Liverpool FC 2015/2016

City desperately need english players though so were ripe for the picking.

Sterling is a great player but he can't shoot so we can now easily upgrade assuming Brenton doesn't copy what he did last year. Hopefully someone else is in charge of spending this money

f**k! If I was a young black English male with some pace, I would be fuckin loaded by now! Ez money!

Sadly I'm not, but I've an idea that makes lord Sugar jelly as f**k! Hell, im gonna rape that dragon in its den!

"So Fey, tell us about the CASSSSSHHHHH''

Well its easy, you go down to Calais, spot a good truck thats filled with African refugees. Now most of them will get caught, but some of them actually reach the tunnel! You get the fastest one out there, and I mean really fast, so fast that Bernd wont have seen him coming, become his agent for a few years, get him a British passport. Let him run at a few lower league clubs for a few years, and before you know it, you will sell him for over 10m to either Chelsea or City.

How bout that for a pitch!

QPR get £9mil

All to fill a squad quota.

Fey wrote:f**k! If I was a young black English male with some pace, I would be fuckin loaded by now! Ez money!

Sadly I'm not, but I've an idea that makes lord Sugar jelly as f**k! Hell, im gonna rape that dragon in its den!

"So Fey, tell us about the CASSSSSHHHHH''

Well its easy, you go down to Calais, spot a good truck thats filled with African refugees. Now most of them will get caught, but some of them actually reach the tunnel! You get the fastest one out there, and I mean really fast, so fast that Bernd wont have seen him coming, become his agent for a few years, get him a British passport. Let him run at a few lower league clubs for a few years, and before you know it, you will sell him for over 10m to either Chelsea or City.

How bout that for a pitch!  

Sounds like a plan.

Just found out that Clyne produced the most crosses in the PL last season. Maybe that's why we're signing Benteke.

Fey wrote:f**k! If I was a young black English male with some pace, I would be fuckin loaded by now! Ez money!

Sadly I'm not, but I've an idea that makes lord Sugar jelly as f**k! Hell, im gonna rape that dragon in its den!

"So Fey, tell us about the CASSSSSHHHHH''

Well its easy, you go down to Calais, spot a good truck thats filled with African refugees. Now most of them will get caught, but some of them actually reach the tunnel! You get the fastest one out there, and I mean really fast, so fast that Bernd wont have seen him coming, become his agent for a few years, get him a British passport. Let him run at a few lower league clubs for a few years, and before you know it, you will sell him for over 10m to either Chelsea or City.

How bout that for a pitch!  

what you're describing is already epidemic in most developing football nations, where every wheeler deals runs an academy, is a coach and an agent buying and selling used players.

Glen is back.

Transfers out:

Glen Johnson
Steven Gerrard
Sebastian Coates
Iago Aspas
Luis Alberto
Brad Jones
Raheem Sterling

Transfers in:

Roberto Ferminho
Nathaniel Clyne
James Milner
Adam Bogdan
Danny Ings
Joe Gomez
Christian Benteke

-----------

That's us done for players in then.

Now to add Borini, Lambert and maybe Balotelli to the outs and possibly Enrique or Lucas as well.

No idea how we are going to do this season - we've got a lot of new players which is never conducive to finding a quick fluency and we have some terrible fixtures early on so there's no time to slowly find our feet.

I reckon we will finish 5th. I am not sure whether that is good enough for Rodgers to keep his job. But how he performs in the cup competitions should also have some bearing IMO. Let's not forget it is only him and Hodgson who have never won a trophy as a Liverpool manager. Also Rodgers has a terrible record in Europe and that is not good enough for LFC.

Messi from La Masia wrote:I reckon we will finish 5th. I am not sure whether that is good enough for Rodgers to keep his job. But how he performs in the cup competitions should also have some bearing IMO. Let's not forget it is only him and Hodgson who have never won a trophy as a Liverpool manager. Also Rodgers has a terrible record in Europe and that is not good enough for LFC.

Does that mean Spurs are going to finish 4th?

