We promise, there's actually some news today that isn't about Luis Suarez, Patrice Evra, handshakes, racism, the London press, the English FA, or Manchester United. I think. Maybe...

* But first off, we've got one more thread to tie up when it comes to Luis Suarez, Patrice Evra, handshakes, the English FA, and Manchester United.

Leading up to the match against Manchester United on Saturday, we looked at Liverpool's league games against them over the past four seasons. Given the recent history of the match, a few things seemed clear: One, the home side was going to out-shoot the visitor. Two, the home side would probably take the edge in possession.

In the past four seasons, Liverpool have played seven games under three managers against Manchester United in the league. Four have been Liverpool victories, two have been won by United, and one has been a draw. And with match number eight coming up on the weekend, it seemed like a good time to look back at some of the statistics beyond the final score from the seven previous games to see if any kind of pattern or omen for Saturday's match appears.

"Now is the winter of our discontent."
Yikes.
Liverpool have averaged 1.00 points per game or fewer in eight months over the last four-and-a-half seasons – eight of 46 months during this time frame. Three were in January, including this season, with one in December.

So, how's that crossing toward Carroll thing going?
Through the first 17 league games, Liverpool averaged just under 19 crosses per match. In the three since, Liverpool are averaging exactly 35 crosses per match, with 43 against Blackburn, 26 against Newcastle, and 36 against City.

Dull competence and three points from a rather somnambulant match may be far better than the alternatives, but in the end it doesn't lend itself to many points of interest to discuss over the following days: No goals to break down; no mistakes to dissect; no scintillating or incompetent performances to dig into.

There has been some talk of late about Jose Enrique, and in particular there have been questions asked as to whether his form has dipped after a flying start to the season that saw him make a strong case for being the league's best left back—and possibly even its best fullback. Previously we looked at his numbers for the club after the first eight games and felt that as he was the only player to be clearly amongst the top three in both attack and defense, the numbers appeared to fully support the idea that he was the best in the league.

The past three league matches have seen Charlie Adam paired with three different midfield partners, with each new pairing leading to a slight shift in the focus of Adam's game. From a largely offensive effort when paired with Lucas against Manchester City through to a job as the deepest midfielder against Queens Park Rangers, it's meant an interesting—and surprisingly successful—progression.

Goals, goals, goals. With Liverpool wasting chance after chance, profligacy to blame for home draws with Norwich, Swansea, and Sunderland as well as away losses to Stoke and Fulham, the number of goals scored has become both millstone and mantra, a clear problem in obvious need of fixing, the major fault keeping the side from reaching its full potential.

On Saturday against Queens Park Rangers, Liverpool dominated nearly every conceivable statistical category, at times more than doubling their opponent's tallies as they racked up the numbers from possession to passing to shots on target. At least this time around they won. Still, that they only barely did win, once again doing their best to keep an overmatched opponent in the game, is a continuing source of frustration for this year's squad.

David N'gog, born April 1st, 1989, turned 22 earlier this year. Andy Carroll, born January 6th, 1989, also turned 22 earlier this year. Last season with Liverpool, N'gog started nine matches in the league and made a further 16 substitute appearances, playing a total of 1057 minutes. He scored twice, once every 529 minutes—or roughly once every six games.

There seems little point in doing a usual chalkboard review. I'd end up focusing on Lucas Leiva's marvelous performance, and you can just as easily head to the Guardian or Stats Zone app and see them for yourself. Each is a beautiful, unique snowflake worthy of admiration, and I recommend doing so.
I thought I'd display his statistics somewhat differently.

For most, Charlie Adam had his best game in a Liverpool shirt against Chelsea, and so before moving on completely from Sunday's match it only seems right to at the very least acknowledge that. And considering this blog's fondness for statistics—not to mention the role stats play in the approach of Fenway Sports Group and Damien Comolli—an obvious point of interest seems clear: Is there anything obvious in Adam's numbers from the weekend that help to separate Sunday from most of what came before?

In the wake of an encouraging win it would be easy to simply focus on the positives like normal, happy people who know how to enjoy success. But what those happy people who know how to enjoy success don't know is that failure and pain is lurking just around every corner, waiting to spring. So really, you're much better off embracing a more negative outlook that asks, "Why hasn't Jose Enrique been called up for Spain yet, and does it mean there's something wrong with him we don't know?

