (and I wouldn’t class this as a comeback) they are either going to come to Anfield and we will smash them all over the park (which to be honest might I don’t think will happen, I think we can comfortably take them but we just don’t ever really look like a threat these days) or we’ll be pushed out of Europa with another slack performance from key players. I hope it’s the first and we demolish them, I really do.

@Mark M : I hope that wasn’t aimed at me, as you can I was clearly blaming the players for there performance last night, and yes Rafa does deserve blame, but I think he put the right team out last night. the pitch was awful but thats not me blaming it for a dismass displays, as we played on a relayed pitch on monday and did us no good.

And yes times have changed, we haven’t won a title in 20 years, time Liverpool fans became realists instead fical “fanatics” (yes the quotation marks are a sign of sarcasm). I want this all to change but I really can’t see it happening and is becoming increasing difficult to fathom what has happened, but we have been blinkered by past successes for so long. I’m hoping we can all take our head out the sand, get behind the team and look towards a brighter future!