I struggle to think how he could have spent this money worse

Lovren - £20
Balotelli - £16m
Lallana - £24m
Markovic - £20m
Mignolet - £12m
Moreno - £16m
Firmino - £22 rising to £28m
Christian (can't run with the ball) Benteke - £32m
Clyne - £12m
Ings - £7m
Borini - £11m
Aspas - £11m
Sakho - £18m
Allen - £18m
Alberto - £8m
Ilori - £6m
Origi - £10m


A staggering waste of money and I've probably missed quite a few

So you're writing off all our summer signings then before they've even kicked a ball?

Clyne, Ings and Milner are all good Premier League players. Milner gives us experience and quality.

Clyne and Ings are relatively young and are both good athletes - they'll give us added energy and can only get better if given game time.

Firminho is an up and coming Brazillian, just like Coutinho was/is - we managed to get Coutinho for a bargain price but you can't always do that. If Firminho can have a similar sort of impact then he'll be worth every penny of that.

Benteke is the only 'risk' this summer - the price tag is too much. I'd value him at £20 million because he has a 1 in 2 goal ratio in the Premier League and again is relatively young. It's a risk because he might not fit our style of play and we've been down this road before (Carroll) which was a disaster but then Benteke has shown his quality much more than Carroll had when we bought him and that was more of a panic buy due to Torres leaving whereas Rodgers has clearly thought this one out for some time. Whether you like Rodgers or not this isn't just some spontaneous signing - he's the man Rodgers wants to lead our attack at least until Sturridge is back.

Again, you can't write off these players until they've at least had half a season to a full season with us and so you can't say we've wasted money until that actually looks to be the case.

In terms of the other players on your list - yes Lovren was a waste of money but he has another season to try and turn things around. Henderson managed to do that after people had written him off, so did Lucas.

Balotelli was a stupid signing.

Markovic is still very young and has shown glimpses of something but needs a run of games to build his confidence up. 20 million was for potential but he hasn't shown that enough yet.

Allen and Moreno are decent squad players. Moreno disappointed me but hopefully can improve this season.

not sure how you can write off Lallana. He's clearly a very good footballer who had injury problems last season. I think he'll show his quality this season if he can stay fit.

I think you have missed the point Luis

Not really interested in arguing the merits of the individual players. As a collective spend of over £200m (or whatever that all adds up to) the failure to really improve the team or only marginally improve it is a disaster. I honestly can't see how he could have spent this any worse. Where are the clever, interesting signings ? Where are the experienced players to come in amd give two or three years before they set sail to MLS for retirement pay ? All I see is a list of mid table punts in the hope they will miraculously become great.

Signing half as many players for the same amount of money would have been the more obvious and sane route to take and wouldn't have left us with this current bloated mess that we have. Where is the ambition with these signings ? Rodgers preaches the virtues of midfield first and foremost. Where is our midfield ? All we have now is workhorses plus Coutinho.

I think we'll do fine this season, but considering the opportunity we had after the great football two seasons ago it feels like his transfer disasters have set us back years when the opportunity to return to the elite was right there to take.

Kimbo wrote:

Messi from La Masia wrote:I reckon we will finish 5th. I am not sure whether that is good enough for Rodgers to keep his job. But how he performs in the cup competitions should also have some bearing IMO. Let's not forget it is only him and Hodgson who have never won a trophy as a Liverpool manager. Also Rodgers has a terrible record in Europe and that is not good enough for LFC.

Does that mean Spurs are going to finish 4th?

No

I think you have missed the point Luis wrote:

Your point was that we've wasted money on all the players you listed. I pointed out that about half of them haven't even kicked a ball for us yet and several of them had an injury ravished season.

Not really interested in arguing the merits of the individual players. As a collective spend of over £200m (or whatever that all adds up to) the failure to really improve the team or only marginally improve it is a disaster. I honestly can't see how he could have spent this any worse. wrote:

Well a good chunk of that spend are on players THAT HAVEN'T KICKED A BALL FOR US YET so at least reserve judgement until they do.

