cuppatea

I've not really got a problem with Skrtel splitting the attackers there, if he just stays with Negredo then you'd have people bitching that he didn't close down the ball. He was in no man's land and the shot shouldn't have beaten Mignolet, I'd bet he saves that 9/10 times.

It wasn't his job to close down the ball. He had Negredo covered and Sakho was closing down the man on the ball, in the end he ran away from Negredo and didn't end up covering either (and forced Sakho to switch from the man on the ball to the runner, who he was too far behind to get near). He's as blind to the opposition in open play as he is to the ball on set pieces. He did the same thing earlier when he let Negredo run off him to get through on goal, luckily he made up for his lack of awareness that time with a last ditch tackle.

Thought Skrtel was as much at fault for their 2nd goal as Mignolet. He was on Negredo then left him to run clean through on goal while he needlessly ran towards the ball. For someone who is completely oblivious to the football on set pieces he doesn't half tunnel in on it in open play.

Other than that thought it was a great half between 2 good teams.

I always find it odd how so many of our fans will passionately root for Uruguay or Spain because some mercenary cunt from that country happens to be spending a few years at our club but they loathe to see the country they were born in do well, despite arguably our greatest ever player captaining them and us always having a number of players turning out for the national side at any given time.

He's still got everything to prove but since January he's done very little wrong at all. No coincidence it coincided with him deploying a bit of pragmatism by dropping the possession at all costs shite, playing a brand of football that suited our key players & signing a few good players. If he'd done that from the off we might have been in the champions league this year. Imagine the difference Sturridge could have made instead of the exciting Borini. The fact that we could have been challenging so quickly is a testament to how quickly things have been changed around.

 

Very happy to have him carry on with his good work to date.

We'd finished 8th when he took over, with a squad full of overpaid and underperforming shite that had been in freefall for 6 months and ended on our lowest ever Premier League points total. Top 4 was never on the cards last season, whoever our manager was or whatever tactics he'd employed.

Oops, posted twice.

How many top class players actually fail to adapt to English football? I don't mean ones who come when they're past it (Shevchenko) or turn out to not actually be that good (Anderson), I'm talking about players who look class before and after their spell in England but simply fail to produce the goods here?

The whole Premiership proven thing is a fucking myth, we more than anyone should know that. For every Veron or Forlan there's a Carroll, Keane, Downing, Cole, Kewell, Babb, Pennant, Adam, Leonhardsen etc (and that's just listing some of the "Premiership proven" shite we've signed). I'd feel much more confident of finishing above Spurs if they had done what we did in their situation and spunked £80m on flavour of the month Premier League players rather than scouring the globe for top talent.

For all the people quoting me, I was only posting in response to the over-the-top negativity that filled this thread after their 2nd goal went in, a lot of which was far more embarrassing than anything that happened on the pitch tonight.

We've had 30 attempts at goal, scored 4 and hit the woodwork 3 times. We were unlucky with the injuries and that the only 2 chances they created in 120 minutes went in but we've been by miles the better team, some of you lot need to get a grip.

Let's not overreact, eh? We've scored twice, hit the woodwork 2 or 3 times, had as many good penalty shouts, created a boatload of chances, dominated possession and territory and barely given them a sniff all night. There's been a huge gulf in class completely evident from the first minute to the last and on another night we could easily have won 6 or 7 nil.

The saves Mignolet made yesterday were saves i would expect any Liverpool keeper to make, be it Reina, Dudek,Kirkland, Westerveld whoever.

Mignolet's second save from Benteke yesterday was more difficult than 3 of the goals Pepe conceded against Villa last season, imo.

Christ, Pepe looks terrible for all 3 of those goals, he doesn't actually dive for any of them, just falls over with his arm held out.

Gerrard

Sturridge

Toure

Not to get drawn into some debate that has been done to death and is largely totally irrelevant in the context of this window, but in the interests of fairness, when a post claims FSG spent £100m a few yrs ago, it would be a bit remiss to not point out this wasn't actually the case.

I never said "net spend", I never said "£100m of FSG's own money", I said we spent over £100m on players and most of it was wasted on shite. If our transfer budget this summer was funded by selling Adam Morgan for £100m, I wouldn't give a fuck where the money came from, I'd expect it to be spent wisely on quality players who would strengthen the team and if we instead spent the full amount on midtable shite then I'd absolutely lay the blame for that on the feet of the manager and transfer committee.

