Wanderers face Sunderland crunch

That is the stark reality after an all-too-predictable but nonetheless demoralising defeat at Anfield.

Wanderers have nine games to rescue a situation that is becoming more grave with every passing day and unless they can hammer a few more nails in Howard Wilkinson's relegation coffin, only the supreme optimists will believe they have what it takes to beat the drop.

Few expected Wanderers to stop the Liverpool revival in its tracks. After all, Gerard Houllier's Reds had turned their season round by beating Manchester United to lift the Worthington Cup and sweeping aside Auxerre to set up a UEFA Cup quarter-final clash with Celtic.

But, after the encouraging performance against United at the Reebok a fortnight earlier, there was reason to believe they might at least make life uncomfortable for the Kop.

For the best part of 45 minutes they gave as good as they got, dominating the game in spells, but in the end Liverpool eased their way back into Champions League contention with Michael Owen the architect of their first home Premiership win since they beat West Ham by the same scoreline on November 2.

It left Wanderers perched perilously above the drop zone, ahead of the Hammers on just goal difference and knowing that Glenn Roeder's men have just put together a couple of wins that could shatter the theory that the team bottom of the Premiership at Christmas is invariably relegated.

More to the point it left Sam Allardyce desperately searching for a solution to the problem that has dogged him all season - the lack of a cutting edge needed to give his defenders a fighting chance of securing the necessary survival points. The minimum safety target is 38, which means four wins from their final nine games. But that is a big ask of a team that has managed just one win in their last 10 - one in 12 if the FA Cup encounters with Sunderland are taken into account!

If Wanderers do go down it will be for the want of a quality finisher - a point the manager has been stressing since day one when he hoped Michael Ricketts would come good and a deficiency that could not have been more graphically illustrated than on Saturday.

For while his creative players - Youri Djorkaeff and Jay-Jay Okocha - struggled to give Salva Ballesta a chance to show what he is made of, Liverpool had Owen - a young man supposedly tormented by demons off as well as on the field - who looked as sharp and as devastating as ever.

Liverpool may not be the Premiership force their expectant fans demand, but at least the England man has shown he has the character to come through the so-called bad times.

As Houllier said with a wry smile: "Michael is like us - in crisis - but he survives."

Allardyce never thought for one minute of Liverpool or Owen being in crisis.

He knew precisely where the threat lay, even going so far as to suggest that if Wanderers could stop the England striker, they would be half way to stopping Liverpool. But identifying the danger man is one thing ... stopping him is an altogether different proposition.

Prophetically, the Bolton boss scoffed at suggestions that Owen had lost his appetite, having seen for himself a fortnight earlier, when he came off the bench to score in the defeat at Birmingham, that the Anfield goal machine was as hungry as any Premiership striker.

And so it proved. Owen tricked his way past Simon Charlton before clipping a cross to the far post for El-Hadji Diouf to nod over the line for a hotly-disputed but - as television replays proved - perfectly-legitimate goal on the stroke of half-time.

Then he effectively killed off any lingering hope Wanderers had of salvaging something in the 67th minute when he was on hand to score his 19th of the season, knocking in Diouf's pull-back after the man from Senegal left the unfortunate Charlton flailing with a blend of luck and perseverance.

In essence, Liverpool did not need that second goal. Wanderers looked a beaten side at half-time and nothing they tried - Pierre-Yves Andre for Bernard Mendy and Kevin Nolan for Salva - made the slightest difference.

They had all-but matched Houllier's Reds, three times forcing Stephane Henchoz's understudy Djimi Traore to make desperate clearances and finding inspiration from the pacy Mendy, who had the beating of John Arne Riise and, after one blistering run, had Jerzy Dudek stretching to palm away a rasping cross-shot.

But that was the only time the Liverpool defence looked like being breached in the entire game. Wanderers could not even hit the target when Sami Hyypia made an uncharacteristic blunder and left Dudek alarmingly exposed; Salva did not have the confidence to pull the trigger himself and rolled the ball instead to Ricardo Gardner who completely miscued!

For all their quality and the confidence they must have had coming off the back of two big victories earlier in the week, Liverpool were actually showing signs of frustration. Hyypia missed the target with a header at the Kop end after being given the freedom of the penalty area to get on the end of Dietmar Hamann's cross and the anxiety levels increased when Jussi Jaaskelainen pulled off a stunning double save, smuggling the ball from under Owen's feet then recovering to block Vladimir Smicer's follow-up shot. Nevertheless, they had the initiative and possessed the quality to make something of it.

All they needed was a goal but they got a bonus with Wanderers going in at half-time, still furiously appealing to referee Barber and berating his assistant for not flagging Diouf offside, convinced they had again been the victims of a grave miscarriage of justice.

That they were wrong and the officials were right did not matter at the time. Wanderers were a goal down at Anfield and they looked like they were feeling sorry for themselves.

"I felt our heads went down when they scored that first goal," Jaaskelainen confessed. "It was disappointing to concede a goal in the last seconds of the first half like that and it could have been offside.

"But that's football. When you are down, decisions seem to go against you. Everybody's reaction was 'Oh no!'. It could have been a different story if it had been 0-0 at half-time."

The big Finland keeper believes Wanderers still have what it takes to survive in the top flight but wants to see a more direct approach in the remaining games.

"Sometimes we try to pass the ball too much," he explained. "We played the ball more in our half than in theirs. Liverpool gave us the space in our own half but we didn't get anywhere. I don't think their keeper had one save to make.

"We have to work harder as a team to get the ball into their half - play a little more straightforward, more direct. That's how we are going to get the points. It's very, very tight but it's in our own hands and I still think we have a good chance."