BRENDAN Rodgers has outlined his desire for ‘three or four’ new faces to go straight into the Liverpool first team over the summer, and stressed the need for the Reds to keep bringing in players of real quality in the manner that they did in January.
“It is quality we are after, not quantity. We’ve seen Coutinho and Daniel Sturridge’s quality in January and if we bring in another three or four quality players to add to what we have got, then we have got a strong squad.
“Naturally there might be people who aren’t playing who might want to think about going elsewhere, but at the moment it’s a strong squad.
“Of course you have an ideal target but we are getting to a situation now where, for me, you have to have three players and if one doesn’t come off you have to be comfortable with the other two – if you get one of those you are happy,” he said.
Rodgers is now confident that with his scouting team up and running, he will be able to keep attracting players of the requisite class to Anfield.
“There is a lot of terrific work going on behind the scenes with the scouting department getting those lists together really. We never had that in the summer and what I had to go with was not what I knew but there were some key positions we needed support in.
“What I didn’t want to do was to waste the club’s money. I like to be extensive and know what we are bringing in, but also we did not have the time and that was the big issue. We are much better placed now. There is great collaboration that goes on between all the departments.
“January was a productive window for us and hopefully if we do the similar in the summer then it’s going to be a real good place for us.”
Liverpool have been linked with a number of players over the past week including Newcastle’s French winger Hatem Ben Arfa and Paris St Germain striker Kevin Gameiro.
[ad_pod id=’DFP-MPU’ align=’right’]
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
I don’t remember the last time LFC has lost this many games in a season. The only reason Europe seemed like a distant possibility was because of the poor seasons the other Top 4 sides have had bar Man U!
Spurs have lost 2 in a row now and have been carried by Bale for many a game and aren’t as strong ad they were when they had Modric and VDV.
Chelsea has been affected by changing managers too often, have had injury problems in defence, are been affected by a misfiring Torres a lot more with Drogba and Anelka already gone and aren’t being helped by plastic fans throwing their dummies out of the pram just because they don’t like the manager.
Man City has also lost the consistency of the previous year as well allowing their neighbours to run away with the league this year.
Arsenal has had their worst run in years, obviously affected by Van Persie leaving them last season and Fabregas, Nasri, Adebayor, Toure amongst many others over the years slowly downgrading the team and not finding good enough replacements over the years. The focus on balancing the books rather than competing for trophies has finally caught up with them. Do you see a similarity with us??
Everton under Moyes really hasn’t been all that better but are looking better becaue of the top teams all struggling. Europe has been the measure and while we used to get 3 Premier League teams in the semifinals of the Champions League we don’t have a single team anymore competing in it after the first knockout phase. We only have Chelsea left in the Europa Cup.
Liverpoool meanwhile haven’t been progressing, we have been going backwards in our so called period of transition since FSG took over. The rot of course started with G&H and our crippling debts but now we have gradually downgraded our quality in depth from squad size, coaching staff, scouting staff, boardroom members, agents, physios all the way down to the tea lady probably…so we don’t have a chance in hell again to be counted amongst the elite anymore.
Sturridge and Coutinho are decent signings we have had in January which is a marked improvement over the summer window where BR admits we didn’t have a scouting team. This will explain why our signings were limited to players BR had worked with before and why we squandered 40 million on rubbish and were left short of attacking options after allowing Kuyt, Maxi, Bellamy, Aquilani and Carroll to lesve. So yes despite managing to save money by downsizing the squad and decreasing the wages by getting rid of ageing players and deadwood we succeeded in cementing our midtable position as well by doing so.
We may have done a lot better keeping Spearing as a defensive MF backup to Lucas, keeping Aquilani and not signing Allen. Borini and Assaidi have not really featured much so I will not say much about them.
It is true we have spent too much and underperformed over the years and some adjustments had to be made after being out of the Champions League for so long and wasting colossal amounts on mediocre players but what’s done is done now and we will struggle for years to come. Any chance of a quick revival though has been hampered by FSG who are themselves novices when it comes to the game of football.
As much as it pains me to say this we are so far off the pace now it will take us another 3-4 years at least to crawl back to where we were in 2008-2009 when we were back where we belonged, amongst Europe’s elite. Even then we were punching above our weight with a very strong 1st Eleven but not enough quality in depth to compete on multiple fronts.
Fast forward to present we have a young, inexperienced manager who is out of his depth, tactically inept and is fortunate to have players like Suarez who may just be able to get us to crawl into the top half of the table season end.
We were celebrating when we were momentarily in 6th place but please think of this in context to what I have written earlier with regards to the other teams. And there are still a few games yet we will lose before the season draws to a pitiful end.
I was dead against us going for BR and not bringing in a proven manager last summer but after the gamble was confirmed I resigned myself to having to support him in the hope he will come good. The hope has faded somewhat but next season will be thr acid test if he is still around.