There was a point in and around the 65th minute when, after cutting Liverpool’s defense open far too easily with a mesmerizing passing move, Real Madrid forward Karim Benzema shared a chuckle with his team-mates after coming within inches of helping his side add a fourth goal. At times it was just that easy.
Following an opening twenty minutes in which the hosts pressed their Spanish guests with the kind of gusto one would expect from a team managed by Brendan Rodgers, a moment of brilliance from Cristiano Ronaldo opened the scoring with a sublime effort before the floodgates swung open. While the worlds best player showed his class with the opener, what followed was, and it hurts to say this, what is becoming part and parcel of the Liverpool experience.
To be fair, there’s no shame in losing to Real Madrid; sure, their history with us put their backs against the wall, but if you remember correctly, this is the team that absolutely smashed Bayern Munich in this same competition last season — and that was before they brought in midfielder Toni Kroos and and striker James Rodriguez for a combined £87mil.
Rodgers pre-match assertion that his side weren’t the underdogs looked to be a sound bit of morale boosting early on. Until the tempo slipped, that is, and his side started to look more and more like the one that laboured to a last gasp win over Queens Park Rangers at the weekend and not the one that battled their way into second place in the Premier League last season.
While Ronaldo’s opener was a well worked bit of magic, there was nothing glowing about what followed — it was just more of the same. A half cleared corner ends up and the feet of Kroos, and with Mario Baloteli apply pressure that can only be called half-hearted, the German whips in a cross for Karim Benzema to loop over Simon Mignolet. Eleven minutes later, it’s another set-piece that does us in with a whole contingent of Reds players — including the Belgian ‘keeper — unable to get the ball of the box before the Frenchman snagged his second.
Unnerving. Unwarranted. Unnecessary.
From then on, it was damage limitation. Joe Allen’s near miss from Balotelli’s cross and Philippe Coutinho’s corker cannoning off the post, while welcome bits of attacking impetus in a match where we sorely lacked it during our opening flurry, gave the reining European champions a bit of a scare, but with a touch of luck eluding either strike, if it wasn’t already obvious, only served to highlight that it wasn’t our night.
The Italian striker, who swapped shirts with Real Madrid defender Pepe on his way off the field at the break, was replaced by Adam Lallana as Rodgers shifted to the kind of formation that ex-Red Jamie Carragher implored him to employ from the get go, but even pulling him off the field for the more lively Englishman hardly made a difference. While it’s easy to point to Liverpool enjoying more of the ball during the second half, it’s also relevant to point out that Carlo Ancelotti’s men took their foot off the pedal with their job already done.
And, there was little question that it was. Maybe I’m exaggerating our role in this a little bit, but at the final whistle, I thought that Real Madrid beat Liverpool just as much as Liverpool beat Liverpool. That’s not to say that Los Blancos weren’t the dominant force throughout, because let’s hand it to them, they were, but when Dejan Lovren said that something was wrong with the Reds following the narrow win over QPR at the weekend, he was spot on.
There’s something wrong, and despite my growing alcoholism, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be fixed anytime soon. If anyone needs me, I’ll be calculating the likelihood of John W. Henry authorizing Rodgers to buy another £20mil defender in January and racing to the bottom of a bottle of Lagavulin.
On your mark, get set…
–Steven