Where are the clever, interesting signings ? wrote:

Firminho is quite interesting. Milner and Ings are clever signings at low costs that will both improve the squad and the first team. Emre Can has potential to be a cracking signing as well.

Where are the experienced players to come in amd give two or three years before they set sail to MLS for retirement pay ? wrote:

Milner?

We went with experience in Kolo Toure and Rickie Lambert - it depends how you utilise it. Chelsea won the league with a fairly young team though.

All I see is a list of mid table punts in the hope they will miraculously become great. wrote:

Well we aren't really in a position to punt on players from the teams that finished above us. We aren't the first team to nick players from those below us. Chelsea and City do it regularly but the difference is they can also go and buy an Aguero or a Hazard every year and leave the likes of Delph on the bench. We don't have that luxury.

Signing half as many players for the same amount of money would have been the more obvious and sane route to take and wouldn't have left us with this current bloated mess that we have. Where is the ambition with these signings ? Rodgers preaches the virtues of midfield first and foremost. Where is our midfield ? All we have now is workhorses plus Coutinho. wrote:

Well our squad was thin when Rodgers took over. I remember our bench away at Chelsea one season had Victor Moses and some 17 year old kid as our only attacking options. This season when everyone's fit we can have a bench of: Bogdan, Lovren, Ibe, Lallana, Allen, Ings, Benteke. That's pretty strong. It's ambitious to beat off rivals (United) for Firminho and Benteke, both were targets for them. Big money has been spent on these two and Clyne was also a target for United and Spurs.

Our midfield is Henderson, Milner and Can. I believe that's a very agile, fluent midfield that can work hard and produce assists. Henderson has been as good as any English midfielder over the last two seasons.

I think we'll do fine this season, but considering the opportunity we had after the great football two seasons ago it feels like his transfer disasters have set us back years when the opportunity to return to the elite was right there to take. wrote:

But how often does a player like Luis Suarez come around? He gets you 25-30 league goals a season. He's literally the difference between 2nd or 5th. Once he went we tried to sign Sanchez who opted for Arsenal. We've been after Pedro and Higuain but clearly they don't want to come to a club who can't guarantee as high wages or consistent Champions League football. That's why Sterling left as well and why Coutinho will probably go next season. We can't compete financially with them so our best hope is to build a squad, particularly with Europa League football to contend with, that can last the duration and play expansive, attacking football. I think we'll see that this season but the defence worries me. We needed to bin Mignolet and sign a quality goalkeeper.

All I get when I read that is

"It might turn out ok"
"What else can we do, we can't compete"

It looks like this lack of ambition has been ingrained in you as well. After spending this ridiculous amount of money I would expect to be supremely confident in the signings and the squad, but none of us are.

It's sad when you are bigging up a midfield as average as Henderson, Can and Milner. We used to have Gerrard, Alonso and Mascherano and even that wasn't ebough.

As I said, opportunity wasted from where we were two seasons ago, and your line that we can't compete financially is hilarious. I don't know why it keeps getting trotted out by our fans. It's insane.

Benteke seems to be getting a bit of an unfair rep.. Bloke was very good in good first season, had injury problems last season but did become much more effective when Villa actually started attacking in games. I think he'll score plenty.. And you really need someone to do that.

What price was Luis throwing out for Benteke a couple of months back?

Benteke is clearly a moneyball signing, I don't think Rogers would have made him a priority.

Our squad is looking a bit Sunderlandy. I agree with COTR, no area of our team looks particularly competent. We have seven strikers, costing about £100m, vying for one place in the team, two at best. Similar amounts spent on both the midfield and defense, to no avail, and easily the worst group of goalkeepers this century.

Looks to me like the Brodge and Fenway Group identified the failure of last season's splurge on buying players with no Premier League experience, and this season they have repeated said splurge but this time on players they believe will hit the ground running.

Do Liverpool have a deep squad now? Yes. But they also have players from last year who hadn't settled now vying with a boatload of new signings who may not need to settle into playing in England, but will take time to settle into Brodge's style and getting to know their team mates. Which means I'd be surprised if Liverpool's starting XI wasn't a filthy mess of chopping and changing for at least the first 3 or 4 months of the season. The depth of quality should be enough for them to keep pace around 4th-5th place, but that might not be enough for Brodge to keep his job, as spending over 200million in 2 years had now placed incredible pressure on him to deliver. Fully expect him gone by Christmas TBH.

