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TalkSilly

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  1. With Adey Ward as his agent these stories of him turning down £180,000 a week at Arsenal don't seem that credible to me, would we pay him that? Neither does the prospect of FSG sanctioning a £30 million move for an injury prone player with only a year left on his contract.
  2. And it's not as if there aren't other positions that couldn't be improved upon either. I'd hoped we would just do what Spurs have done these last few years: add 2 or 3 decent, effective players every summer and eventually find ourselves in the strong position they are now. But we definitely need one or two more first-team ready players in before the end of the month for that progress to be maintained.
  3. If nothing happens before the end of the window there will be trouble no doubt. At the very least FSG will have to shake up the recruitment team as they just aren't delivering. It's nearly 5 years since they moved over from City and their record has been patchy to put it mildly. This is Klopp's 4th window, there's been ample time and opportunity to sort out the shortcomings in the squad but we still only have 2, first-team quality but injury prone centre-backs. One slip and we will be playing that CL qualifier tie with Klavan or Gomez in the heart of the defence and that will put the prestige of the club at risk, to say nothing of the massive revenue at stake. It's not in FSG's or the club's best interests to put itself in this position but it has. That's just incompetence, nothing else. What I find really odd about FSG's stewardship of the club is the hapless way they've managed risk. Henry's whole business career revolves around the accurate assessment of risk, his fund is one of the best performing anywhere over the last 20 years because he is so good at it. But with him as owner Liverpool as a club seem to have taken ill advised gambles all over the place. With Coutinho for instance, just because he signed a new contract doesn't mean he couldn't leave us high and dry a few months later, it's already happened to them once before with Suarez. Even if we keep him this window he will almost certainly be off next summer so we should be looking to get his replacement in now to give them a season to bed in but I'd be very surprised if we do. I hope things have turned round and we have reasons to be optimistic by August 31st because all the old excuses no longer apply. We don't have a manager nobody's heard of or no chance of Champion's League football or a lack of money anymore. City and Chelsea are getting these deals over the line, why aren't we able to do the same?
  4. Anyone else seen the stories about one of the attackers calling himself "Abz" and wearing an Arsenal shirt? Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
  5. All this talk about £100 million for Keita and Van Dijk but not much about a left-back or another quick forward. Milner has plainly had enough of playing at left back and faded to an almost non-existent attacking threat in the second half of the season as far as I could make out. I can't see how this young kid from Fulham could be a replacement either. Apart from being 17 he's more of an attacking player anyway. As for the forward, Julian Brandt appears to have decided to stay put apparently because he wants guaranteed first team football to improve his World Cup chances. The only other player mentioned is Mohammed Salah, don't know how likely he is. I wonder whether Coutinho moving back into midfield might allow Klopp to persuade Brandt that he would be first choice in a front 3 with Firmino and Mane. I know Brandt has been a long-term fixation for our scouting department. They were reportedly watching him when they noticed Emre Can, and that was 3 years ago.
  6. 3 nill up with 15 minutes to go and I am still shitting myself.
  7. We weren't top of the league on New Year's Eve, we were 6 points behind Chelsea in 2nd but I agree with your general view of the second half of this season. It's been atrocious. So far we have 27 points from the 17 league games in 2017, that's a point less than we'd got from the same games last season but then we had to play an extra 8 Europa League ties and a League Cup final and were reduced to starting Stewart and Chirivella in the league. Considering the different circumstances the second half of this season has been a disaster, we have utterly failed to take any advantage of the free weeks' preparation time we've had at all. I hope you're wrong about the Europa League but our form this year would suggest that's where we're going to end up. I find it difficult to make a case that there's been any real progress this season overall. We might have a few more points in the league but considering the advantages Klopp has had we should have done a lot better.
  8. Yup, that's where I am at the moment. Looking back you could make a case that the wheels began to fall off when Coutinho got injured in late November. I can only think of a couple of games since then that we won convincingly: Boro away and the Anfield derby. The rest have all had an element of "could go either way" about them. Events seem to control this team rather than the other way round so anything could happen in the last 4 games. It's frustrating because Klopp had 8 months last season to work English football out and come up with a substantial improvement this year and no matter what happens in the next 4 games does an extra handful of league wins really constitute the sort of progress we expected without the distraction of Europe?
  9. This 3 goal deficit is worth another point to us. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
  10. Difficult to believe that we've going to achieve less this season than last. Klopp's going to have to pull his finger out because the club can't go on like this.
  11. I doubt he was expecting the form of his back up players to be as abject as it has been either. Klavan has had the odd good game but the rest of them have been consistently awful. Lucas and Sturridge look as if they can't cope with top-flight football anymore, Moreno is still useless and Origi and Çan have been shockingly bad considering how well they played at times last season. Most of them will have to be replaced if the club is to progress but who would bet on us doing that successfully? Not me. Judging by the rumours circulating in this transfer window, the only position we currently want to recruit in is at wide forward, hence the links to the likes of Brandt and Pulisic, we don't seem to be bothered about any of the other positions that need improving.
  12. God, I think I'm more upset after reading that than I was at the end of the game, and I can't think of anything positive to add either. I think Klopp had a difficult balance to strike with the squad in the summer. He's an optimist by nature so he gambled and it's just not paid off. Out of Europe, this season's demands were always going to be ridiculously uneven. 17 games in the first 15 weeks. Only 4 midweek games in the League Cup where he could get away with playing a fringe side, then it goes mental in December and January, 15 games in 9 weeks, all of them important. From the start of Feb until the end of the season we only have one midweek game if we don't progress further in the cups. 7 relatively sedate months but the failure to cope with the 2 mad ones in the middle have cost us this season.
  13. Doesn't look like we're going to sign anybody this month, which seems a bit risky as there's only 7 points between us and the Mancs in 6th at the moment. Another couple of off days like the ones against Bournemouth and West Ham might see us out of the top 4 so I wouldn't be taking anything for granted at this stage. If there is the remotest possibility of improving the squad we should be doing everything we can to make it happen. Klopp delivering the CL after 3 windows where he has effectively just traded the squad he inherited when he arrived and not spent any additional money would be a pretty remarkable achievement in my book, especially considering the insane amounts of money the rest of the top 6, bar Spurs, spent in the summer.
  14. I'd have agreed with this 5 years ago but I think this league is now so competitive managers feel they have to try and spread minutes around the squad as much as possible. When Benitez was in charge we'd have expected to go to a mid-table side like Palace and at the very least draw even after a difficult Champions League game mid-week, these days we don't really know what to expect from game to game and neither does anyone else. Apart from Leicester all the teams involved in European football last week dropped points in the league last weekend. For me Tuesday's team was a pretty clear indication that, despite all the talk to the contrary, Klopp is seriously prioritising the league this season way above everything else. It will be interesting to see how we do if most of our first eleven have only played 30 odd games going into April as, of our last 9 league fixtures, Everton on the 1st are the sole team currently in the top 6. None of the other 8 teams are in the bottom 3 at the moment either so they might not have that much to play for. With a fit and relatively fresh first eleven who knows how many points we can put on the board this season?
  15. I notice they scored a minute after Olsson got away with that insane challenge on Matip, how the fuck did the officials miss that? It wasn't one of those 50-50 ones it was all Olsson and as blatant as it could possibly be. It looked like he was trying to get Matip in a choke hold. If that has been given and we'd converted the penalty at 3-0 that would have been that. If we'd lost points yesterday it would have been soley down to terrible officiating, nothing else.
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