I'm just pointing out Souness has a very obvious bias here. He may be a legendary footballer but he's still a human being and subject to the same cognitive pitfalls as the rest of us. Don't hold your breath on the criticism stopping. I'd be more willing to accept it if it wasn't solely based around his height. Do you think Souness would be singing the same tune had Martinez put in the exact same performances while being 2 inches taller? I don't. I don't think there's anything Martinez could have done better to convince his critics.
It's also worth noting that the main shit-stirrers have been Souness and Carragher. Neville and other non-Liverpool pundits have asked the question, but they don't seem to be quite as insistent that Lisandro is a disaster waiting to happen. I think we both agree that Martinez hasn't looked like a player who's been very lucky not to have been responsible for several goals, and that despite being heavily targeted at several times during all of his appearances he has held up as well as basically any CB in the PL would. Souness and the other critics are either deliberately ignoring this data or using the targets to conclude that Lisandro has been ineffective, despite basically only one scoring chance and zero goals resulting from those targets over 4 matches. He gave up a chance last week, fine. Even world class defenders will do that from time to time. We agree that flawlessness is not the required standard, even if it's the required goal.
