These Two Should Be the First Out the Door Over the Summer

WHILE perusing through football articles this morning online, I noticed a rather disturbing piece from the Mail regarding Maxi Rodriguez.

He is supposedly considering cancelling his own contract and moving on during this summer.

Having watched that farce from Liverpool on Saturday (for the first 60 minutes, at least) can anybody really blame him?

I could understand if Maxi had given some serious thought to moving on in the summer anyway, particularly after another strong showing this season, following his storming end to last season. And while he’s played little this season he has shown that, when he does we have few better at doing what he does, i.e. supporting Luis Suarez. Not to mention he chips in with important goals and does exactly what our other midfielders appear to feel is a bit beneath them: getting in to the bloody box to support the attack at every opportunity.

If the little Argie is seriously considering this then I would not blame him for a second, although if I was Kenny I would beg him to reconsider, at least for one more season. Sadly this won’t be the case, I don’t think, as reports from various other sources seem to indicate that Maxi will be one of the first players shipped in the summer to balance the books and to ensure that there is room (and funds?) for further jumps into the market.

Ridiculously, a few of the players that Maxi is almost certainly more capable than – and should be starting ahead of – are likely to be given another season: Downing, Henderson and Spearing. For me, these three have been colossal disappointments this season. Henderson and Downing even more so because of the fees we had to waste on them. I will pull no punches over the fact that I think that Adam and Carroll have not shown enough either but in Adam’s defence, he was starting to come into a decent run of performance once he and Lucas got a little bit of an understanding going. Once Lucas was injured he was having to play alongside Spearing and if there are still any out there that think he’s good enough, I’d suggest heading straight to your nearest shrink.

Carroll, on the other hand, has struggled all season but has started to come good when it matters most for him – the end of the season. There were doubts around him but after the past few weeks, then culminating in the massive display he gave us in the final 30 minutes on Saturday, Carroll has earned more respect for the way he’s turned things around and has probably given himself another season and the support of many more doubters, besides.

But for Henderson, Downing and Spearing the end cannot come soon enough. We’ve seen some inept footballers at this club in the past two decades but tell me, is there a single Liverpool fan that wouldn’t swap Downing for Riera, Kewell or Gonzalez now? Is there really anybody out there that wouldn’t pay over the odds to replace Spearing with Damien Plessis (remember those performances against Arsenal a few years ago) or Momo Sissoko? Mostly Rafa Benitez signings, yet he was crucified for them at the time and has been since but he wouldn’t ever, not in a million years, sign players (nor play players) as bad as these, but more on that later in the week.

As for these 3, I would happily move them all on in the summer but I would probably have to bow to pressure over Henderson, simply to be fair. Because, you see, I was probably amongst Lucas’s biggest supporters back in the dark days, when everything from his position (or, more importantly, the player who’s position he was able to fill) to his hair-style was picked at, so when we see how far he’s come up to his early-season injury, I allow myself to feel a little bit smug. So if I was to not allow Henderson the same time to develop and grow I’d be a massive hypocrite. With that in mind I could stomach letting the young midfielder have another season to start showing what he’s worth, as there have perhaps been a handful of flashes in a relatively poor season for him so far and he needs to begin showing big improvements next season. A starting point would be to grow a pair and stop allowing every game he’s a part of to pass him by as if he’s the ghost of Jamie Redknapp.
[ad_pod id=”unruly-video” align=”center”]
As for the other two, however, I can’t see any reasoning that I would find suitable that would enable either player to be kept on the books. I read one or two fans that believed Spearing can still ‘do a job’ for us over the weekend but they at least had the decency to concede that he was not good enough to fill any role but that of ‘3^rd choice defensive midfielder’. The guy is 23, soon going on 24 and if he is still considered nothing more than a backup for the backup then he just isn’t good enough. As far as I’m concerned, we need a genuine, quality backup to Lucas and then the player that fills in for these two should be a youngster that can learn from them. Seriously, do we really need three players in every position? That’s how we got in to the state we did under Houllier, when we had an enormously average squad back in 2005.

No, Spearing is poor and has never once this season not looked completely out of his depth. He has only been given the added time he’s had because he’s ‘local’ which, if you ask me, is beginning to sound like a dirty word every time I say it. I believe there are a number of clubs out there that would be willing to pay around £2-£4 million for the midfielder and we’d be stupid not to accept it. Whether he ends up back in the Premier league or moves down a division I could not say but he needs to be moved on now.

Downing, on the other hand, has been a great disappointment for me. I wrote at the start of the season that I preferred the thought of signing him to Ashley Young, as I had it in my mind that he was more mature and much more consistent. While Young has been anything but consistent over at Fergie-land, Downing has at least proved me right in one respect: he’s been consistent. Yes, he’s been consistently dire. When you pay around about £20 million for a winger, you expect him to be one of the best. Or, at least, one of the best in the country. But so far this season, he’s been outscored by a central defender (Martin Skrtel – 4), a striker that cost us nothing (Craig Bellamy – 9) and a midfielder that has been so ludicrously under-used he’s considering ripping his own contract up (Maxi – 6). He’s also been hopelessly outplayed when it comes to assists as well and just to save us all the time and effort, I’ll just let you know that John Flanagan has the same amount of assists as Downing does this season and leave it at that.

What you’re beginning to see there is a widely-respected, experienced 27 year-old winger, with 33 England caps so far and over 350 games played in his career at Premier League club level. For that, there can be no excuses, none whatsoever. He doesn’t need a ‘bedding in’ 12 months or any time to ‘find his feet’, he’s from England, he’s over 25 and he’s been doing this for years. The bedding in excuse is only eligible for youngsters and foreign players. Nor can the old ‘pressure from the huge fee’ be peddled out, as he’s moved clubs for large fees before, at a younger age as well. And if you find it hard to handle the pressure of a big club at the age of 27 well then maybe you’re not cut out to play for that big club, and this is the conclusion I’ve come to: Downing just can’t handle the pressure of playing at a big club. We’ll take a fairly sizeable hit from the sale but we need to cut our losses now and let him go. The likes of Newcastle, Stoke, Sunderland would be interested, I’m sure, and I bet Villa would happily have him back if they stay up. We’d lose around £5-£10 million but that’s business and we’d just have to swallow it.

So with rumours already circulating about another summer of transfer activity for the Reds, I’d happily see Downing and Spearing be the first out of the door and then perhaps the lessons we’ve learned from using players like these this season would teach whoever’s in charge by then that they need to be a little more shrewd with the money we have to strengthen our squad for 2012-2013.

Live4Liverpool is recruiting columnists. For further info contact the site editor at live4liverpool@snack-media.com

Follow us on Twitter here: @live4Liverpool and ‘Like’ us on Facebook