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Headline of the day...
YOU'RE JUST A CHEAT
There was controversy at Anfield last night as Liverpool avoided another disastrous defeat thanks to a very dubious penalty won by David Ngog. The Liverpool forward went down under the tackle of Lee Carsley, despite there being no contact, and Carsley calls him "an embarrassment and a cheat" in the
Daily Express.
Hold the back page...
POOL DIVER
Carsley elaborates in the
Daily Mail: "I was absolutely nowhere near him. It is a joke. I knew I did not touch him and I told the referee to book me or send me off, because it would have made me feel better. I am sure [Ngog] has a family, and if I went home after doing that I would be embarrassed."
KING CON
The
Daily Mirror call the incident an "outrageous dive"...
NGOG DIVE FURY
...the
Daily Star do the same in their first paragraph but are more restrained in their second, saying "TV replays seemed to show Lee Carsley got nowhere near Ngog".
'CHEAT' NGOG SAVES POINT AS LIVERPOOL FALTER AGAIN
"A blatant dive" is
The Independent's verdict, adding that "it was arguably worse than Eduardo's dive against Celtic".
LIVERPOOL CAUGHT IN 'CHEAT' ROW
Even Rafa Benitez reckons it wasn't a penalty. He is quoted in
The Times as saying: "We scored with a penalty that probably wasn't a penalty, but we deserved to win the game."
'AN EMBARASSING CASE OF CHEATING' SAVES LIVERPOOL
And Ngog? He too reckons Birmingham were conned. Rafa tells
The Guardian: "I asked him about the penalty and he said maybe it wasn't."
Other top stories...
GERRARD RIDES TO THE RESCUE AS BLUES HOPES TAKE A DIVE
The Daily Telegraph's Henry Winter agrees with Rafa: "Liverpool deserved to take a point at least from this mad encounter, particularly as they had in Glen Johnson comfortably the best player on the pitch, but the manner in which Rafael Benitez's side secured the draw with 20 minutes remaining was highly distasteful."
RAFA'S LAGS ELEVEN
A bit of good news from the
Daily Mirror: "There were signs that the fog of crisis IS lifting for the Anfield club, even if they needed a blatant bit of gamesmanship from their young striker David Ngog to help. for a start, for all the disappointment of dropping two points at home against a Birmingham side they are expected to beat, they created enough chances to have won comfortably, and on another day would have buried their visitors without the help of a dubious - make that appalling - penalty."
GERRARD RETURNS TO SPARE LIVERPOOL HUMILIATION
The Guardian look at the Anfield crowd: "It was noticeable that Benitez retained the loyalty of a crowd that did not descend to booing even at the close of the match. If there is an immediate apprehension in Benitez's mind it will be that, in principle, he did have the means on the field to overwhelm Birmingham."
LIVERPOOL SAVED FROM HUMILIATION BY GERRARD
The Independent are slightly more negative: "In the good old days, when Rafael Benitez found himself in a tight spot, he would call upon Steven Gerrard and the skipper, with the figurative Superman cape fluttering behind him, would do the business and send Anfield into raptures. Last night there was another Gerrard rescue act but this was not Olympiakos or Milan who had pushed Liverpool into a corner, this was Birmingham City. And no-one left Anfield wondering whether they had witnessed a game to live with the best of all time. Many of them will have been wondering if the Liverpool manager has just about used up all his luck."
NGOG SHAMES LIVERPOOL
Similar thoughts from the
Daily Mail: "How long before even the Kop start to turn against their beloved Rafa? How long before they start to wonder if a manager who brought them such joy in Istanbul four years ago has started to run out of ideas? Benitez is a fine manager, as he has proved in Spain and here in England. But a draw that came only after David Ngog had secured a penalty with a quite disgraceful dive amounted to a result every bit as crushing as the six defeats they had suffered in the eight games prior to this contest."
SHOULD RAFA STAY OR GO?
Finally,
The Sun evaluate Rafa's performance, judging him on selection, tactics, motivation, substitutions and the crowd. The latter is the only section that gives the paper cause to believe he should stay at Anfield.