Following the narrow 1-0 loss to Real Madrid last night, Liverpool are left three points off of FC Basel for second place in Champions League Group B, and with progression anything but a sure thing, the Reds face a fight to move on to the knock-out stages of the competition.
Anything but a pair of wins from their two remaining matches would almost certainly see Liverpool sent packing from Europe’s biggest stage, but Reds midfielder Adam Lallana has insisted that it’s this type of pressure that top-class players thrive on. We knew it was going to be a difficult place to come, but we showed that we’ve got fight and we’re still in the competition. We know we’ve got to win our last two games. It’s going to be tough but we’re confident that we’re capable of achieving that” he said following the final whistle at the Santiago Bernabéu. “We’ve got a tough game away at Ludogorets and then we play Basel at Anfield. They’re two big games, but they are games that you want to be involved in as a footballer.”
The former Southampton captain, who left the South Coast for Anfield over the summer in search of Champions League football, had the Reds best chance of the match when he sent a low shot in just wide of the net early in the second half. There were suggestions prior to the match that boss Brendan Rodgers wholesale changes to the squad represented a forfeit of sorts with many of the regular starting eleven left on the bench, but Lallana doesn’t see it that way at all.
“I think we [the players] were out there to prove a point and prove that we wanted to stay in the team for the weekend. We’ve got another big game against Chelsea on Saturday” he continued. “The manager has brought a lot of players in and he’s confident that they are good enough to perform at the level of the competition that we’re in. We know we’ve been struggling with performances lately. But we’ve got characters in the squad and we know we’ve just got to dig in. We’ll be doing that again on Saturday.”