Kenny got the chop for not getting top 4.

Not really, he got the chop for overseeing our worst league campaign in decades, after spending over £100m on mostly shite.

Van persie was 30m after all the add ons and that's a world class finished product. Higuain wasn't far off, ibrahimovic has always been a finished product switching hands at over 20m, Rooney would be good too.

 

Just that we are unable to attract them now.

Van Persie had a year left on his contract and was 29, otherwise you'd have been looking at twice the fee. Higuain was surplus to requirements at Real Madrid (for genuine world class you're usually looking to relieve a team of their best players, which obviously ramps the price up) and Ibrahimovic moved for a world record fee a few years ago. A player of Willian's standing is what £30m generally gets you in today's market.

Good points, but bear in mind that I suspect not only the fee has increased but the terms of the player increased in line with the offer from Spurs.

I think paying £28m and getting him on good terms might have been just palatable to us. Of course we'd be overpaying by £8m in all likelihood, but maybe the wages he was asking for were quite reasonable and we saw that it all balanced out.

 

But once the bidding went over £30m (and I've heard it's closer to £33m), and his wages go up by £10-20k a week, then you're massively overpaying for a player and I think that Spurs tipped the balance too far and we saw that the deal was fast becoming a monstrous one for a player who, despite our scouts liking him, is still a bit of a gamble at the highest level. We can write off, say, £5m-£7m through slightly overpaying for fee and wages, just. But I don't think we can turn a blind eye to something more like a £15m risk over 4 years, which is closer to what it had become.

 

At his very, very best, Willian isn't going to be as good as Coutinho, for example. The lad is 25, he's not suddenly going to bloom into a World Class player, he is what he is, a very good player who is easy on the eye and has good creativity.

 

We weren;t offering £2/3 m below his market value, we were offering £8m above his market value, and we refused to go above that whereas Spurs were hell bent on securing a player and kept on climbing. The risk is on Spurs now because there's no way that Willian, if unsuccessful, can be shifted for anything close to the same amount, and there's no way that he's worth £30m (in the traditional sense of being a World Class player) in the first place.

 

Ideally, as a club, we want to pay the market value for a player. Of course we do, we want value. But from time to time, we're going to be tempted to pay slightly over the market value in order to get someone in who we feel is vital or of such potential that it would be valuable to us in the medium term. We obviously felt that Willian was worth a gamble at just over market value, but not once the bidding got silly. I think that's fair enough from the club. There'll always be some club, somewhere, with cash to spend following a big sale. If we always come up against them and pay the inflated price then you'll go broke very quickly. YOu have to have some sort of guiding philosophy and stick to it.

 

As you say, just because Spurs are willing to pay £33m for him does not make him a £33m player. We learnt this through Carroll, and now it's time for Spurs to learn the same lesson.

Market value is what a club is prepared to pay, not what we think they're worth. Willian's market value is £30m, 2 clubs have paid that for him in the last 6 months and there were reportedly others willing to do the same. To say his value is £20m is meaningless, especially when we were willing to go way above that ourselves. Clearly if we thought there were players of equivalent quality available at £20m we wouldn't have been offering £28m for him at all.

Also, who are all of these established world class players, in their mid-20's, available for £30m? In today's market that sort of money gets you a very good but not great player like Willian, Fernandinho, Illamarendi (a whopping 7 international caps between them, at a combined cost of over £90m) or an extremely talented youngster like Hazard or Marquinhos, it doesn't get you a ready made, completely proven, undisputed world class player at the peak of his career and if it did we'd be at the back of a long queue to sign them.

I'll say again, the problem with Andy Carroll wasn't the fee, it's that he was shit. If you could have advised the board with the benefit of hindsight you wouldn't have told them to try and get Carroll for less, you'd have begged them not to sign him at all. By the same token, you'd be telling them to get Coutinho whatever the cost, when the likelihood is that if another club had come in and offered £2m more than us we'd have pulled out of the running and missed out on a fantastic player.

It's just disappointing that we obviously identified Willian as that quality first team addition in attack that Rodgers has been asking for all summer but then lost out because of financial reasons to a team we're hoping to rival for 4th. The scale of that disappointment will only become clear in 2 weeks time but if the window closes without us making a quality signing in attack (clearly the manager's priority), it won't be because we couldn't find players we felt would strengthen us, it'll be because we weren't prepared to pay the going rate for them when we did.

