Essien out for several months

You see what you want to see luis. Ramires was mostly average last season, with a few excellent games and a few dreadful games thrown in.

Interestingly, his fellow countryman Lucas has also been one of Brazil's worst players at the Copa and was also very average (but for a few good performances) last season yet, according to posts made by some of the Liverpool fans on here, he had a brilliant season.

From Opta: 172 - Lucas Leiva made more tackles than any other player in the top five leagues in Europe this season.

He was voted Liverpool fans' player of the season, so not just the 4 Liverpool fans on here but he won 40% of the 129,774 votes cast.

Ramires will become a Mikel. Chelsea need better midfield players.

S4P wrote:You see what you want to see luis. Ramires was mostly average last season, with a few excellent games and a few dreadful games thrown in.

Interestingly, his fellow countryman Lucas has also been one of Brazil's worst players at the Copa and was also very average (but for a few good performances) last season yet, according to posts made by some of the Liverpool fans on here, he had a brilliant season.

Lucas was the player's player of the season and fans player of the season by quite some distance so probably wrong bringing him into this one SP based on last season.

Ramires might come good this season. It did after all take Lucas about two years to get to anything approaching a reasonable level of performance. Ramires also has the unfortunate disadvantage of having to play football alongside Frank Lampard and Mikel.

Ramires used to play for Benfica.

COTR wrote:
Ramires might come good this season. It did after all take Lucas about two years to get to anything approaching a reasonable level of performance. Ramires also has the unfortunate disadvantage of having to play football alongside Frank Lampard and Mikel.

And this is the reason for the hype from his own club's fans. It isn't so much that he was outstanding last season - rather, his performances were being judged relative to his performances in previous seasons. If he hadn't performed so poorly in previous seasons, his performances last season would not have received anything like the same amount of praise from Liverpool fans. Perhaps 'most improved player' would have been a more deserving award.

It is always nice to see someone continuing Batman's good work and bringing up a random, irrelevant stat. Anyway, wasn't Lampard one of the top assisters last season? Yet in the same sentence luis informs us that he is now 'past it'.

Lucas seems to have the same problem for Brazil he used to have for Liverpool under Benitez - in that his team mates are all a lot better than him. If he is to be a success at international level he needs the Brazil squad to be slowly diluted with players like Jovanovic, Poulson, Kyrgiakos and Konchesky. That's when you'll see the best of him.

Has Lucas gotten better, or have Liverpool just gotten worse?