Liverpool need to be fucking smart. The "we dont have the money to sign the best" is fucking BULLSHIT!

No, you wont be able to sign Hazard....NOW! Thing is, if you have a decent scouting, you buy him earlier when he doesnt cost that much and the bigger clubs arent interested in him yet. Cause Liverpool has plenty of money, they waste it every year, but they have enough of it.

It all comes down to scouting, Benteke got a trial at us a few years back, he didnt make it...now he is 50 million. You have to scout smart.

And dont forget the Liverpool is part of the EPL so the can buy players with relative ease, was talking with a Southampton supporter yesterday, and he couldnt believe that his tiny club could now buy the best players in Holland...if its a good thing for footbal thats something else.

Still can't believe nobody seemed to challenge Southampton for Clasie. Must really love Koeman.

From England you mean? Cause there was plenty of interest from the Serie A and Germany..guess he went for Koeman though. Well you know the love for big black DM's in England on his position. He needs to gain muscle for the EPL though, he was by far the smallest at Southampton yesterday. Who look really good btw, they totally dicked us, but we just started so..HHH didnt cheer went he scored..

Still..he was in tears yesterday when he said goodbye, and so was I.

Isco Benny wrote:Looks to me like the Brodge and Fenway Group identified the failure of last season's splurge on buying players with no Premier League experience, and this season they have repeated said splurge but this time on players they believe will hit the ground running.

Do Liverpool have a deep squad now? Yes. But they also have players from last year who hadn't settled now vying with a boatload of new signings who may not need to settle into playing in England, but will take time to settle into Brodge's style and getting to know their team mates. Which means I'd be surprised if Liverpool's starting XI wasn't a filthy mess of chopping and changing for at least the first 3 or 4 months of the season. The depth of quality should be enough for them to keep pace around 4th-5th place, but that might not be enough for Brodge to keep his job, as spending over 200million in 2 years had now placed incredible pressure on him to deliver. Fully expect him gone by Christmas TBH.

did you get confused or are you being sarcastic?

We've been back in training this week as a full squad before we head out to Finland at the weekend for our final pre season match. We also play Swindon this weekend so I imagine that will be more for the 'squad' players like Balotelli, Allen, Ings etc.

All things considered I don't think Firminho and Benteke have had enough time to integrate with the squad yet so I can't see Firimnho starting vs Stoke on the 9th. Benteke will probably start although Ings has had far more time with the squad in pre season and scored a few.

Probable team vs Stoke:

--------------------Mignolet------------

---Clyne----Skrtel-----Sakho------Moreno------

--------------------Can--------------------------

---------Henderson--------Milner--------------

------Lallana------------------Coutinho--------

-------------------Benteke----------------------

Rodgers seems to be favouring Lovren in pre season ahead of Sakho but I'm not sure how much you can read into that. We're also heavily linked to Digne from PSG so if that comes off he could start over Moreno.

Sakho has to start ahead of Lovren, surely.

..................Mignolet

Clyne........Skrtel......Sakho.....Moreno

............Henderson....Allen
.....Firminho..............Coutinho
......................................Sturridge
...................Benteke

We don't really have a centre mid this season so hopefully it's just all out attack. This team doesn't look so bad and some decent bench options in Ibe, Markovic and Lallana

Milner will definitely be starting games - him, Henderson and Coutinho are the only guaranteed starters from midfield to attack. Lucas, Allen and Can will compete for one spot.

I think this will be a big season for Lallana. He's in direct competition for a place with Firminho so it depends who performs better in training and on the pitch.

Absolutely no idea what happens when Sturridge is back. I see him as a luxury now.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-3231133/STEVEN-GERRARD-EXCLUSIVE-day-really-got-hurt-tackle.html

The knives are really out for Rodgers now - even the 'die hard' Liverpool fans who back the manager 'till death do them part are turning.

