Give them a yard and not even 25 men would stop Liverpool's SAS - Luis Suarez and Daniel Sturridge

 
Ian Herbert28 March 2014

Good luck with stopping the Liverpool charge, Tottenham. The squad who arrive on Merseyside this weekend not only face a side who have won seven consecutive Premier League games but one blessed with the best strikeforce in the country.

SAS is the moniker Luis Suarez and Daniel Sturridge have assumed across a season in which Liverpool have scored in 21 consecutive Premier League games, a sequence way ahead of the next-best seven-game run by Swansea, and have only twice failed to net in the top flight.

The pattern at Anfield is generally an early blitz: Tottenham have scored only 13 first-half League goals this season — Liverpool have scored 13 in the first 16 minutes of games.

Sunderland manager Gus Poyet, an intelligent strategist, sought strength in numbers to quell Suarez and Sturridge on Wednesday night. He deployed a five-man defence which he had tested only in the week leading up to the Anfield fixture and the smothering plan, backed up by doughty defending, frustrated Liverpool.

But 25 defenders won’t be enough against the SAS if one of them drifts deeper than a yard away from either of the pair.

When the deadly duo is allocated space in excess of that — as Sturridge was when he ran at Sunderland’s Andrea Dossena early in Wednesday’s second half — there will be consequences. Sturridge’s moment of liberty allowed him to lift his head from the ball and strike Liverpool into a 2-0 lead.

Southampton manager Mauricio Pochettino, the only coach to win at Anfield this season, limited Sturridge’s opportunities in September — just like Poyet — by pressing from high up the field. His players reduced Liverpool to playing the ball long and their defence that day — “like rocks” as Adam Lallana described them — were ready for them.

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Southampton were also helped by one of the less successful of Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers’s experiments — the use of four central defenders — which allowed them in. The defence remains the punishable component of the Liverpool team, which is Tottenham’s crack of light on Sunday.

But there can be no margin for error — not so much for Younes Kaboul and Jan Vertonghen as for Nabil Bentaleb and Sandro, if Tim Sherwood anchors the midfield with them. It was Arsenal’s looseness in central areas which enabled Liverpool to wreak such havoc in their 5-1 annihilation of the Gunners in February, six weeks after Tottenham had shipped five against Rodgers’s players.

Suarez and Sturridge — the first Liverpool strike partnership to hit 20 goals each in a season since Ian St John and Roger Hunt 50 years ago — are a duo unlike either of the other two pairs to have reached that tally in the same Premier League season: Peter Beardsley and Andy Cole in 1993-94 and Didier Drogba and Frank Lampard from 2009-10.

They are individualists, “soloists” as Rodgers like to call them; to you and me just plain selfish when they need to be.

But two lone rangers are a more complicated danger than one pair, as Arsene Wenger will tell you.

The Frenchman’s eminently sensible plan of attack for Anfield — “to master the ball and to have the ball and to dominate the game” — was reduced to dust in the 20 minutes it took Liverpool to go 4-0 up.

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