They started yesterday with two debutants: the centre-back Mauricio Pellegrino and forward Fernando Morientes, and though the team played with energy, it was mostly wasted. It wasn’t that Liverpool weren’t good enough; rather, that they weren’t nearly good enough.
Think of that “This Is Anfield” sign that hangs in the tunnel and wonder how things have come to such a pass. Agitation now seeps from every seat in the old stadium. A Liverpool player makes a mistake and someone sitting near you damns him to hell. They don’t believe things are going to get better at Anfield and, alas, there was nothing yesterday to suggest otherwise.
For Liverpool reds, the most depressing part of the afternoon were the final 25 minutes when Wes Brown’s dismissal reduced United to 10 men, yet only served to accentuate the gap between the teams.
United regrouped. John O’Shea replaced Cristiano Ronaldo and moved comfortably into Brown’s place. The team retreated into its own half and tightened its grip on the game.
United could do that because they passed the ball better than their rivals. Their five-man midfield was simply too much for Liverpool’s four.
Neither was the advantage merely numerical. Roy Keane and Paul Scholes were much better than Steven Gerrard and Dietmar Hamann, and then Ronaldo, Darren Fletcher, Louis Saha and Wayne Rooney all had their moments. Rooney, of course, is the perfect example of a player who does not need to be central to a match to suddenly become its central figure.
Throughout the opening 20 minutes yesterday, he was a peripheral figure, playing wide on the left. The Liverpool crowd was taunting him relentlessly. What 19-year-old could remain unaffected? Then Gerrard fouled Fletcher and Liverpool’s concentration wavered for a few seconds. That was all it took. United moved the ball left to Ronaldo, who passed inside to Rooney. He was 35 yards from goal and not in a particularly dangerous position, but he took two quick touches and, just as you thought he might shoot, the ball was whizzing towards Jerzy Dudek.
The shot was well struck, but close to Dudek, who was slow to react and couldn’t get his body behind the ball. “I had a good view of it,” said the goalkeeper afterwards. “I don’t know what happened.”
Two seasons ago, Dudek conceded two bad goals in a game against United at Anfield. Before that game, he had been outstanding. Since then, he has not been the same. Yesterday’s goal was his mistake but the speed with which Rooney dispatches his shots will catch out more goalkeepers than Dudek.
After scoring, the Liverpudlian raced towards the fans closest to him, who happened to be at Anfield’s Kop End. Rooney then put his hands to his ears by way of asking the fans if they still considered him “a fat b*****d”. Some will complain about the teenager’s provocative behaviour, but he had been goaded mercilessly.
Liverpool had played reasonably well through that opening quarter but the goal drained their morale, as it will in a team that lacks belief.
Morientes’s career has had its share of debut goals and he tried his hardest to get one yesterday, but he got just two glimpses of the goal before being replaced late in the game.
The second of those half-chances came from a fine Luis Garcia pass that Morientes chested forward but then blazed high and wide. As he walked from the pitch, the United faithful sung “You Should Have Signed For A Big Club” and how that must have galled the home crowd. Morientes told Rafael Benitez, his manager, that he was very, very tired. Welcome to the Premiership, Señor.
United could easily have been two up at the interval. Scholes played the ball back for Keane, who smashed a volley that looped viciously over Dudek’s head but ricocheted back off the bar.
Liverpool picked up the tempo in the second half and when John Arne Riise played a neat pass through to Morientes, there was a brief moment of danger. It perished almost immediately with a crunching Gabriel Heinze tackle. As a motif for the entire match, that moment serves us well: technically and tactically superior for most of the game, United were also the team with the warriors.
Liverpool, of course, have suffered through injury, but their conquerers yesterday were also without the injured Gary Neville, Rio Ferdinand, Alan Smith, Ryan Giggs and Ruud van Nistelrooy. The quality of the effort and the testimony to the strength of United’s squad lay in the sense of a team playing and performing at full tilt.