Liverpool took the lead through Raul Meireles but allowed Wigan Athletic to get back into the game after Steve Gohouri’s effort leveled the scores shortly after the hour mark, resulting in a 1-1 draw for the Anfield men.
Coach Kenny Dalglish was happy with his side's performance but insists that after the international duties of midweek his players lacked the edge to win the game.
“I think it was a game where we started well enough, we scored a good goal by Raul [Meireles] then Luis [Suarez] hit the post but you could tell that a lot of them had been playing on Wednesday night,” he told reporters.
“It’s the same if you get a game yourself on a Wednesday night, there’s just that bit of an edge missing.
“I think if the edge had been on the final pass would have been better and on three or four occasions we would have been in, but the sharpness was away a wee bit, which is understandable.
"But saying that we are obviously disappointed not to have taken three points and with a bit of luck we would’ve got them.”
Luis Suarez made his first start in a Liverpool shirt with the 24-year-old hitting the woodwork twice.
Dalglish was frustrated by the impact the international fixtures had on team selection, with Daniel Agger not fit to make the squad while Meireles came off as a second half substitute after picking up an illness on international duty.
The Liverpool boss admits it is a big blow to lose the Portuguese player, who has now scored in his last five Liverpool appearances.
“It hasn’t come from the cooking at Melwood, that’s for sure. It could just be a bug that’s going around. It was just sickness," he said.
“During the first half he wasn’t feeling to clever and he tried to play on but it wasn’t fair to ask him to.”
“Whether it’s a result of the game in midweek for Portugal and he’s just over-exerted himself or it’s a virus-- I don’t know what the cause of it is but he was certainly sick at half time.
"He’s a goalscoring threat for us so it was a blow to lose him.”
No comments:
Post a Comment