Compelling Soccer

That was going to say "BABEL!!!!!" up until the 90th minute. Then Sotirios Krygiakos committed his second error of the match and this time Pepe Reina couldn't bail him out. Lisandro Lopez buried the chance and Liverpool's CL hopes likely with it.

There's almost a strange symmetry between Liverpool and my favorite baseball team, the New York Mets these days. Injuries to two of their best players hurt badly, but the subsequent injuries are what does the team in. Today missing Steven Gerrard hurt as did not having Fernando Torres at full strength. But what proved to be the death blow was the lack of Glen Johnson on the backline. If Johnson plays, Jaime Carragher is in the center with Daniel Agger and Krygiakos is on the bench. Does Liverpool then walk away with the victory? It's impossible to say, even if it is tempting to superimpose Johnson into that moment instead of Krygiakos. But what we do know is that we can't do that; he wasn't there and the end result is a Liverpool draw that may as well have been a loss.

And so it looks like barring an unlikely event; an uninspired Lyon having already clinched needing to go to Fiorentina and win, that Liverpool appears to have crashed out of the Champions League group stage. The vultures are circling Rafa as a result.

Here is where the Mets comparison feels so apt for me right now. Much like Mets general manager Omar Minaya, Benitez has had unquestioned success as the manager of Liverpool but now is in the midst of an awful season thanks to injuries to the team's top two players and other key contributors. Minaya's teams had winning records every season of his tenure up until this last one, when a rash of injuries to every single one of the team's top five players destroyed the season. They came tantalizing close to the World Series in 2006, but fell to the eventual champions. Benitez Liverpool squad dropped a mere two games in the EPL last season, but still finished second to Manchester United. Both teams have spent a ton of money on acquisitions, many of which did not work out. Key players departed and were not adequately replaced so that when the injury bug hit, the end result was near total collapse on the remaining pieces.

Clearly both men have done things poorly at times given the resources of the clubs they are running. But therein lies the flaw; when is success not enough? What frustrates me most about Mets fans these days are those critical of Minaya because they don't like his process who are then too quick to write off the success he had and attribute it to luck. I'm sorry, I don't buy it. You don't take over a team as crappy as the Mets were in 2004 and get them a game from the World Series while subsequently posting the most wins in the National League over that span by luck. As good as Jose Reyes and David Wright are, they by themselves could not do it. Similarly, Liverpool was teetering on disaster under the run of Gerard Houllier. Rafa came in and turned them into a European power with two Champions League Final appearances. He got them the brink of a title last year. He brought in arguably the best striker in the world in Torres. (Minaya brought in the best centerfielder in baseball in Carlos Beltran, though that was not necessarily apparent at the time) You can knock the way he built this team this season, but he built the team that had them as legit contenders for the EPL crown, just as Minaya had built a team with his strategy that produced one of the better teams in baseball.

I guess I'm disgusted with the "We expect the world" mentality, combining with the "grass is greener." You can do worse. You can do better, but you cannot assume you will. As I would say as a Mets fan to someone who hates on Minaya because he isn't stats inclined; would you rather JP Riccardi? And a coworker asked me when I complained to him about Bob Bradley; would you rather Sven? So who is better than Rafa? Sir Alex and Arsene Wenger don't just appear out of nowhere. Look at so many big clubs and what happens when they switch managers. How many end up playing manager musical chairs? Does Liverpool really want to be Chelsea?

But hey, I run neither Liverpool nor the New York Mets. And in the end all I'll be doing is reacting like everyone else when the ax comes. I suspect I'll have plenty to react to in the next few months.