Gerrard asks teammates to do more for Liverpool
Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard has called on his Anfield teammates to do more to turn their season around in the wake of their third consecutive league defeat at Sunderland on Saturday.
The Reds had not lost three straight league games since 2003, and the defeat left Kenny Dalglish’s side in seventh spot in the table, just two points above Everton ahead of Tuesday’s Merseyside derby at Anfield.
“The players need to take responsibility for where we are in the league,” Gerrard said.
“It’s just not good enough for a club like us to be there.
“We have to find a better level of consistency. We need a reaction and there’s no better team to produce that against than Everton.
“It’s important the players put in a performance and get a result for the fans.
“Everyone is a bit down after recent results but we want to put a smile back on their faces.
“It’s a big week and we want to go into that Cup tie with Stoke (an FA Cup quarter-final) on the back of a win.”
After lifting the League Cup last month to end a six-year wait for a trophy, Liverpool had hoped to push on and compete for a top-four finish that would see them return to the Champions League.
But instead losses to Arsenal and then Sunderland mean they now find themselves looking over their shoulders to the teams below them.
Gerrard said it was time to forget about their League Cup success and move on.
“The League Cup was a fantastic achievement but it’s gone now, it’s been put to bed. We have to forget about that,” he told the Liverpool Echo.
“We wanted to build on winning the League Cup by pushing for the top four, but it hasn’t happened so far as we’ve lost two on the bounce.
“We need to sort our league form out sharpish and try to get back to Wembley in the FA Cup.
“That Stoke game has become even more important than it was a few weeks ago.
“The frustrating thing is we went from a fantastic performance, an eight or nine out of 10 against Arsenal, to a three or four out of 10 against Sunderland.
“We didn’t deserve to lose to Arsenal but on Saturday there were no excuses.
“You can look for the easy way out and say the pitch was bad and it was windy but the fact is we just weren’t good enough on the day.
“As players we have to take responsibility for a bad performance.
“We just didn’t get out of first gear in the first half; we improved a bit in the second half but as a whole it wasn’t good enough.”
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Gerrard asks teammates to do more for Liverpool
