Newcastle Hold On For Road Point At Anfield

We are left stood her feeling fortunate to have taken anything away from Anfield today as it seemed that for large chunks of the match the main tactic was "Let Liverpool do what they want and try to absorb it defensively". In those choice few minutes (about 25 or so) when we played football to our ability, we looked about as good as we have all season, which makes the result all the more frustrating.

After weathering an initial 30 minute span, the Toon ended the first half with such a period and saw a halftime lead at 1-0 through a moment of brilliance from Hatem Ben Arfa who beat Jose Enrique and sent in a perfect cross to Yohan Cabaye who made no mistake from 6 yards out, beating Brad Jones cross-goal into the upper 90. That highlight was nearly the last of the highlights for Newcastle, who came back out from halftime with the same concession-based strategy and paid for it with Jonas eventually giving up possession which led to a nice bit of skill from Luis Suarez who easily rounded Tim Krul and leveled for Liverpool.

The ultimate story of the match will be in players missing for the next match for Newcastle as the match saw the following:

• James Perch was withdrawn on 27 minutes through injury
• Demba Ba was withdrawn on 47 minutes through injury
• Yohan Cabaye was withdrawn on 69 minutes through injury
• Fabricio Coloccini was shown a straight red on 84 minutes for a pretty bad foul on Luis Suarez

Desperate defending (as we've seen before) was the order of the day following the Coloccini red card, and ultimately on the day we will feel very fortunate to end up taking a point from this match.