I'll be honest up front, I'm not a football manager, or an expert, I don’t have any “in the know” contacts I am just an ordinary fan.
Now we’ve established that I wanted to look at why there seems to be some general disappointment about how the season is shaping up. Lack of transfer activity in the plus column and lots of transfer activity in the minus column. We are, in the words of the article, downgraded from the 20 months or so that FSG took over. Is our squad as good as the squad of 15th October 2010?
Let’s look at the differences (senior players)
Forwards
Out:
Torres
Kuyt
Rodriguez
Ngog
Jovanovic
Babel
In:
Suarez
Borini
Bellamy
Carroll
Downing
Verdict
Honestly not sure there is too much difference here, on paper. If look at what has been achieved since they left:
Torres (7 goals in 46 games), Suarez has been a better player over the last 2 years (15 goals in 44 games).
Ngog, Jovanovic and Babel never really did anything, or went on to achieve anything. Babel scored 5 in his 46 games for Hoffenheim, Jovanovic 9 goals in 32 games for Anderlecht in the tricky Belgian league, and N’gog 3 in 33 for Bolton. Have we missed these guys?
Well we replaced them with Bellamy (6 goals in 27 games) and Downing (2 goals in 46 games) a pretty poor return but they’re probably better players.
Kuyt, damn I loved Kuyt. Yes he never scored as many as we hoped and yes he ran and ran but gave away some silly free kicks but he is a loss.
Rodriguez was under played, we all think we could have got more out of him, he was a bit slow, but always found space and his intelligent late runs delivered a really high goal return, another loss.
Carroll (6 goals in 42 games) has not been a good player so far, is there more to come, probably, will he stay, probably not.
There’s not much in it, of course we may be about to lose Bellamy and Carroll but at the time of writing our forward line is not demonstrably worse than when FSG took over
Midfield
Out:
Meireles
Mascherano
Poulsen
Aquilani
In:
Henderson
Adam
Verdict
This won’t take long
Yes Mascherano was a big loss and you can take your Christian Poulsen and throw him in the stinky bin. Up stepped Lucas, and who’d have thought he was really rather good, however we already had him, so yes big loss was Mascher.
Meireles, another loss, and one can’t help but feel would have enjoyed our new 4-3-3 system, Aquliani no loss we never really had him.
To counter this we have Charlie Adam, who is really disappointing and, apparently, also a coward. And Henderson who has, of all the recruits from last summer, fared the best and probably will be a good player.
Overall our midfield squad is significantly weaker yep, no doubt about it.
Defence
Out:
Kyrgiakos
Konchesky
Aurelio
In:
Enrique
Coates
Verdict
Kyrgiakos, everyone’s favourite Greek enforcer was a bit agricultural with his tackling but never gave anything other than his best and I quite liked him but we hardly miss him.
Konchesky and his mum are better off gone from Liverpool
Aurelio was made of some sort of exotic blend of stickle bricks and paper mache which was fundamentally unstable and liable to break in a heartbeat, we liked him but it was time to go and get some proper medical help somewhere.
So two left backs out and one in, the infuriating big biceped erratic pace master of Jose Enrique is better than the two we lost, yes we need cover but surely we are better off with Jose.
Coates is a massive man with some exciting potential again an improvement on the big popular Greek.
Defence, slightly better off if lacking cover for left back.
So that proves it :–
Forwards - Not much different
Midfield – Much weaker now
Defence – Probably a slight improvement.
Conclusion
So what have we learnt, well we need some more in the midfield area. We’re playing 4-3-3 Lucas, Gerrard and Henderson probably first choice. It’s the second 3 which is particularly weak Spearing, Adam, Shelvey. Wouldn’t want to go to Eastlands with that.
And this is the point, our first eleven is probably okay, 1 or 2 players short of what we’d like (1 forward and a creative midfielder maybe Allen and Rameirez?) It’s the bench which is weak, and really it’s these players we’ve been shipping out this summer the highly paid bench warmers which are stopping us affording decent first teamers. Four £60k per week bench warmers will cost us £12.5 million each year in wages. Rodgers is streamlining the club and that is the right thing to do. We have to be patient, we have got the best part of 4 weeks before the window closes, this is the year to rebuild to move on the costly second team players and re invest the money in younger, hopefully better players.
We can’t start getting twitchy now, we have to keep the pressure off the management to allow them to build the team I urge all of you to stay calm and wait for the transfer news which will come, of course it will.
