Andy K

An impressive performance by AVB and his team given that they had been celebrating their league triumph earlier this week. Spartak are no mugs and have pace and craft throughout the team. I would dearly love to see AVB brought in this summer to build the dynasty that FSG are talking about. I guess we will have to wait until then to see just how visionary they really are.

I see AVB/Porto are on ITV4 on Thursday night, so we should get to see first hand his tactical skills and Porto's flair.

I would like to see AVB brought in at the end of the season with Kenny providing the guidance role like Paisley did with Kenny. I think AVB is what we need, new fresh ideas, who can maximise players potential. Crucially AVB is proving himself in Europe as well as the league albeit on the lesser stage, but i think Porto will win the Europa Cup and we should act swiftly on this one.

I would go for Cahill and Ayala as the main CB and cover CB for next year. By all accounts Ayala is developing in to an excellent CB, but would need easing in. He certainly has the most experience of all our young CB's and from what i have seen is by far the better all round player, miles ahead of Wilson for example.

On his game Mascherano is the best defensive midfielder in the world, and Liverpool could certainly do with him to protect the defence. The issue about him leaving the club was down to Purslow, in that when Barca came in for him and Madrid came in for Alonso in the pervious year he was told if he stayed with us for 1 more year then he could leave. As he said before his departure he expected Liverpool to keep their promise and for a time that appeared it was not happening. Whether we like it or not most players in the world would leave any club to play for Barca. While it might not be working out for him at this moment the guy is world class. Watching the Arsenal, Barca game the other night, before Arsenal started their come back you could tell then they needed a player of Mascherano calibre on the field as Wilshere was dominating the game.

On the face of it this is really shocking and does not move the club forward at all and questions NESV financial muscle and commitment to get LFC back at the summit of English football. Although NESV may argue that during the month from the sent email to the club being purchased their offer was improved (although we do not know this happened at this stage), Purslow questions their integrity to not borrow money i.e. leverage the debts and claims that the debt is only half paid off. I think there could be a danger of the supporters being charmed by NESV as they have said very little and of course it appears that they spent big in the January transfer window (braking the transfer record twice in the process), when if fact the net spend was zero. From the day Hicks and Gillett took over the club it has always been vitally important to scrutinise, how the club is being run, where the money is coming from and how the clubs revenues are being spent and I think this must not stop. NESV have to date been quite coy on the issue where their money comes from, claiming it would not be fair to disclose this information as there is a consortium of investors. I just hope that the likes of SOS and the LFC supporting top journalists keep on probing and calling NESV to account at every stage. Time will tell if we have a wolf in sheep’s clothing, although if we spot this too late the consequences for the club will be dire. It would be good if Purslow could now come out and clarify his initial comments i.e. do they still hold and if not, why not.

According to the Independent it was the summer clearout that was the cause of the £9m, with agents being paid for incoming, outgoing and renegotiated deals. Clearly some of this spend could have been avoided if Hodgson had either not been so hasy in getting rid of players like Aquilani, Insua and DLV, or stood up to Purslow, insisting that he should be making the football decisions. Liverpool have paid out more than £9m – the price of the second striker they could not afford last summer – on agents' fees in the past year, a figure eclipsed only by Chelsea, as the Anfield club tackled the legacy of previous manager Rafael Benitez. The amount spent by all Premier League clubs on agents in the year from 1 October 2009 to 30 September, a period taking in transfer windows in January and last summer, was more than £67m, only £3m less than the previous year despite a general reduction in transfer activity. While Manchester City vastly reduced their figure from £12.9m to £5.9m – the appointment of Brian Marwood as football adminstrator was designed to deliver in-house expertise – Liverpool's outlay soared to £9.03m because of the sheer turnover of playing staff. Coincidentally, manager Roy Hodgson failed to secure West Ham's Carlton Cole as a second striker on the summer transfer deadline day because the club's £9m bid proved insufficient. Liverpool's new owners, New England Sports Ventures, have made the pursuit of better value in the transfer market a priority. But as the club seeks to ship out many of the players that Benitez had on the books, their payments to agents may not look much better when the Premier League publishes its next table of sums paid to agents in a year's time. Hodgson, who has complained publicly that Benitez bequeathed him an "unbelievably overstaffed" club, has sold Diego Cavalieri, Javier Mascherano, Damien Plessis, Albert Riera, Krisztiá* Nemeth, Yossi Benayoun, plus Lauri Dalla Valle and Alex Kacaniklic, makeweights in the deal which brought in Paul Konchesky from Fulham. Each has incurred agents' fees and so, too, the loan deals including Philipp Deggen, Alberto Aquilani, Nabil El-Zar and Emiliano Insua. Hodgson did not choose to sell Mascherano and Benayoun, but he and his former managing director, Christian Purslow, mandated agents to find new clubs for some of the players they were desperate to shed. The substantial effort put into keeping those stars that Liverpool do not want to lose has brought new contracts for Fernando Torres and Pepe Reina, from which their agents also take a cut. The incoming players have been Brad Jones, Fabio Aurelio, Konchesky, Christian Poulsen, Joe Cole, Danny Wilson, Jonjo Shelvey and Raul Meireles. A concern for Liverpool must be how to sell some of those players currently out on loan whom they do not want back: Aquilani has impressed at Juventus but Insua, also on a season's loan, is currently not a starter at Galatasaray. Agents may be called in to help secure deals which will spare Liverpool their salaries. The new director of football strategy, Damien Comolli, also has his ideas about whom he wants to bring in – and it is little wonder that Liverpool are so desperate to do something about their academy's dire record in nurturing players of Premier League standard. In the past decade, only three Anfield academy graduates have played 40 or more games for a Premier League club. Manchester City are also relying on their academy to reduce a £133m annual wage bill which risks leaving them in breach of Uefa's Financial Fair Play regulations, while chief executive Garry Cook's determination to cutting the influence of agents at Eastlands has seen their agent-payment outgoings fall to a figure only slightly above the £5.36m paid out by Tottenham Hotspur, the club who pipped them to fourth spot last season. Manchester United, where Sir Alex Ferguson has resolved to develop the club through investing in youth, have paid only £2.3m to agents, which is considerably less than Bolton's £3.5m. The Wanderers' figure reflects the wage bill which led chairman Kevin Gartside to warn last month that players may need to be sold in January. Blackpool's £40,000 figure reflects their over-performance. Liverpool's announcement yesterday that Jamie Carragher needs surgery for a dislocated shoulder, and may be out for up to three months, increases the prospect of a centre-half being signed. The France international Adil Rami, one of a number of Lille players that Hodgson has watched recently, has a physical strength which suggests he is cut out for the Premier League. But Lille will want ¤15m (£12.5m) for the Moroccan-born player – and then, of course, there will be the agents' fees. Club payments to agents The table shows the total paid by each Premier League club to agents involved in transfers and loan deals in the period 1 October 2009 to 30 September 2010.