The thing is, we clearly believe Willian is a very good player who would significantly strengthen our team, or we wouldn't have been willing to pay £27/28m for him in the first place. In the end we've lost out on someone who we thought would add real quality to the first team because we were offering £2/3m below his market value and not prepared to go any higher.

Personally, I don't believe you can overpay for players who significantly strengthen your team. The problem with Kenny/Commolli's signings wasn't the fees paid, it was that they were fucking shit. Carroll at £25m would have still been a terrible signing, just as Coutinho for that amount would have been a great one. At the end of the day, the worth of Willian or any other signing will be determined entirely by his performances on the pitch. In a year's time either we will have been proven wrong not to have not paid the £30m, or wrong to have wanted him for slightly less than that amount, it's almost impossible to imagine a scenario in which he looks good value at £28m and poor value at £30m.

If we missed out on Willian because we feel that £30m could be better spent elsewhere and we go out and spend it then I've no problem with that. If, however, we fail to significantly strengthen in the next 2 weeks because we weren't prepared to pay the going rate for players that we identified to dramatically improve us then I'd be bitterly disappointed and worried about our ambition as a club.

Coutinho

Toure

Mignolet

Jesus Christ, who the fuck decided Jay Spearing was worth £55k a week?! Glen Johnson on £100k a week is fucking mental as well!

Just after RAWK barred any talk about matches while they were being played I got perma-banned for posting "less of the match talk in here lads, what do you think this is, a football forum?", along with a message calling me a cunt and telling me to fuck off elsewhere. Charming.

We want the player, the player wants to come, his club are desperate to sell. How hard can it be? Fuck it, I'm getting his name on the back of my shirt tomorrow!

I like both sites. RAWK is a stricter then TLW but, it still has got some good threads. Especially in the flagpole corner.

RAWK is stricter than North Korea, it's the most over-moderated forum to have ever existed, that it's a football forum only makes that fact all the more hilarious.

Yeah, that's what I said. So we're really in agreement. I don't think he's a £30m player, though. He'd get a starting place on the left, no doubt about it. Maybe it's just me, when you spend £30m on a player I think you should get a real top drawer player. That money is mega.

We paid £35m for Andy Carroll and £20m for Stuart Downing, "top" players are in the £50-60m bracket now.

In Kenny's first 6 months in charge, Suarez thrived playing alongside Kuyt, Maxi and Meireles, and Carroll was shit. That summer we signed the left back Carroll had played with at Newcastle, a winger from the North East with the most crosses in the league, another young lad from the North East with good chance creation and crossing accuracy stats (and Henderson was clearly bought to play wide right here) and a set piece maestro (haha!) whose corners were apparently worth £10m alone. When the season began all of those players were in the team, while Kuyt, Maxi and Meireles were out of it (Meireles was then sold, Kuyt relegated to a fringe role and Maxi could hardly get a kick all season). Even Suarez found himself dragged off in the opening game as we were chasing the win and benched for he 2nd one, while Carroll played 90 minutes in both.

I'm not sure how much clearer it could have been that the decision was made that summer to try and build the team around Carroll and I'd be absolutely fucking astonished if Kenny didn't have a huge say in that. I still often wonder what could have been if we actually tried building on our excellent end of season form, rather than ripping it up and looking towards a 4-4-2 of shit, overpriced British players, signed at great expense in its place.

Who signed Carroll? Newly appointed Director of Football and advocate of soccernomics Comolli or newly appointed caretaker manager Dalglish?

 

The last time the supporters' voice was truly heard was when FSG replaced Hodgson with Dalglish. What followed was 5 months of mostly very good form on the pitch. Then 'business' got in the way but you think it was Dalglish's 'idea' to abandon the winning formula.

 

Madness.

Dalglish may not have been responsible for the signing of Carroll as caretaker manager but I'm pretty sure he had a big say on the direction the team took the following summer, after being handed the job full-time. Certainly it was his idea on the opening day of that season to drop Meireles, Kuyt and Maxi, while handing starts to Enrique, Downing, Carroll, Adam and Henderson (playing wide right). It seemed pretty clear to me that summer that we had made the decision to build the team around Andy Carroll rather than Luis Suarez and I can't possibly imagine Kenny didn't have a big say in that.