by Dave Usher for ESPN
This time last year Liverpool were loaning Andy Carroll to West Ham United without having secured a replacement. Speaking after a 1-1 draw against Hearts in a Europa League qualifier, Brendan Rodgers stated that with 24 hours left before the close of the transfer window he was confident that a new striker would be joining the next day, with Clint Dempsey the man he believed would be walking through the Melwood doors.
As we know, it didn't happen and instead Spurs swooped in to land the USA international. Hindsight is, of course, 20-20, but it can be argued that it proved to be a lucky escape for the Reds; Dempsey didn't pull up any trees at Tottenham and was shipped out after one relatively undistinguished season at White Hart Lane.
That's an extremely simplistic way of looking at it though, and it's not necessarily a view I subscribe to. Dempsey had scored a lot of goals for Fulham the previous season and he may well have repeated that feat had he been teamed up with Luis Suarez, or of course he may have been completely useless. We'll never know because the owners didn't sanction the transfer.
Personally, I was never a massive Dempsey fan and he wouldn't have been high on any list of players I wanted to see at Liverpool, but that wasn't really the point. It was irrelevant what I or anybody else thought, the only thing that mattered was that the manager wanted him and believed he was getting him. He shipped Carroll out on the premise he would be replaced and considering Rodgers was in desperate need of a forward it seemed negligent that the club pulled the plug on it. Rodgers later admitted that he would not have sanctioned Carroll's departure if he'd known that no replacement would be forthcoming.
Naturally, whenever last summer's transfer window is brought up it's always the name of Dempsey that springs to mind, but there was another striker Liverpool considered signing only to decide against completing the deal. Well, not for another six months anyway. After witnessing Daniel Sturridge plunder 15 goals in just 19 games since joining the club you can't help but wonder what might have been had he been recruited last August. He was available and Liverpool thought long and hard about it, but in the end Rodgers baulked at the then £15 million asking price due to concerns he had about the player's mentality and attitude.
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