Mails: Liverpool have learned to grind, and that’s big news

Keep your emails coming to theeditor@football365.com…

Palace vs Liverpool conclusions
* Knee-jerk reaction: Keita is amazing. He exudes confidence on the ball (did you see THAT turn?) and offers Liverpool’s attack another dimension.

* Henderson being kept out of the starting line up after his exertions at the World Cup can only be a good thing. I honestly hope he just keeps coming on as a sub until he is needed through injury. If world-cup-summerless Milner and Wijnaldum can do the job, let them keep doing it and save your better player for the rest of the season.

* Post match analysis of course compared Liverpool to Man City, and concluded the front 3 and back 4 were equal. The major difference is City have two of the best 10s in the PL in Silva and De Bruyne… I feel like this is pretty generous to Liverpool, and I’m curious what the mailbox thinks. If we swapped any two of Milner, Wijnaldum, Henderson or Lallana for Silva and De Bruyne, would ‘pool be as good at City? Personally, I doubt it.

* Mane is phenomenal, I really hope he smashes them in for fun this year.

* Crystal Palace surprised the sh*t out of me. That is a damn good team. Wan-Bissaka was flawless but for one moment (which exactly isn’t the definition of flawless, I know).
Ziggy (Are “Conclusions” the new “Philosophy”?)

Maybe James Milner is immortal?
I’m waiting for your annual ‘We thought James Milner was totally finished because “insert reason” piece, this time driven by the fact that we all thought Fabinho and Keita would restrict him to substitute appearances. Which they may well do going forward, but hey, have to take what you can get yeah?

The man is a machine. Nothing short of wonderful. He’s using the international break to stage his own charity match. Legend.

He deserves either an MBE or #50 on the Euros ladder. You know it makes sense.
Jonny Kay

Liverpool are grinding
That isn’t the Liverpool I know. Firmino looked quite poor, Salah didn’t have his shooting boots on and Mané made a number of imperfect decisions. Keita looked slick but didn’t help us to penetrate whilst Milner and Wijnaldum worked hard without producing much.

And yet Liverpool kept on grinding. They didn’t make any mistakes at the back and didn’t concede any big chances to allow Palace to get excited and build up a head of steam. Then once they were ahead they just kept things neat and under control. Benteke looked 4’11” when he was being out fought and out competed by VVD. Robertson was brilliant at left back and Alisson was assured and handled everything that came his way quite nicely.

Lovren couldn’t have picked a worse time to get injured. VVD/Gomez now have two clean sheets under their belts and Klopp won’t want to make changes there unless anything glaring happens. He’s basically Clyne’d himself potentially.

Liverpool will have tougher away games this season but I bet that win will be massive for the team spirit; knowing they can go to tough games and every man can be relied upon to hold it together, not sh*t the bed and then hopefully create something further upfield.
Minty, LFC

Liverpool draw that game last season
I reckon Palace would’ve taken at least a point out of that game against the Liverpool of recent years. Funny what the goal being protected by someone without biscuit hands can do.

Also, I’ve seen a lot of rival fans criticising Liverpool fans for saying “this will be our year”. Dunno where they’re meeting these people as it’s not something I’ve heard a Liverpool fan say in an unironic fashion. Lots of rivals repeating this line is not the same as lots of Liverpool fans saying it.

Could it be our year? Sure, more likely than many, not as much as some. Will it be? Probably not…dunno if you noticed that whole City, Pep thing going on; they’re quite handy.
Aidan, Lfc (if wagon wheels counted as biscuits, being biscuit hands could be a good thing)

Roy Hodgson was a bad loser
Poor, poor, Uncle Roy, his post match interview summed up everything I detest about him and reminds me how much I loathed him as Manager of LFC and then England, has he ever lost a game fairly? He has a thousand excuses for every defeat, very few of which anybody agrees with.

When asked initially if his team could have given more, his response was a very brief “No” and then added a few plaudits for their effort. He couldn’t wait to bring up the “decisions went against us” card and then asked about specific decisions, responded by saying “What do you expect me to say?”, “This is typical press questioning and I don’t like to talk about referees”, something he then proceeded to do for the almost the entire interview!

” Of course it’s only my opinion, and you’ll probably now trot out another 30 or so people who have a different one, that’s what you do”, well if they do Roy, it’s probably because you’re wrong, in fact two were sufficient, Carragher and Neville. As for Van Dijk “wiping out” Max Meyer, no Palace player appealed and Sky did not even think it worthy of a second look.

I think Michael Oliver (not a fan) needs to come out and explain exactly why he gave the penalty. Was it for..