I'll be honest up front, I'm not a football manager, or an expert, I don’t have any “in the know” contacts I am just an ordinary fan.
Now we’ve established that I wanted to look at why there seems to be some general disappointment about how the season is shaping up. Lack of transfer activity in the plus column and lots of transfer activity in the minus column. We are, in the words of the article, downgraded from the 20 months or so that FSG took over. Is our squad as good as the squad of 15th October 2010?
Let’s look at the differences (senior players)
Forwards
Out:
Torres
Kuyt
Rodriguez
Ngog
Jovanovic
Babel
In:
Suarez
Borini
Bellamy
Carroll
Downing
Verdict
Honestly not sure there is too much difference here, on paper. If look at what has been achieved since they left:
Torres (7 goals in 46 games), Suarez has been a better player over the last 2 years (15 goals in 44 games).
Ngog, Jovanovic and Babel never really did anything, or went on to achieve anything. Babel scored 5 in his 46 games for Hoffenheim, Jovanovic 9 goals in 32 games for Anderlecht in the tricky Belgian league, and N’gog 3 in 33 for Bolton. Have we missed these guys?
Well we replaced them with Bellamy (6 goals in 27 games) and Downing (2 goals in 46 games) a pretty poor return but they’re probably better players.
Kuyt, damn I loved Kuyt. Yes he never scored as many as we hoped and yes he ran and ran but gave away some silly free kicks but he is a loss.
Rodriguez was under played, we all think we could have got more out of him, he was a bit slow, but always found space and his intelligent late runs delivered a really high goal return, another loss.
Carroll (6 goals in 42 games) has not been a good player so far, is there more to come, probably, will he stay, probably not.
There’s not much in it, of course we may be about to lose Bellamy and Carroll but at the time of writing our forward line is not demonstrably worse than when FSG took over
Midfield
Out:
Meireles
Mascherano
Poulsen
Aquilani
In:
Henderson
Adam
Verdict
This won’t take long
Yes Mascherano was a big loss and you can take your Christian Poulsen and throw him in the stinky bin. Up stepped Lucas, and who’d have thought he was really rather good, however we already had him, so yes big loss was Mascher.
Meireles, another loss, and one can’t help but feel would have enjoyed our new 4-3-3 system, Aquliani no loss we never really had him.
To counter this we have Charlie Adam, who is really disappointing and, apparently, also a coward. And Henderson who has, of all the recruits from last summer, fared the best and probably will be a good player.
Overall our midfield squad is significantly weaker yep, no doubt about it.
Defence
Out:
Kyrgiakos
Konchesky
Aurelio
In:
Enrique
Coates
Verdict
Kyrgiakos, everyone’s favourite Greek enforcer was a bit agricultural with his tackling but never gave anything other than his best and I quite liked him but we hardly miss him.
Konchesky and his mum are better off gone from Liverpool
Aurelio was made of some sort of exotic blend of stickle bricks and paper mache which was fundamentally unstable and liable to break in a heartbeat, we liked him but it was time to go and get some proper medical help somewhere.
So two left backs out and one in, the infuriating big biceped erratic pace master of Jose Enrique is better than the two we lost, yes we need cover but surely we are better off with Jose.
Coates is a massive man with some exciting potential again an improvement on the big popular Greek.
Defence, slightly better off if lacking cover for left back.
So that proves it :–
Forwards - Not much different
Midfield – Much weaker now
Defence – Probably a slight improvement.
Conclusion
So what have we learnt, well we need some more in the midfield area. We’re playing 4-3-3 Lucas, Gerrard and Henderson probably first choice. It’s the second 3 which is particularly weak Spearing, Adam, Shelvey. Wouldn’t want to go to Eastlands with that.
And this is the point, our first eleven is probably okay, 1 or 2 players short of what we’d like (1 forward and a creative midfielder maybe Allen and Rameirez?) It’s the bench which is weak, and really it’s these players we’ve been shipping out this summer the highly paid bench warmers which are stopping us affording decent first teamers. Four £60k per week bench warmers will cost us £12.5 million each year in wages. Rodgers is streamlining the club and that is the right thing to do. We have to be patient, we have got the best part of 4 weeks before the window closes, this is the year to rebuild to move on the costly second team players and re invest the money in younger, hopefully better players.
We can’t start getting twitchy now, we have to keep the pressure off the management to allow them to build the team I urge all of you to stay calm and wait for the transfer news which will come, of course it will.