Swansea vs Liverpool: The Shelvey effect

Swansea also made a sub at half time replacing Nathan Dyer with Jonathan de Guzman.

After 10 minutes of the second half, Liverpool were also making a substitution, an injured Coutinho was replaced with Iago Aspas. Unfortunately for Aspas, he had a pretty dire game. I hate jumping on a new signing’s back and obviously all hope is not lost just yet, but he didn’t really add anything to our game and lost possession on several occasions. This is quite worrying considering the role he plays but hopefully he can adjust, learn and improve. After all, this is only one match.

Shortly after the substitution, there was an incident on the field between Shelvey and Lucas. It was essentially handbags but it wasn’t nice to see ex team mates pushing and shoving each other over nothing. Both got booked for their troubles too, so it was hardly worth it!

Whilst Liverpool continued to try and regain a foothold on this game, Swansea were becoming ever more confident. Some of their key players like Michu had been quiet in the first half but now they were coming to light. Michu was back to his old self just after the hour mark when after being set up by… YES Jonjo Shelvey, he converted to put his side right back in the game.

By now, Liverpool looked as though they were trying to hold on for the draw. Kolo Toure replaced Andre Wisdom with 20 minutes to go and the Reds looked reluctant to break. A lot of criticism was given to the defence on Twitter last night but I think they dealt effectively with the Swansea pressure especially late on in the game, it may not have been a textbook response but it worked and they successfully prevented Swansea from finding a winner.

Raheem Sterling added some late excitement for the Reds as he definitely wanted to help Liverpool find a late winner. A free kick from Steven Gerrard gave Liverpool some sort of chance but in his 400th appearance as captain, Stevie took the chance himself and sent his effort over. As the game wound down, it was Swansea that were still pushing but thankfully for Liverpool, the game ended 2-2 and the Reds were back on top of the league.

This match is a difficult one to analyse really because of the nature of how it started. Swansea are not an easy team to beat at home and so some would say a draw is a good result anyway. I’m certainly happy with the draw, although it would have been nice to collect 3 points of course. The other thing to note is that Liverpool could have come off a lot worse in this game. The early gifted equaliser for us as I said in the post seemed to take the bite away from Swansea, if we hadn’t of found a goal so quickly I think Swansea would have pushed hard and perhaps even have found a second before half time but then this is all guess work isn’t it?

The point is, it’s a decent result, we still haven’t lost and we’re still top of the league with Southampton at home next. I get the frustration from some fans about particularly the second half performance, but I don’t understand when people act like it’s the end of the world, because, quite frankly, it’s not.