There are few players who were more vocal speaking out against the club’s former owners and the lack of investment than Pepe Reina. The man many players regard as an ideal vice-captain or captain of Liverpool Football Club has constantly stood up against those seeking to harm the reds.
He has now jumped to the defence of Fernando Torres, who was almost singled out by the current manager for poor form and confidence. Reina insisted the blame would have been better lay at the doors of other players, insisting that Torres had been handed poor service and hadn’t seen much of the ball due to Liverpool’s present style of play.
He said:
“All strikers are about the goals. They want to score them and they want to score the winners like Fernando did against Blackburn.
I think he can build up now to what he was like of old. What has happened to him is more or less what has happened to David Villa in Barcelona. They are both great players but when strikers are not scoring people are always disappointed in them.
“It’s not fair. I don’t think we have been assisting him like we should, particularly in the last few weeks. He has not been able to do anything at all.
“We know he is the type of player that can win a game just like that but we can’t expect him to keep doing it on his own. We have to feed him in. That’s the point.”
Pepe insists that Liverpool must now push on.
“We have just been keeping focused on what we are doing, because it has been a tough situation. Thankfully the win over Blackburn means we are slightly better off than we were.
“It is a really tight table. We are only three points from eighth place and now the challenge is to keep winning games. We can’t give this up. That’s the way we have to be in every single game.”
Meanwhile John Cross in the Daily Mirror believes that Man United are keen to make a, quite frankly, laughable £12M bid for Pepe Reina to replace their 40 year old Van der Saar.
We will be watching with interest to see how Roy responds to this speculation. Hopefully he will have learned his lesson from the Torres saga a week or two ago.