It was always going to be on the cards and there seemed to be an atmosphere of "lets just get this over with !" amongst both the Saints team and supporters.

I would like to say this was a bad day at the office, but in the grand scheme of things it probably wasn't, although Liverpool scored three goals, two of which we gifted, it was a bad time to play Liverpool and we ended up with the same result everyone else has got against them this season.

Ironically when Liverpool scored neither keeper had seemingly touched the ball, when Alex McCarthy made a vain attempt to claw back the ball as it rebounded off Wesley Hoedt, it was his first touch of the game and given that the ball was already over the line, as we kicked off he still hadn't touched it when the ball was live as such.

It was always going to be hard, we were always going to struggle going forward without Danny Ings, but we battled manfully and although it was tough going with Shaquiri, Mane, Salah & Firmino playing some sublime one touch football we stuck at it.

You knew it wasn't going to be our day with the final kick of the first half, when the referee signalled 2 minutes of injury time you wondered where he had got that from, there had been no injuries no stoppages, but the story of Saints season, soft free kick given against us and we are punished.

That took away any lingering hope that we might get back in the game, at 2-0 there was always a chance that if we sneaked one back there might be an unlikely draw, but at 3-0 we were dead and buried.

Perhaps the stats tell the story of the game, although Liverpool had 61 % possession they only had 12 shots on goal and only 4 on target, they dominated possession, they buzzed around, but we battled to stop them getting in and hurting us, ironically as has been the case for a while lapses in concentration letting us down, on the first goal, four players could have been said to have not exactly been covered in glory for their part.

But we have to accept that we were facing a Liverpool side in full flow, they have the best attacking force in the country at the moment, they have options, if the four attacking players who strated for them aren't in form, then they still have Sturridge and also Adam Lallana when fit, in comparison Danny Ings who most would agree is our top striker was 7th in line behind those half dozen, that is what we are up against these days in the Premier league.

So we have to chalk this one off, regroup and look to Wolves next week, this was a test, the result has been neutral, although we were not great we were not truly awful either, we can move forward from this with a little optimism in that we have played our most difficult game of the season.

On a last note yes we did have only one shot on target that in the last minute, but it wasn't our first effort, that fell to Vestergaard in the first half who saw his header go a yard wide.

Photo: Action Images

IanRC added 20:17 - Sep 25 Can't remember when I felt so depressed watching a performance. We used to give big teams a run for their money (even though wins were infrequent) but there was never any chance of that on Saturday. Disappointing that Firmino catching the heels of Redmond as he was about to shoot was ignored by the refereeing team, though I suppose we should be used to this favouring of the 'big' teams, after all we do have the laughingly titled FPP endorsed by the (corrupt) FA.

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Rochdale Polls