March 19, 2009
Europe's best scared of facing Liverpool in Champions League
STEVEN GERRARD reckons Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal are quaking in their boots at the prospect of being paired with Liverpool tomorrow.
Over the past week the Reds have dished out four-goal drubbings to both Real Madrid and United. Now skipper Gerro reckons the Kop have Europe’s big guns running scared ahead of the Champions League quarter-final draw in Nyon.
The first half of their 4-0 hiding of Real in particular — the Galacticos’ highest-ever Champions League defeat — sent shockwaves across the entire game. And Gerrard is convinced the one team their rivals will be desperately hoping to avoid in the draw is the Anfield outfit.
The bookmakers may still only rate them as fourth favourites behind Barca, holders United and Chelsea but the Liverpool skipper believes they could be left with egg on their face come May 27.
He roared: “If you ask me about a fear factor in the Champions League, I think the other seven are the ones who are going to have concerns about coming up against us, don’t you? The way I look at it is that we’re going to have to play them sooner of later so it doesn’t matter if it’s now, the semi-finals or the final.
“We’re not running scared of anyone. We’ll take whoever we get and believe that we are going to go through. “If we could hand-pick an opponent then maybe we’d want someone like Villarreal or Porto but, at this stage of the competition, there are no easy games. It may be a cliche but it’s true.
“Everyone who’s got to this stage has done well and believes in themselves. But we’ve shown — the players, manager and fans — we’re a force to be reckoned with when we pull it all together.”
Gerrard marked his 100th Euro appearance with a double against Real, leaving him level with Bayern’s Miroslav Klose as joint Champions League leading scorers on seven. Yet it was Liverpool’s first-half display against the Spanish giants which really left the Kop captain purring, regardless of his own personal milestone.
And he believes the opening 45 minutes, which blew Madrid out of the water as the Spaniards chased a 1-0 first-leg deficit, was the most complete in his Anfield career.
Gerrard added: “I honestly can’t remember us playing as well as we did in the first half of the Real game. “I don’t just mean in the Champions League or in Europe — I mean in any competition in all of the time I’ve been playing for Liverpool.
“I don’t think we’ve controlled a game like that from the very first minute, dictated it and bossed it that way before or for so long. “Playing like that, I don’t think there is a side in Europe that could have lived with us. We’ve played well against Arsenal, Juventus, Inter, Chelsea and whoever else, but that first-half performance against Madrid was better than them all.
“Maybe the results of some of those games were more important, like Milan in Istanbul, but in terms of pure control that was the best by a distance. “People are talking of Real being a bad team but they weren’t saying that the week before.
“The run of games they’ve been on in La Liga tells us they are a good team. “If they looked poor at Anfield it’s because that is how we made them look. We destroyed them and made them look ordinary and we deserve credit for that rather than looking for other reasons.”
Things are certainly looking rosier for the Reds than at any stage of the season, with Fernando Torres also hitting peak form after a hamstring-dogged campaign.
Torres gave United centre back pair Rio Ferdinand and — especially — Nemanja Vidic an absolute nightmare on Saturday to rekindle Anfield dreams of a first Premier League crown. But rattling up eight goals in a week — and leaving two of Europe’s true giants on their knees — also left Gerrard with regrets over what might have been, with the Reds still four points off the summit having played a game more than United.
He admitted: “There’s got to be a slight disappointment — for me anyway — when I see how well we have played. “If we had played like that every week we’d be five or six points clear at the top of the Premier League. “Real couldn’t live with us playing like that and I don’t think we’d have dropped half the points we have if we played like it — there’s a lesson there for us all.”
