Sunday, December 14, 2008

John Aldridge: Strong Minds A Key Weapon For Liverpool In Premier League Points Battle

If you were to pinpoint a single reason why Liverpool are top of the league and have just won their Champions League group it would have to be mental strength.

All good teams need it to stand any chance of being successful and Rafa Benitez’s side have it in abundance.

They have needed it as well because they have not yet found their fluency and they can sometimes be frustrating to watch.

But they are still grinding out results which can only happen if you have a really strong team mentality.

It’s fair to say we are still waiting for this Liverpool team to really click but that hasn’t stopped them from picking up enough points to top the league which says an awful lot about their character.

The win at Blackburn was fairly typical of what we have seen for much of this season. The performance wasn’t outstanding but they got the job done when it would have been so easy to slip up.

Ewood Park is never an easy place to win as Liverpool have discovered to their cost a couple of times but they scored three good goals and claimed maximum points and you can’t ask for much more than that.

It seems they are a bit better away from home at the moment, probably because they are afforded more space.

Meanwhile, it was great to see Liverpool top their Champions League group, but what pleased me most about the win against PSV was seeing three young local lads get on as substitutes.

Jay Spearing, Stephen Darby and Martin Kelly all did well after coming on, and I was really pleased for them.

Hopefully this wasn’t a token gesture by Rafa and he wasn’t just trying to pacify those of us who want to see more local lads promoted to the first team ranks.

You can’t dangle a carrot if there isn’t a hope in hell of young local players getting into the squad on a more regular basis.

Seeing them on the pitch in a Champions League game will have been a massive boost to the young players in the reserves and the academy because it’s important to know that there is a route into the first team if they are good enough.

I’m sure the majority of Liverpool fans would love to see more local lads getting their chance, so hopefully this was a sign of things to come.

*ONE thing that disappointed me this week was the news that Ryan Babel had asked to go out on loan.

The only reason you could possibly be looking for a move away from a team that’s top of the league would be if your confidence was so low that it needed boosting elsewhere.

Babel comes across as being quite a confident lad and it gave the impression that he was waving the white flag and wasn’t prepared to fight for his place.

He has to knuckle down and prove he is good enough to play for Liverpool because he is at one of the world’s greatest clubs and you don’t walk away from Anfield, even temporarily, without a fight.

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