Misery for Birmingham City
“If Alex McLeish is going to shove someone in the team and you’re playing Wolves at home for example, you have got to go and play. You can’t say ‘I’m nervous’. You’ve got to be able to handle that, handle not making those type of errors and maybe that’s what separates groups.
“I go back to my own experience with Tom Huddlestone at Derby, we were in a dogfight of relegation and he was 17-years-of-age and playing week in, week out in our first team and wasn’t frightened of taking the ball and getting people playing, because he believed in what he could do.
“You started to think that one or two of ours didn’t really fancy wanting the ball.”
Blues game plan was to hassle Liverpool and not let them get into their stride. It wasn’t implemented until it was too late.
“In terms of when we got the ball, we actually popped it about once or twice and slid one or two balls in,” said Westley.
“We were OK. When the game turned over, and by that I mean when the opposition got the ball, we weren’t quick enough to react to what was happening.
“Normally against poor youth team players, they have so many touches you have a chance to recover. Against this lot, it was two passes and they’re threatening you, or they get a two-versus-one wide.
“When we lost the ball we didn’t get close to people by any stretch of the imagination.”
At the interval, words were said.
Westley revealed: “We told them how disappointed we were that we didn’t get close to them, how it easy it was for Liverpool. The number six for them, Andre Wisdom, he’s 16, a schoolboy. He played the first-half with a cigar on, he walked about the pitch, no-one got near him, no-one tackled him. And that’s a problem.
“The wide boy, David Amoo, at half-time he was shaking Shaun Timmins’s hand saying ‘thank you very much, I’ve had a nice half’.
“We had to make it that more uncomfortable for them. We did a little bit better at it in the second-half.”