A: Sakho having his arms around Salah’s neck/shoulders (thought Salah was backing in a bit)
B: A small tap on Salahs ankle
C: The very clear (albeit by tv replay) pull on the shirt, or
D: The final trip

Gary Neville summed it up perfectly, when it’s for you it’s correct, when it’s against you, you think it’s harsh, you don’t think it’s NOT, you just think it’s harsh.
Howard (VAR would have spoiled the Palace fans night by showing the decisions to be correct!) Jones

Some thoughts from a Palace perspective
*That was a fair result, even if the scoreline was a little bit flattering to Liverpool. Crystal Palace played well and on another day one of those half-chances might have gone in. Ultimately though this result won’t make a great deal of difference to either team’s season – at least, compared to the dent a defeat would have put in Liverpool’s season, or the boost the home side would have got from an unexpected victory. Similarly, a two-goal margin of defeat isn’t enough to seriously affect Palace’s goal difference in the long run.

*The post-match comments were a tale of two penalty shouts. The first one was the sort of penalty that always seems to be given against your team but never for them; similarly, Palace’s penalty shout, when they felt Virgil van Dijk had tripped Max Meyer, was the sort of call that never goes your way but always seems to go against you. On the first one, from what I’ve seen, looked like Mamadou Sakho trying to stand his ground and failing, making contact with Mo Salah, who got up apologising as though he was trying to avoid being booked for diving. Bizarre.

*Other than that, Salah didn’t cover himself in glory last night, not least because he had to be told by one of his coaches to go over to the Liverpool fans after the game, having been the only player not to do so. Coming soon to a gossip column near you?

*Before last night, the last Palace player to be sent off in the Premier League was Pape Souare on 27 February 2016, at the end of a game we were already losing. Prior to his dismissal, Aaron Wan-Bissaka had been absolutely tremendous. He kept Sadio Mane incredibly quiet, and was heavily involved when the Eagles began to grow into the game and had most of their better chances.

On the other side, Liverpool’s two young defenders, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Joe Gomez, both acquitted themselves very well and combined to keep Wilfried Zaha quiet, apart from one moment of Wilf brilliance where he made four defenders look incredibly foolish in one go.

*Because of the amount of defending his team had to do, this was unlikely to be a showcase for Christian Benteke. However, it felt like the only time Jonathan Pearce and Chris Sutton on 5 Live said his name was to mention that they’d hardly mentioned him. It just felt like Palace had a good spell right after he was replaced by Alexander Sørloth.

The Norwegian has surely put himself into contention to start away at Watford on Sunday lunchtime. The other possibility for Roy Hodgson, given that Max Meyer looked lively when he came on, is to revert at least initially to the effective strikerless 4-4-2 from last season, with Meyer in an advanced midfield role.
Ed Quoththeraven

Thoughts on the Under-20 World Cup
So the women’s under-20 world cup is on. I didn’t realize this until I was doing some idle channel surfing on Friday afternoon and caught France kicking off against North Korea in the second quarterfinal game. I was deeply intrigued so I caught the whole game and the next two after that (England-Netherlands and Germany-Japan).

I enjoyed all the games to varying degrees and I found a lot of interesting contrasts with the men’s game. Some of the things I enjoyed:

-The teams were very reliant on short passing and pretty much all the teams were playing out from the back even when under pressure in their own box. Teams seemed very wary of launching long balls forward. Has this always been a thing at this level of the women’s game or is it a recent development? Would love to know.

-There was very little gamesmanship, no play-acting and no nasty fouls. It was extremely surreal watching a game under those conditions.

– I didn’t see a single player shouting at a referee. Another surreal difference from the men’s game

– There is a deep thrill watching a football game when you don’t know anything about the teams. I had no idea who the heavyweights were, who the star players were or any other relevant information. I wish I watched more games without that knowledge.

All in all a pretty fun afternoon and looking forward to the semis tonight.
Minega Isibo

Zing
I’m presuming Karius will be walking to Besiktas on his own then.
Andy Race, YNWA (unless you’re rubbish)

And a lovely retort
Andy Jones is correct that “gameweek” doesn’t sound right when applied to English football. He is way off the mark, however, in calling it an Americanism. We don’t use that term here and I have never heard it before. We do refer to the 17 weeks of the NFL season as “Week X” but don’t usually refer to weeks when discussing our other popular sports.

Also, each of our top professional leagues have about 30 teams in them so I’m not sure what Andy means by saying they only have 12. It’s almost as though he encountered a term he wasn’t used to in the mailbox and fired off a xenophobic emotional response devoid of any actual thought or research. Almost…

Since the gentleman who used this term is apparently Aussie, could it perhaps be a dreadful Australianism?

Kind Regards,
An American looking forward to NFL Week 1