Post match: Newcastle v Liverpool (EPL 4/12/24 7.30pm)

It was a horrendous error last night, let’s be honest.
But he won’t let it happen again. Darwin should have scored, those misses also cost us.
But at the end of the day the keeper’s error will be remembered.

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:+1:t2:

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Don’t want to talk about individual performances.

It was always going to a tough match. Away against an opponent who is all about intensity and with an extra day to prepare.

And then you have a shit referee which makes it near impossible to win that match.

Newcastle at home kicked Chelsea out of the League Cup, won against Arsenal and City were not able to win there at the start of the season.

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I would suggest that instead it’s precisely during that time that we’ve been performing well enough that we could afford him to be finding his feet. Unless I’m much mistaken, the role he’s had this season is somewhat different from under Jürgen.

If it helps, his finishing for Uruguay doesn’t seem to be too bad in the last couple of years, numbers-wise, which suggests to me that there is the core of that player in him. I’m not convinced that he will be able to piece it all together, but at the very least it’s something he has the ability to.

I’m not even arguing that he’s necessarily a Suarez waiting to have his breakout season (which if you go by his finding his finishing, was 2012-13, when he was 25 going on 26, which is pretty much where Núñez finds himself right now), but I’m saying that fans are giving him far too much grief.

Later Mané, perhaps. Early Mané, including even in 2018-19 was really inconsistent as well.

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Darwin FFS!!! :rage:

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Yup on reflection this morning it’s not the worse result I think how it came about was a kicker. Concerned with how we get through this period.

Our rivals as you say will or have the potential to drop points there. That’s less the case at Goodison where they roll over for them.

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I think Nunez cost us the game much more than Kelleher did. At 1-1 he has a tap in from 3 yards and somehow contrives to completely miss the ball. Then a couple of minutes later he gives it away needlessly in midfield and they score. That’s 2-1 to them when it should be 1-2 to us. After that he was just embarrassing for the entire rest of the game.

Slot shouldn’t be exempt from criticism either. Gomez at CB and Quansah at RB made no sense and the moment we got the third he should have closed the game down.

I also thought the ref was just incompetent rather than biased. I think the late penalty call for them proved that. It looked like a penalty to me.

Anyway , a 3-3 at Newcastle is a throwback to the good old / bad old days. Must have been fun for the neutrals , but I have to admit that I much prefer the controlled 2 nils we have become accustomed to under Slot. If we can get one of those performances on Saturday this will be completely forgotten.

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What was it that Roy Evans called it? Suicide football or something?

I felt, particularly in the first half, that our players looked knackered compared to Newcastle. With the extra European games and the injuries making fewer options to rest players it is always going to catch up with them. Having said that, Salah was exceptional.

One thing that Slot has managed to do is to get us to see games out towards the end and that failed here.

It’s disappointing to concede at the end through a mistake but these things happen. Dropping two points like that is a bit of a blow, but it is worth pointing out that we are now in December and Slot hasn’t lost away in any competition.

Oh yes, the ref is a home blower. I think Gordon knew that as went tripping over shadows.

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We were extremely lucky that they didn’t get the penalty. If there truly was an agenda against us from the refs, it would have been given instantly. We can’t win them all and a point isn’t the end of the world. Plus United lost which is always a bonus. Arsenal winning is irrelevant

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Thing is… we scored three goals away from home, hit the ‘woodwork’ twice’, had good attempts saved, missed golden ‘sitters’, we were fatigued to f*ck… had a referee that disrupted us gaining any rhythm or momentum, yellow carded us without compunction… played on a pitch with a 600mm slope…!
We never won, but we never got beat either…
Let’s take the game to the Blueshite on Saturday…

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This is the positive we did create more than enough and lost to a rather odd goal.

As said other teams will struggle here and it’s ticked off our difficult list of fixtures.

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Earlier Mané still didn’t miss the kind of chances Darwin is still missing. Yes, he can be annoying. I’d say Arne recognises this which is why he gets less game time. He can be a great creator of situations that lead to goals like the penalty against City. But he’s just not trustworthy enough at this level to put away enough chances.

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We were unlucky to not get a penalty when the handball in the box was overlooked. An occasion when it evened out.

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I wonder if the VAR had had a word that some of the Newcastle players were trying it on?

https://theanfieldnoise.com/t/the-unreliable-lfc-transfer-rumours-discussion-thread-part-3/3778/5992

Perhaps I should have made that post here instead. He did, it’s just easy to forget. I for one remember I didn’t see all the hype about Mané in 2016-17, when he just missed so many.

But the numbers really don’t lie. You could perhaps argue that his per 90 figures look better because of the limited sample size, but I think they do still tell an important story.

I’m not fond of the “eye test” simply because of situations like these, where such an evaluation is affected by personal biases, mood, overall sentiment about the game, and is very reactionary.

Stats can only tell you so much, you still need to actually watch the game to know what the numbers really mean in the context, but I think there’s enough there to suggest that there’s a lot of romanticising the past.

Mané with much more playing time has only exceeded Núñez’s goal contributions in total in 2 seasons, from 2018-20. Firmino just once in 2017-18.

Like I get it, we love them, and Núñez hasn’t delivered the level of success that we had in 2018-20, but it’s precisely because of the on-pitch success relative to expectations that we remember so fondly. I don’t think anyone was expecting us to get to the Champions League Final in 2018, having just scraped 4th place the previous season. But considering that was a time when we were going from Rodgers in 8th to Champions League Final in just 3 seasons before becoming all-conquering, it’s easy to remember them fondly and forget their flaws.

And all said, that doesn’t excuse the poor game he had last night. But it’s incredible the amount of shite he gets that’s disproportionate to what’s actually going on. The narrative has already been formed, so there’s precious little that he can do unless he becomes consistently Salah-level, that can change that narrative.

EDIT: And there’s some irony that in this same fixture last season, he was by all accounts the matchwinner who transformed the game when he came on. Clinical finishes that Salah or Mané would be proud of, let alone Firmino (it doesn’t really seem Jota’s style to score like that).

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I have heard that it was extremely blustery at the game and I suspect that had a lot to do with that last goal. It did look like the ball took a strange trajectory as if it was being held up as it passed over the keeper…

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The rain did look terrible, not sure about the wind. That was one of the things I noticed about the game, the weather, which really says a lot about it.

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That was a year ago though , and was probably his finest performance. We’ve seen nothing like it since. Even average players have world class games from time to time.

Edit: I just had a look , and in 76 PL games he’s got 22 goals. That’s nowhere near good enough.

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