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Every week, the ECHO gets the views of a Liverpool FC fan to gauge the feeling among supporters of the week that’s been and the week ahead.

This week we chat to Neil Atkinson, host of the Anfield Wrap and author of Make Us Dream, to get his views on Daniel Sturridge and returning to Selhurst Park to face Crystal Palace.

International week. Glad of the break?

In a sense, yes. The season starts properly here, no more stuttering, this is where club football happens. It’s time to kick on. Liverpool have 12 games in just over forty days until the FA Cup Third Round. Now is the time to be clever, to have learnt from mistakes and to do the business.

Momentum is massive in football. Liverpool need to grasp it and cling to it.

Roy Hodgson had some interesting views on Daniel Sturridge’s injury. Is this club v country feud detrimental?

I would have to take legal advice to discuss Roy Hodgson in a newspaper as august as the Liverpool Echo. My vitriol shouldn’t sully these pages.

And so on to Sturridge’s injury. How much of a blow is it, and how should Rodgers continue to deal with it?

It’s a matter of collective nerve. Without or without Sturridge Liverpool go out onto the pitch against 13 teams in this league with noticeably better players. They need to make that advantage tell and not have an inbuilt excuse. It is too easy for all parties, players, staff, supporters to get inside their own heads, get on their backs given Sturridge’s latest set back. Far too easy.

Liverpool need to relax and look at the games coming up against Palace, Stoke, Leicester and Sunderland as an opportunity to be superior. The first way you deal with this is by rolling sleeves up and working hard. The second way is getting a swagger back. The third way is by getting back to playing football with smiles on faces. Last season Liverpool looked to enjoy their work. This season they seem bogged down by it.

The way I’d deal with it tactically in the league is by going Brazilian and getting some Magic Squares on. Play Balotelli and Lambert up front, Coutinho and Sterling in behind and, at Palace, go with Lucas and Allen or Can at the base of the midfield. Give the full backs licence to go with two more natural olders protecting them and get the whole side more compact. It allows both Balotelli and Lambert to drop knowing the two behind them have the chance to fill the space.

Two up front worked for Liverpool last season as it meant they always had bodies in the box. Part of the innate superiority Liverpool have over their next four opponents means that weight of numbers in attack should tell. They obviously have to work very hard and concentrate too as Palace, Stoke, Leicester and Sunderland will run themselves into the ground. But that doesn’t mean superiority should be compromised for theoretical solidity. Liverpool need to think they are better than those sides and then show it.

Europe - a different matter. At Ludogrets I’d use something closer to a 433 there with Gerrard, Lallana and Henderson featuring if fit; I’d also use Borini as a wide forward. Liverpool have no excuse not to be fresh game by game. They have a number of good players, just lacking one or two magic ones.



The Reds return to Crystal Palace on Sunday. What’s more important - revenge or three points?

Revenge? What for?

Listen, let’s get something straight – one of the greatest things that ever happened in football happened last season at Selhurst Park in this fixture: Liverpool collectively tried to win a game 10-0. Ten nil. And they very nearly succeeded. The stats from the game are incredible. Liverpool had a shot every three minutes against a Tony Pulis team. It was, for 70 minutes, Liverpool’s best away performance of the season. They ran themselves into the ground.

When Luis Suarez got the ball out of the net at 3-0, the bravery and purity of that side was never better encapsulated. They made anything feel possible. Anything at all. Score five at Stoke. Score six at Cardiff. Score four in 20 minutes against Arsenal. Nothing was out of the question. And when Suarez gets the ball, that’s it. That’s the apogee. That’s the thing and the whole of the thing. What else are we in it for if not that?

It’s easy to be cynical in football. It’s ongoing from all supporters. It’s easy to see success and failure as digital things which cannot be transcended. But this game does transcend whether or not what Liverpool tried to do succeeded; that they tried to do it is the achievement.

The travelling Reds got to see and feel something which blazed and if it was eventually extinguished, well who cares?

To have had that moment, that sense of being entirely on fire, that idea that there is nothing but this, that this unlikely, slightly deranged band of Reds were your Reds, our Reds, and that there is nothing they can’t conceive of, nothing they won’t try and do, to have had that unlikely second of colossal, improbable belief, well how many football supporters in the world, in the whole wide world, how many of them have had that moment, how many have had a moment that pure?

When Suarez gets the ball, it’s the proudest I’ve been of any Liverpool team I’ve ever seen. Any of them, winning all those trophies they’ve won, that was the moment. What a gang of lads they were. So I’ll have the three points, please.

How do you see the rest of the year panning out for Liverpool?

See the Sturridge answer. Hold your nerve. That’s the key thing. Regain trust in one another. Everyone except Chelsea in last season’s top seven has disappointed to date. Nothing is gone, nothing is lost. It’s important to make progress up to the third round of the FA Cup. This is the trick Arsenal have pulled for ten years. These games are the ones where you define your season, by having too much for mediocrity. Get to Old Trafford with 10-12 more points on the board and almost anything is possible.

Any other business?

Fancy yourselves and win. That is the only business in town. Oh and I’ll be signing copies of Make Us Dream – The Story Of Liverpool’s Season 2013/14 with John Gibbons over the weekend.

A quote about the book: “Quite simply, I haven’t read a better review of a season since The Glory Game – and Hunter Davies had an unprecedented access all areas pass to produce his classic.”

Not my words but those of David Prentice of this very company. So we’ll be signing that brilliant Christmas present in Pritchard’s in Crosby on Saturday at 11am, then The Olde Bookshop in Formby at 1pm and Ormskirk Waterstones at 3pm. Fry’s Chocolate Cremes are our rider. They are the Kendal Mint Cake of North Merseyside book tours.