With Liverpool facing Chelsea in a week's time, I thought it interesting to look at the club's recent record against the best and worst of the Premier League. Long story short, Liverpool have a habit of playing up or down to the opposition's level under Dalglish.
Against top-five opponents:
• 1-0 Chelsea (a)
• 3-1 United (h)
• 3-0 City (h)
• 1-1 Arsenal (a)
• 0-2 Tottenham (h)
• 2-0 Arsenal (a)
• 0-4 Tottenham (a)
• 1-1 United (h)
Overall record: 4W-2D-2L
Points per game: 1.

One of the summer's main talking points was "chances created," a fairly new statistic meant to replace assists. Assists take two to tango, reliant on the goal scorer actually scoring the goal. LiverpoolFC.tv clarifies the stat by renaming it "shot assists," a name I actually prefer, although I'll stick with Opta's nomenclature since I'm using FourFourTwo's StatsZone stats throughout this piece.

Against Swansea, Liverpool started on top, couldn't take advantage of the early dominance, and finished with a draw. Against Norwich, Liverpool started on top, couldn't take advantage of the early dominance, and finished with a draw. Against Stoke, Liverpool started on top, couldn't take advantage of the early dominance, and lost.

With a quarter of the Premier League season wrapped up, the unavoidable reality is that Liverpool hasn't performed up to the level that many fans had hoped they would. They haven't seemed especially poor perhaps, but clearly they haven't hit the sorts of highs they did in the second half of 2010-11 that had fans talking about the squad being a few tweaks away from legitimate contenders after finishing out the season with the third best record—and very nearly the second best up until stumbling through their final two matches—in the league under Kenny Dalglish.

It's only Monday, but already it's almost time for another match. And for a moment it's almost as though Liverpool were back in Europe once again, the games coming thick and furious and with hardly a moment to decompress in between them. Then you remember that Liverpool's last bit of midweek football was a will-sapping friendly at Rangers, and that this week's sees a trip to Stoke to face a side renowned for its ability to sap the will of opponents and their fans alike.

Nine games. 39 shots: 17 on target, 16 off target, six blocked. Four goals. That's an awful lot of shots without much return. Which seems to be the story of Liverpool's season so far.
This isn't to criticize Suarez. More often than not, especially against Norwich, he's looked the only one capable of magic, capable of somehow hauling Liverpool to three points.

With Lucas suspended for Saturday, having already picked up five bookings (four in the league, one in the Carling Cup), I thought I'd take a look at how his defending has matured since becoming a regular starter in 2009-10.
Lucas appeared in 35 league matches (32 starts, three subs) in 2009-10, 33 (32 starts, one sub) in 2010-11, and in all eight so far this season.

If there's one thing most Liverpool fans would be able to agree on it's that left back Jose Enrique has exceeded expectations, and if the season were to end today he'd likely be named the club's player of the season. Still, it's been difficult to judge him objectively, at least from a strictly Liverpool perspective.

Instead of an in-depth look at a single facet, I thought I'd post multiple chalkboards from Saturday's match, highlighting a couple of predominant themes.
Crosses
That Zonal Marking mentions this in his weekly league-wide roundup demonstrates how glaring a stat it was. 22 attempted crosses, two successful.

Stewart Downing got off to a flying start for Liverpool, coming out against Sunderland, Arsenal, and Bolton as not just one of the club's better players of the early going but potentially the long sought answer for the left side of midfield. Then, as quickly as he'd seemed to establish himself, in the eyes of many he became a question mark.

Yep. More infographics as yet another international break is driving me insane.
Fairly straight-forward. As usual, click to expand images. A few random notes:
• Reasonable degree of variance from Liverpool's two main penalty takers: Kuyt and Gerrard. Kuyt went to the keeper's left four times (one saved), to the keeper's right twice, and down the middle once – with six of seven strikes along the ground.

As usual, I'd recommend opening the main graphic in a new window. It's prettier that way, plus you can zoom in to see all those painstakingly placed bars. Also, as an FYI, when goals appear atop shots (circles on top of bars), it means the two incidents happened in the same minute, and it's usually for one of two reasons.

