You’ll never walk alone.
Blaming Mario Balotelli masks Liverpool’s biggest problems
The Italian swapped shirts during halftime of the loss to Real Madrid, but whipping up a media frenzy over the incident is a mere distraction. The Reds have serious problems they’ll need to address if they want to return to last season’s glories.
Alex Livesey
Well, you'll never walk alone when times are good, but you sure will trudge down on your lonesome if Liverpool need a scapegoat to blame for their poor performances. Now, it's new forward Mario Balotelli that's left to walk solo.
Balotelli raised a furor among certain Liverpool fans, the English media and Brendan Rodgers when he swapped shirts with Pepe at halftime during Liverpool's Champions League match, when Real Madrid were up 3-0. The manager implied Balotelli will be disciplined for his behavior, as such a move has no place in English football culture.
However, if you go back to the Chelsea-Liverpool game in December 2013, Philippe Coutinho can be spotted swapping shirts with Oscar, with Chelsea up 2-1 at the break. But scapegoating is neither rational nor reasonable, instead stemming from pure emotion. This Liverpool side, currently fifth in the table with four wins, have been a let-down after last season's title challenge. But rather than assess what's gone wrong, all the blame is being piled upon one player.
Balotelli likely deserves criticism, playing poorly, missing open goals and often looking disinterested. But focusing on him alone deflects attention from Liverpool’s other problems, which were evident last season: the suspect defense, the lack of cover in the middle, inconsistent attacking midfielders and over-dependence on their strikers scoring more goals than they concede.
The fury over the shirt-swap seems to imply that complex issues boil down to one simple solution. But if that was the case, then when Balotelli came off at halftime, Liverpool should have, at the least, elicited some sweat from the Madrid defenders. Instead, the Real players could well have turned the screws, scoring another handful of goals. Fortunately for the Reds, they turned their attention to the upcoming el Clasico, or perhaps to their modeling contracts.
Focusing on one player as the reason for all the team's problems is nothing new, of course. Arsenal always seem to have a scapegoat in waiting, and the media loves nothing more than to play into it. Take Mesut Özil, for example: whenever the team is playing well, then his movement is graceful and measured. When the team is playing badly? He's a waste of space, lazy and Arsenal are basically playing with 10 men. The year before that it was Olivier Giroud, and before that Aaron Ramsey. The same goes for Robin van Persie at United, who has, after the initial honeymoon period, been put through the same assembly line of tired cliches and stupid criticisms. Look at how few miles he covered in that last game! Total disgrace!
Mario may have his faults, but suggesting that he doesn’t have a football brain, as Graeme Souness bellows, is ridiculous. The blame falls upon him, because it’s easier than accepting Liverpool on the whole might have a problem. Or it’s easier to fault the new boy on the block, the one that already has a poor reputation, than to turn against Liverpool heroes.
Like Reds' captain Steven Gerrard. It has been evident for some time, at both international and domestic level, that Gerrard is pretty much past it --whatever it really is. In the World Cup, he was one of the perpetrators to England's demise, especially when he gifted two goals in the Uruguay match. During Liverpool's late season run in last year, he laid out the red carpet for Demba Ba, as well as for anyone else with any sort of athleticism who ran at him. And in the Real Madrid game, well:
You see that player with the armband shuffling listlessly while Karim Benzema, Cristiano Ronaldo and James Rodríguez unlock the defense? There are brave men at your door, Simon Mignolet, but Gerrard just can't be bothered. It's as if he was so busy contemplating his relation to the space around him, the troubles of the world and the infinite glory of the ever-expanding universe, and thus coming to grips with his own insignificance within the realm of existence to even tackle or foul any of those three players.
We can also look at the second goal here.
Watch as Glen Johnson does his best matador defense and watch on as Benzema leaps unchallenged in the air and scores an easy header.
The third goal is a combination of the two players that we’ve faulted so far, since two heads are better than one.
The challenge for the initial ball is commendable and even the challenge on Pepe as the ball squirms loose can’t be faulted. But once the ball gets to Benzema, watch as how Johnson and Gerrard stand in awe as he puts Madrid up 3-0, each refusing to put in a challenge or even to remotely bother the striker.
Scapegoating Balotelli diverts attention from these two, as well as other underperforming members of the team. Coutinho had a terrible game and has been rather inconsistent all season, Raheem Sterling looked gassed, Dejan Lovren pulled the wool over everyone's eyes last season and Joe Allen looked absolutely lost. The fact that a Real Madrid team who have decimated and reduced their opponents to nothing more than wailing carcasses did not do the same to Liverpool was a gift in itself.
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The manager, too, should not escape criticism -- in fact, he may be most deserving of it. Rodgers has thrown his players under the bus, but Balotelli bears the brunt of his scorn. Rodgers has publicly called him a risk, suggested that he was their last option in the market and even said that it remains to be seen if Mario's best is good enough. All this allows him to dodge the alarming truth: he's out of ideas if Liverpool doesn't score early goals. Last year Rodgers was a revelation; this year, he's faced with the same issues in his team without the easy solutions of Luis Suárez, a fit Daniel Sturridge and gluts of goals in the first twenty minutes. Without answers, Rodgers deflects the blame.
Swapping shirts at half-time may be ill-advised, but it should be a non-issue. Those making it an issue are simply trying to build a mountain out of a mole-hill so that it can obstruct their views from the actual problems Liverpool face. Using Balotelli as a scapegoat won’t solve the side’s woes -- in fact, it’s likely to make them worse. The only hope they have of returning to their title-challenging ways is to face the problems head-on, rather than hide behind issues of faux-morality and blame-shifting.
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