Friday, July 31, 2009

Notts County 2-2 Liverpool XI

I’ve given up my regular blogging about Liverpool games as I just don’t have the time any more and prefer to concentrate on other matters here. Nonetheless, I suppose it’s worth making an exception for matches that I see in person…

I went to see a Liverpool Reserve XI play a pre-season friendly against Notts County this evening (taking advantage of my girlfriend living in Nottingham and celebrating our half-year anniversary in style!). It was a stronger line up than expected in some ways, featuring the likes of Darby, Pacheco and Nemeth – although I was disappointed not to see Hammill or Dalle Valle.

The match ended 2-2, which probably isn’t so encouraging. If this had been Arsenal’s young reserves then they would probably have wiped the floor with a League 2 outfit.

The hotly-tipped Pacheco scored the opener and definitely showed some nice touches, but he really was small and I’m worried he won’t make it in England. At least, he’s destined to be no more than the next Benayoun rather than the next Messi.

Of the others, I wasn’t hugely impressed. The defending was shaky at times, especially from set pieces, despite one of their centre forwards looking about 5’4” himself (kind of like a mini-me duplicate of the other actually). I didn’t think Nemeth looked too impressive – he did some good work in the build up to the first goal, but then went down rather easily in the box (just as well the ball came Pacheco’s way). I was fairly impressed with a couple of substitutes though – Simon and Saric I think they were – who livened things up a bit when they came on.

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