Against Everton, Lucas Leiva only passed to Charlie Adam twice in their 67 minutes on the pitch together, while Adam passed to Lucas five times. By comparison, Lucas passed to Steven Gerrard three times after he came on for Adam, a limited data set but one that nonetheless would equate to a healthy nine passes across a full ninety minutes.

In a season that has seen more than its share of less than stellar performances while discussion about his future has pushed to the fore, the reaction to Jamie Carragher's composed performance at Goodison on Saturday was swift and unanimous. The club's official website, never ones to shy away from hyperbole, gauged the prevailing mood and turned things up to eleven when they skipped obvious choices Lucas Leiva and Jose Enrique in favour of promoting a Carragher every-touch compilation.

If nothing against Brighton or Wolves was going to convincingly answer the questions left behind by the Tottenham debacle, at the least fans could hope nothing that happened would make the players involved seem any worse. And if Andy Carroll's first positive performance of the season at least set out a convincing blueprint for the player moving forward, Charlie Adam's performance only left more questions despite forcing a Wolverhampton own goal.

With all the talk in recent weeks of who needs to start, who deserves to start, and what the priorities should be when it comes to deciding who needs and deserves to start, it seemed like the perfect time for last week's poll to find who Liverpool Offside readers thought was the club's most underrated player.

Below is a comparison of individual statistics from Henderson and Kuyt's last four league games when played on the right of a 4-2-2-2. Formation notation is subjective, especially with this season's group of players, but these are how I saw each formation at the start of matches. For Henderson, that's wins over Wolves and Bolton, the draw against Sunderland, and loss at Stoke.

Yesterday marked Dalglish's 30th game in charge since taking over last January. The side's record over that span is 15W-6D-9L. How does that compare with previous bosses?
Read the hexagonal diagrams from left to right, in rows of six. Just to make things confusing. Linearity isn't really the point anyway.

30 shots, six on target, six blocked, zero goals. 76% possession to the opposition's 24%. 400 more passes attempted than the opposition. Statistically, it seems impossible.
Obviously, it's not. Because it's happened twice in three years. The above stats are from when Liverpool met Stoke at Anfield in September 2008.

The standard narrative is that international breaks are an unnecessary disruption where players get hurt and clubs suffer. But is that really the case?
The short answer is: it depends. Liverpool were worse after the international breaks in the previous two seasons, had the same record before and after in 2008-09, and were actually better in 2007-08.

Liverpool's 3-1 win over Bolton wasn't much better than last year's 2-1 win over Bolton. What? You thought otherwise?
Liverpool had more possession, took more shots, and created more chances in last season's meeting. Bolton's pass completion rate was far higher on Saturday than in January.

After a sitting down for a chat before the Sunderland match lead to an ultimately disappointing result while Arsenal turned out much better when taking the week off, there was some obvious trepidation when it came to our chat with Matilda of the Bolton Offside. But when Tea and Crumpets heard that fillet steak simmered in red wine, garlic, and vegetable sauce was an option at the Reebok and that we wouldn't be stuck eating hobo stew out of an old tin can, we figured we might as well cross our fingers and take a shot at trying to better understand these Wanderers that don't do a whole lot of wandering any more.

The following graphic shows games Liverpool won with goals after the 80th minute. This obviously does not count those where Liverpool equalized to pilfer a point – such as last spring's late late late penalty to draw at Arsenal – or games where they've piled on the misery – as against Birmingham under Dalglish, Steaua under Hodgson, etc.

There's big news and number crunching and behind the scenes insights to get to in a crowded news and notes today, so without further ado let's get right to it...

* Potentially huge news in the ongoing Hillsborough fight surfaced yesterday when the government was ordered by the Information Commissioner to release Margaret Thatcher's private files on the disaster.

Three years after winning the European Championship, Liverpool's gone and done it again by capturing the Copa America. Wonder if there's a date set for the parade yet...

* It was a starring role once again for Luis Suarez, scoring the winning goal and setting up another as Uruguay cruised to a 3-0 victory over Paraguay in a final where for the first time in this year's Copa America a match went something like everybody thought it would.

In the end, Liverpool get the man they've been chasing since the transfer window opened. They get the man who was caught holding up a Liverpool scarf in Spain with Andy Carroll three weeks ago. It will cost the club up to £20M—with, as always, the "up to" being of key importance—an improved offer on the £15M they reportedly bid earlier in the week.