Reports today have heavily linked Liverpool with a move for Nice striker Loic Remy. Skysports.com have spoken to his agent Frederic Guerra who confirmed the Reds had enquired about the player:
“Yes, Liverpool are interested in Loic and Loic is interested in Liverpool. There has also been interest from West Ham and Tottenham and it is now up to Nice. Loic has always said he is keen to play in England and Liverpool are a massive club.”
Website Nice Matin has gone as far as saying that the Reds had agreed a £12.5m fee for the player and that he would be in Liverpool tomorrow for a medical, but it seems they have jumped the gun. Liverpool boss Roy Hodgson said:
“He’s a player who was mentioned to me by the scouting department and a player the club were following before I came, He’s a player I know very little about. If I am going to be interested in a player I am going to have to watch him playing, study him and make judgments which I have not been able to.”
Liverpool’s head scout Eduardo Macia has apparently been tracking the player for five years from his development as a teenager. So if there was any interest from the Reds, what sort of player would we get? A biased viewpoint comes from his agent Guerra who described the player as “like Thierry Henry” who would become better than the former Arsenal striker if he came to England. Is this truly the case though? I would be concerned that we were buying another El-Hadji Diouf or to a lesser extent Djibril Cisse. The player could very well be talented but he is unproven at the top level, unlike many other strikers who could be purchased for the figures being bandied around for Remy.
He has certainly been compared to Thierry Henry in his native France because of his style of play. He has pace in abundance and loves to run the channels while he is graceful on the ball and is a consummate finisher. The biggest problem for Remy is that it is not certain what his best position is. Despite scoring goals regularly in Ligue One, he has been used both on the left and right for Nice. If he was to play up front on his own, as he might have to at Liverpool, and was expected to score goals, he may struggle.
This has to be a concern for any Reds fans who would not want to see the very little money we have, spent on a novice. Certainly he has many admirers in his native France. He was spotted as a talent from a young age and was brought in to Lyon’s youth academy at just ten years of age. At the academy, he played with both Karim Benzema and Hatem Ben Arfa and he progressed to playing in the team’s first team like his compatriots back in October 2006, making his debut against St Etienne. He made six league appearances during his first season at the club and followed with eight more early in the 2007/08 season.
Still young, it was thought best that he was loaned out to another club for first team experience and he spent the rest of the campaign at Lens. It was a relatively successful loan spell and he scored 4 goals in 12 appearances, returning to Lyon at the end of the season. He had shown some promising glimpses of his talent and it persuaded Nice to spend a club record €8million on the player. In a struggling team he scored 11 goals in his first season and 14 goals last season as Nice finished 15th. He also attracted the attention of his former club Lyon who wanted to purchase the player back but they failed to agree a fee. The player caught the eye of French coach Raymond Domenech too and he played in a friendly against Mali for France A, coming on as a 54th minute substitute.
The player does also have a great deal of mental strength. At the start of this calendar year, he and his team-mates were subjected to a spitting incident by their own fans after a poor home defeat to Auxerre. Remy described the affair as “unacceptable” and threatened to leave in January, but persevered and continued to score goals until the end of the season. Question marks remain whether he would be a good acquisition for Liverpool though. Two relatively good seasons in Ligue One, and the fact there are questions over his physical ability to cope with the rigours of the Premier League, mean the jury is still out on Remy and it remains to be seen whether he would be worth the gamble despite his undoubted potential.
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you have to be prepared to take a risk on players or you’ll never buy anyone! we cannot afford the “finished article” so we have to take a chance on potential, i remember us rejecting the chance to take a certain christiano ronaldo for a reported £5m and we all know what happened there! i, for one, would rather take on west ham and spurs now, rather than be non-starters in a bidding war with the big boys in 2 years time! i would be of the same opinion when it comes to steven defour and taiwo or benfica’s LB
T am sure he will be a lot better than Diouf but to say another Cisse well injuries ruined his chances of proving just how good he was, and that could happen to anyone.
steve, not really why are buying yet again another risk,, thats something in itself we can not do at all? why are we not paying the same to get crouch back or even buy Huntelaar, he said the other day that champions league is not the be all and end all he just wants to play, he is young and good, he knows kuyt and babel and would settle well , he has not had it easy of late which means he is hungry, id go for him for less? yet again we are buying players who are not top of their game for alot of cash that we do not have