Football’s First Defender

However, Liverpool, who have always had an advantage in the away game, did not expect that in one round, the situation on the field would change drastically.

As far as Liverpool was concerned, when Chelsea launched a "siege", Chelsea caught it once, which was not a counterattack, and achieved great results.

Hazard and Azpilicueta's left 2v2 chance.

Hazard sent a through ball close to the sideline to Azpilicueta who was on the edge.

Markovic, who is defending on the right, is still too young to break the ball out of bounds, throwing the ball out of bounds to Chelsea, and wants to get the ball out of the baseline.

But Azpilicueta won't let Markovic have his way.

Forcibly accelerating and overtaking from the outside, and then using the huge advantage of physical confrontation, Azpilicueta squeezed Markovic's card from the outside.

Before the ball went out of the baseline, the ball was regained.

Directly opening the way with his body, Markovic's thin body is much worse than that of Azpilicueta who has been in the Premier League for many years.

Azpilicueta broke through directly along the baseline and reached the Liverpool penalty area.

Afterwards, under Liverpool's layers of defense, Azpilicueta easily flicked the ball to his side.

Hazard, who followed up, was within Liverpool's penalty area. After receiving the ball, he directly changed the direction of the ball and tried to hit the goal.

Compared with Hazard's flexibility, Lovren, who came back to defend, is too bulky.

Hazard's sudden touch of the ball made it too late for Lovren to react. He stretched out to break Hazard's leg, and instead directly knocked Hazard down in the penalty area.

"beep--"

The referee directly reached out and pointed to the penalty spot, and Liverpool was sentenced to death.

Hazard did it right away.

Although Mignolet predicted the right direction of the goal, but Hazard's penalty kick was fast enough and the angle was tricky enough, Mignolet had nothing to do.

After taking the lead, Chelsea further implemented Mourinho's defensive strategy, which also made Liverpool's offense have no excellent opportunities at all.

Chelsea's defense is also different from the previous fight in the middle.

In today's home team's defensive tactics, layers of interceptions were set up in the midfield, but in order to deal with Liverpool's recent penetrating offensive play, when Liverpool advances, Chelsea will not be tough with Liverpool in the midfield.

Instead, retreat step by step until within the restricted area to build the strongest line of defense.

During the game, it was easy to see that Coutinho, Lallana, and Sterling, who retreated to respond, played quite brilliant consecutive passes.

But when passing continuously and opening up enough passing space, looking around, there are at least 4 Chelsea blue-shirt defenders in the penalty area, holding their positions and limiting the pass to the penalty area.

In the end, Liverpool still dominated by long shots.

Courtois played steadily, and Liverpool's opening momentum was somewhat suppressed by Chelsea.

Chelsea's defensive counterattack was impressive. Fortunately, they had a defense line of three central defenders. Chelsea did not invest much in the counterattack. With Yang Feng's occasional supplementary defense, Chelsea did not have an outstanding counterattack opportunity.

Costa was still directly restrained by Yang Feng in this game. Even though Yang Feng would sometimes abandon Costa and go out to defend, Costa couldn't wait for the chance to catch the ball at all.

Whenever Yang Feng gave up on himself and went out to make up the defense, he would definitely complete the clearance immediately, and would not give Chelsea the ball player a chance to pass the ball to Costa.

Costa has been playing very depressed during the game. Even in the first half of the frontcourt defense, Costa was whistled for a yellow card due to excessive movements, which can be described as extremely depressed.

At halftime, the game was finally fixed at 1-0, and Chelsea, who were playing at home, temporarily took the lead.

In the situation of falling behind in the away game, Rogers can only choose to give it a go, continue to strengthen the team's offensive investment, and give the players more offensive autonomy.

With the two wing backs making more forward assists, the number of offensive players in Liverpool's frontcourt began to increase. Facing Chelsea's defense, they could gradually start to play a threat.

Although this will make Liverpool's own defense more loopholes, and there will be more room to watch in the backcourt, but Liverpool now have to do the same.

Fortunately, while Liverpool's offense regained its advantage, under Yang Feng's large-scale defensive coverage, Chelsea's counterattack, although threatening, still did not form a good way to turn it into a threat and hit the goal.

Sterling, who played the important role of Liverpool's striker in this game, performed quite well.

Among Chelsea's defensive crowd, he has brilliantly displayed his speed and flexibility advantages.

Especially the tacit pass between him and Coutinho in a small area can always tear apart Chelsea's defense and create an offensive space.

At the beginning of the second half of the game, Coutinho suddenly swiped the ball horizontally during the breakthrough on the left side. Sterling, who came over, shot a low angle shot from a small angle. If Courtois fell to the ground fast enough, This ball must have passed Courtois's wicket and flew into the goal.

And Liverpool's frontcourt pressing, resulting in an on-the-spot counterattack opportunity, also gave Sterling a huge support in front of the attack.

Markovich's long pass after stealing the ball from the right side directly found Sterling in front of the penalty area. Sterling leaned back against Terry for the first time, and when Terry was about to exert force, he hit Kaiser. Tring, when stealing the ball.

Sterling turned around suddenly with the ball, accelerated directly, got rid of Terry's defense, and entered Chelsea's penalty area.

Before Cahill's supplementary defense was in place, Sterling volleyed and hit the goal, which once again tested Courtois.

It's just that Courtois, who successfully squeezed the veteran goalkeeper to the bench, played too steadily, and made another side attack, holding the ball out of the baseline, trying to keep Chelsea's goal.

Sterling was also very speechless. In this game, as far as shooting is concerned, Sterling, who often misses the goal, has a shooting accuracy rate far exceeding the average today, but he can't get past the opponent's goalkeeper at all.

Whether his shooting skills are too poor or Chelsea's goalkeeper is too strong, Sterling is almost doubting himself.

Fortunately, hard work pays off.

No matter how strong Courtois is, he is still a human being, not a god, and he still cannot build a wall in front of the door by himself.

The 64th minute of the game.

When Coutinho was not considered a chance, he made a strong direct pass in the midfield area, passing the ball past two Chelsea defenders and sending it to Sterling in front.

It was far from the penalty area, and there were Chelsea players in blue shirts in all directions.

Coutinho's "irresponsible" pass this time plunged Sterling directly into the blue siege.

However, the familiarity between the teammates let Coutinho know that this is an excellent opportunity for Sterling to play.

Although surrounded by Chelsea defensive players, it is also a reality that no one is close to defend when receiving the ball.

Sterling directly dribbled the ball and accelerated forward. The Chelsea players reacted and rushed to defend, but found that they could not catch up with Sterling.

The two people on the side were thrown away by Sterling's acceleration, and Cahill and Ivanovic on the two sides in front were the kind of defensive players who were tall but lacked flexibility.

Sterling accelerated instantly, and in the process of dribbling the ball, there was a certain small angle change, so that the defense of the two was not closed before Sterling rushed over.

Entering the penalty area, facing Courtois in a half-attack state, Sterling directly pushed the far corner.

This time, the ball finally evaded Courtois' demeanor and rolled into the bottom right corner of the goal.

1 to 1!

Sterling helped the team equalize...