Improve – or else Liverpool face cup exit, warns Jamie Carragher

Aug 25 2008 by Ian Doyle, Liverpool Daily Post

“We realise we have to step it up a level on Wednesday but we have won two out of two and long may that continue.

“We know we will improve. We’ve got too many good players to keep performing the way we are doing at the moment so I’m sure it will turn, but we have to be delighted with the results.”

Liverpool’s win was enough to send them to the top of the table alongside Chelsea as the only teams to have won their first two Premier League games.

But Carragher said: “It is too early in the season to say where we are as a team. The proof that we have improved will be there after several months if we haven’t had too many draws and losses.

“There is a lot of pressure when you play for Liverpool and I know what the headlines would have been had we lost to Middlesbrough – they would have said the title’s over. I’ve been here long enough to know what it’s like so to reverse it and go top of the league shows what fine lines there are in football.

“I’m sure there would have been a lot of criticism of players and the manager had we lost but we are top of the

league and that’s the difference.”

Carragher’s 86th-minute equaliser, which would be only the fifth goal of his entire career, has been credited as an own goal to Middlesbrough centre-back Pogatetz.

“I want to claim it but it’s not the end of the world if I don’t get it,” added the Liverpool defender. “I’m hardly going to break any goalscoring records am I?”

Of Saturday’s game, Carragher said: “Middlesbrough performed well. It was a great strike from Mido and, to be honest, I couldn’t really see us scoring.

“They defended very well but I’ve seen that happen so often, we have done it so many times at Anfield, where all of a sudden something just happens in the last 10 minutes and the Kop sucks a goal in.

“We have been doing that for 40 years, since the days of Bill Shankly.”