Are We Setting Our Sights Far Too Low?

I was pleasantly surprised to see the rumours doing the rounds on Friday night across the web that Liverpool had completed a deal to bring Uruguayan international Gaston Ramirez to the club. I know little about him, to be completely honest, other than he plays for Bologna in Italy and is a highly thought of young attacking player, even referred to as the ‘Uruguayan Kaka’. Regardless of any of this, he is a member of one of the best international sides in the world and that can only be a good thing, especially as he has two of his compatriots already at the club. If he signs, he will certainly present the fans with a very exciting prospect.

However, this rumour aside some of the others have me slightly concerned.

Admittedly, they are only rumours but with names such as Mark Davies, Victor Moses and Steven Caulker popping up regularly this week, it really is starting to get slightly worrying. I’m beginning to think that we’re setting our sights far too low.

As always, you can’t bank on gossip in the press until a move is announced or admitted to by the clubs involved but the very fact that we’re having our name associated with players such as these makes me concerned that we either a) don’t have very much money to spend or b) we’re simply targeting average squad players.

We made a similar mistake last summer and brought in a group of players for extortionate fees. Regardless of how much a player like Davies would cost, he is not what Liverpool needs or wants. Sure, he may have had a decent season at a relegated side and he may well be a decent player but we’ve let a more than decent squad player (Dirk Kuyt) move on for next to nothing already this summer and it look increasingly likely that another, Craig Bellamy, will be on his way too. So are these really the sorts of players we want to be replacing them with? I would much rather see a couple of the youngsters step in to fill the squad voids left by these two players.
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But despite comparisons with our activities last summer, the more appropriate comparison would be with Roy Hodgson transfers in the summer of 2010, when he brought in a number of players he was familiar with/had worked with before, including Brad Jones, Paul Konchesky and Christian Poulsen – all solid players at the level they are suited for, but they are not the sort you bring in to a club the size of Liverpool. Hodgson brought these men in because he’d worked with them before and they’d done a job but the signings were well out of sync with the task he faced at Liverpool.

The concern for me is that Brendan Rodgers might be about to make similar mistakes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking the man before he’s even signed a player but a quick look at some of the primary targets we’ve had linked to the club in the past few weeks show a who’s who of players that have either played for, been loaned to or been targeted by, his former club Swansea while he was manager there: Gylfi Sigurdsson, Steven Caulker, Fabio Borini, Mark Davies. Sigurdsson aside, these are all players that would be acceptable for a club of Swansea’s stature and could do a decent job for them, but they are not Liverpool players; they are not the kind of quality we need to pepper our squad with during this very crucial summer window. As I’ve found myself saying all too often in the past few weeks, let’s just hope they are only that: transfer rumours, and when the ball starts rolling after the Euros have ended, we’ll start to see some genuine quality arriving at the club.
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