Middlesbrough 1, Liverpool 1 - post match analysis

Jan 14 2008 by Nick Smith, Liverpool Daily Post

CASTING an envious glance across the technical area isn’t something Rafael Benitez has reason to do to many managers – perhaps least of all Gareth Southgate.

The Spaniard is leading a club that no other in the English game can rival in terms of honours, a haul that has been extended in such memorable fashion during his reign.

Middlesbrough, with their sad, solitary Carling Cup that took until 2004 to arrive in the cabinet, couldn’t even dream of such riches.

But there is one area of the respective clubs that could do with being shipped from the industrial heartland of the north east to Merseyside in bulk at the moment – stability.

Apart from the unveiling of record defensive buy Martin Skrtel, there’s been precious little of that on show at Anfield this week.

It’s something Middlesbrough goalkeeper Mark Schwarzer knows a thing or two about. His safe hands have ensured a decade as number one at the Riverside and hence more appearances in the Premier League than any other foreign player.

And in the build-up to Saturday’s game he declared: “We are fortunate to have Steve Gibson – there is a stability which is not there at other places.”

Too right. He must have seen Liverpool coming.

Southgate might only have been a manager for 18 months but he is keeping his head admirably above the surface in the choppy waters of top-flight management.

He is already the league’s eighth longest-serving manager and despite the sheer mid-table mediocrity his sides keep churning out, he is a clear beneficiary of support from his chairman.

Which probably explains why the only supporters’ banner you’ll see Gibson on features his face beneath the words ‘one of us’.

As for Benitez, he is fifth on the managerial service list after a reign of only three-and-a-half years but one that has yielded victory in one of two European Cup finals he has guided his side too, plus an FA Cup.

He has the honours, the pedigree and, for the above achievements, fanatics willing to march through the streets of Anfield to get their message of support across.

And although his side have now only managed to draw four games in a row, he still has a top four outfit under his wing.

But what he hasn’t got is a Steve Gibson.

Nobody would ever swap the plastic soullessness of the Riverside for the inspiring surroundings of Anfield for a minute – and that hostility isn’t just because Liverpool hadn’t scored here for six years until Fernando Torres’s awesome intervention on Saturday.

However, thanks to the owner they do have a togetherness, a single-mindedness, and a sense of security – traits that you’d never imagined Liverpool would ever crave.

And they allow the somewhat under-whelming yet infinitely likeable Southgate to carry on with the job of lifting his players for such occasions, as he did when Middlesbrough inflicted Arsenal’s only defeat of the campaign on them last month.

So while it may be some way off the most exciting club to support, at least they are comfortable within their own ordinariness. And you only have to look – to give one example – a bit further up the east coast to see what turmoil you can be thrown into if you’re uncertain of your future.

And what Liverpool need more anything now is a clear sense of direction other than the one they had on Saturday – destined for nothing other than the usual reliance on Torres to dig them out of a hole.

Which he did with a brilliant 71st-minute equaliser that took his tally for the campaign to 17 and merely added to the overwhelming evidence that Benitez pulled off a masterstroke by homing in on the brilliant 23-year-old in the summer transfer window.

But what surrounded it was more evidence that the players are currently doing the manager few favours in winning him any from his bosses.

His side looked lethargic, inexplicably nervy and, in the main, only threatening when Sami Hyypia was closing in on corners.

Which could have brought a winner when, in injury time, Schwarzer saved his header, as he had done Steven Gerrard’s two minutes earlier.

But three points would have seemed a laughable prospect at half-time.

The home side were doing everything Liverpool weren’t. Lively forwards Tuncay and Jeremie Aliadiere were causing problems with their movement and bringing the wide men into play.

At the other end, it was nowhere near as co-ordinated, as Benitez’s decision to start the fading Andriy Voronin alongside Torres with John Arne Riise pushing up on the left looked ill-advised.

It was only after Torres’s fifth goal in five league games that they managed to attack with any urgency or purpose, helped in no small part by Ryan Babel’s half-time replacing of a strangely shaky Alvaro Arbeloa.

Before that, long-range efforts looked the best bet and even they were few and far between. Passing was also lousy as their feet looked as itchy as Nicolas Anelka’s in a transfer window.

It all transpired to produce what was possibly Liverpool’s worst first-half performance of the season, and Middlesbrough capitalised on their opponents’ sluggish start with a fine opening goal in the 26th minute.

Stewart Downing whipped the ball to the far post and two intelligent headers by Gary O’Neil and Aliadiere teed up George Boateng, who started the move by slipping past a sleepy Liverpool midfield, for a simple tap-in.

The fact that a virus had swept through the home camp in the build-up to the game only added to the embarrassment – which would have been driven home in the 67th minute if Downing’s drive had crept inside the post instead of cannoning back off it via Pepe Reina’s fingertips.

And then Boro learnt a lesson that all Premier League defences are gradually coming to terms with as Torres’s debut season marches on – that if your cushion is only one goal, he's likely to whip it from under you in an instant.

And just four minutes after Downing’s misfortune, it hit home harder than the left winger’s free-kick that pole-axed Javier Mascherano in the first half.

When Torres received the ball from Babel he had dropped deeper in search of service that he just wasn’t getting from his midfield, and neither of the domineering duo of Robert Huth and David Wheater tracked his movement.

Torres could even afford to slip on the greasy Riverside surface before composing himself and lining up another contender for his personal goal of the season competition, thrashing the ball into Schwarzer’s right-hand top corner from 25 yards.

If only everything at Anfield at the moment was as reliable as Torres.

It was a goal to lift any mood, even one as rotten as Benitez’s must have been on Saturday morning following more doubts over his future making their way into the public domain.

It’s a shame this performance and result won’t do the same.