Pavilionaire
Well-known member
- Jul 7, 2003
- 31,515
Dunk's aberration left us to defend a man light for ten minutes. Hardly ideal, and infuriatingly avoidable, but teams achieve it all the time. I don't think you can describe it as pivotal - the game didn't turn at that moment. We were already under pressure at the time.
It didn't lead directly to the equaliser in the way the concession of a penalty did, last time out. It could be argued that Hemed's miss at 2-0 (though more forgivable) was far more 'pivotal'.
All this though misses the whole point of the piece, which is that apportioning individual blame isn't beneficial to our aims. The TEAM earned their two goal lead, and the TEAM let it slip.
But it's not any old ten minutes, it's the final ten minutes (actually 13 minutes in this case) when QPR are losing and throwing everything at us, when they have the momentum having scored 15 minutes earlier. The commentators could sense QPR were likely to equalise, indeed they were talking about QPR even going on and winning the match.
Dorset Seagull makes a great point about the old Liverpool team preying on weakness. The fact is that even before Tuesday night the man most likely to get sent off is Dunk and the man most likely to make a stupid defensive mistake is Dunk.