I'm not desperate for him to go because I don't think any replacement will do much better right now. If you're going to sack a manager and start again it has to be done at the very end of a season so they have a full summer to prepare with their new squad. Any manager coming in now would maybe rejuvenate the squad for a few games during a honeymoon period but ultimately the lack of quality and winning mentality would shine through eventually.

As I've said before I like Rodgers - I think he has a vision for this club and I still don't buy the Suarez was a one man team season. Yes, Suarez 'bailed' us out many times but Ronaldo did that for United, Aguero did it for City. Sanchez did it a lot for Arsenal last season. The manager still has to ensure players like that can thrive based on what the players around him do and Rodgers managed to get a brilliant triumvirate of Sterling, Suarez and Sturridge playing aided by Henderson and Coutinho.

There's no doubting though that there are two major flaws to his management in his time with Liverpool.

1) The defence and goalkeeper. Mingolet has been such a disaster for the majority of his Liverpool career. Today was another example - he creates so much tension in the back line. I'm unsure why Rodgers can't see this. He dropped Mignolet 'indefinitely' for one game last season then put him back in and he improved for a run of games. However from March onwards he went back to being dodgy again. We should have signed an upgrade over the summer. Instead, we sign Bogdan, who isn't exactly a great keeper anyway to replace one of the worst ever keepers, Brad Jones, on the bench. Baffling.

Then you look at the defence itself. Rodgers has seriously fucked it up. He fell out with Agger who was probably our most consistent centre back since Carra and Hyypia left. He signed Sakho for 18 million, started him when he was poor then dropped him when he became very good. He signed Illori for about 6 million who's now gone on loan. And now he's keeping faith with Lovren despite consistently poor performances.

We look like we never ever practise defensive set pieces. Skrtel can't last more than this season - his time has to be up now. We actually need to sell possibly all our centre backs and start again.

Then the fullbacks. It seems like we've been shit at signing a left back for about 10 years. Riise, Dossena, Enrique, Konchesky, Moreno, Gomez.

The last two are our options now. Moreno has been disappointing for 14 million. Gomez is very young and clearly not ready yet but Rodgers thinks playing him at Old Trafford will be ok. I don't think Flanagan is ever coming back and Enrique is still laughably here as well.

I think Clyne is a good player but he can only thrive when we play a fluid attacking game.

The defence is a mess though. No one looks confident, there's no wavelength between them. Rodgers has had 4 years to sort this and it's as fragile as ever.

2) Wasted money.

A classic example of this is Lazar Markovic, 20 million, young, a fairly good prospect. Out on loan in Turkey. Danny Ings, a cheap buy from Burnley as a third choice striker is starting as a left wing back. It's stuff like that where I think Rodgers can't blame anyone if he was to be sacked tomorrow. It's the kind of thing managers do when they know their time is up, like when Rafa took Torres off when we were losing.

I'm desperately willing Rodgers' signings to come good and I discount this summer's cohort until the season ends. But I can count the likes of Lallana, Allen, Moreno, Lovren, Sakho, Markovic. That's over 100 million pounds and I can't honestly say I'd be that bothered if any of them left the club right now. None of them are game changing players.

When you spend that much money as a manager and you bring in so many players you need at least half of them to come good. So far only Coutinho and Sturridge are still the only 2 Brendan Rodgers signings that have been top class. That's 2 players in 4 seasons. This is going to cost him his job.

I think if we were playing well but not getting the results it would be different but the only time we've played well this season has been in one half of football at the Emirates Stadium. We've scored 3 goals all season - 2 of which were wonder goals and one was offside.

Granted, today we didn't have Coutinho or Henderson or Sturridge. I get that it's difficult without 3 key players at Old Trafford. But there was no fucking fight from the players we did have. There was no cohesion, no passion. Rodgers goes on about character but I haven't seen any from us all season and most of last season.

I am not advocating sacking Rodgers right now but I don't think he has long left. We should be winning our next 4 matches in all competitions. If we don't win them and we don't play well I think he's gone.