Liverpool’s Top Five Players Of The Season, So Far

IT’S been a highly promising, not to mention entertaining, start to the season for Liverpool so far with just over a quarter of the season gone.

We’re sitting comfortably in 2^nd place, behind the current best team in the country, with only they and Manchester City having scored more and only Arsenal and two others having conceded less.

Our side contains a host of new players, young players and the two best strikers in the country. Not only this, but they’re also joint top scorers in the league with Sergio Aguero.

At this stage, it is far more than any of us would’ve dared to dream was possible after 11 games way back in August but it is a very real reality and one we should be enjoying as much as we can.

With that in mind and with the season officially now just over a quarter of the way through, I feel it is a good time to take a look at the stand out players for the Reds during the season, thus far:

5. Kolo Toure

Given that I wrote about my uncertainty over the signing of former Manchester City defender back in pre-season, I guess this selection comes with a fairly decent sized slice of humble pie. But my God, does it taste good.

For the mere price of his (no doubt, significantly reduced) wage, Toure is now looking like the bargain of the season (regardless of what some pundits are saying about the £40-odd million paid for Mesut Ozil!). Toure has since played in all but left-back across the back line, even putting in a shift as a right wing-back last month and he has been nothing but a revelation, winning over the hearts and minds of Liverpool fans with his performances.

Showing heart, fight, intelligence and no small amount of talent Toure has very much won me over and has clearly won over many more Liverpool fans making my biggest concern about Toure – his ability to play a full season – all but moot.

He is not quite ‘past it’ but he is very much in the twilight of his career and has been brought in to complement the youth and quality in our fairly young squad with experience. But when Kolo Toure does retire, and hopefully he will do that as a Liverpool player, the lasting image we will all have of him is that warm, infectious smile. A great player, a great signing and one of Liverpool’s most impressive players of the season so far, to boot!

4. Lucas Leiva

I will start out by admitting that I’m incredibly biased toward Lucas Leiva. I always feel I should establish that whenever writing about the (still young) Brazilian midfielder, as I often end up gushing about him and it can come off a little bit embarrassing.

The fact is, Lucas is our most important midfielder and he is only going to improve over the next few years. One of the most disappointing parts of Lucas’s career will always be the fact that you only notice how important he is when he isn’t there and that has been the case several times over the past few years, during a bad spell of regular injuries.

Also, sadly for the player, his masterful performance when playing against that season’s Premier League champions, Manchester City, has become his benchmark but Lucas’s performances will not always be that apparent, particularly as Liverpool have moved on since that time and are now a team capable of dominating all but a handful of Premier League teams.

But again, against Fulham on Saturday, Lucas was in incredible form, proving the catalyst and platform for what was easily the best performance we’ve seen from the team all season.

If Lucas stays fit and continues to build on his form this season then we’ll always have a reliable, solid and, sadly, unnoticed lynchpin to build our performances on for the next 27 league games and if it wasn’t for the spectacularly good form of the next three this season, he’d have been placed even higher.
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3. Luis Suarez

What do you say about the man himself? He is ridiculous in many ways but none more so than how talented he is. Sometimes, he can be so sublime that he makes you forget that he can, only occasionally, be a despicable human being.

But my God, what a bloody player.

I’ve read a lot this season about how much better than Messi, Ronaldo is, and how much closer to Messi and Ronaldo, Zlatan Ibrahimovic is than any of us realize but it’s strange that Luis Suarez’s name never enters people’s minds when the ‘best players in the world’ discussion kicks off.

For me, what Suarez achieves playing for Liverpool is almost as impressive as what the likes of Ronaldo, Messi and Ibrahimovic achieve at their respective clubs. In many ways I can understand why Suarez would want to move to a club with so many resources and so many world class players because I can only imagine how many goals he would score and set up when surrounded by such talent.

At Liverpool he has two (possibly three, if you include an aging Gerrard) incredible players that he plays in tandem with so well, as well as a number of solid – if unspectacular – players and talented youngsters coming through. But at a club like Barcelona or Madrid he would have world class players in every position to compliment his every move. If Madrid think Bale was worth £85 million then I can’t imagine the price they’d place on Suarez in his present form.

All platitudes aside, Suarez has come back from his lengthy ban and has almost literally set the league alight with 8 league goals in 6 games, not to mention an assist thrown in for good measure.

It is very hard to imagine another player capable of such a feat, currently playing in the Premier League, apart from possibly Sergio Aguero. Or, when in the mood, the next man on this list…

2. Daniel Sturridge

It was a tough choice for the no.2 spot, given how electric Luis Suarez has been this season, and given Sturridge’s own lack of goals in the last…two games. But Sturridge deserves his placing for his ridiculous consistency since January of last season.

His real contribution this season though has been in hitting – and staying – as top scorer in the Premier league, providing the goals that have kept the Reds in the top 2 or 3 spots since August.

Let’s not forget that Sturridge’s contributions early in the season meant that we took a maximum 9 points from our tricky first 3 games. He also scored a brace in the league cup tie which took us through and, Southampton aside, he scored in every game up until Arsenal last weekend.

So while Luis Suarez’s form has been the more impressive in the more recent games, without Sturridge’s contributions all season, we’d have been looking a at significantly worse first 11 games. I only hope that he rediscovers his form in the coming weeks as we’re going to need both him and Suarez in top form if we’re going to match the current league leaders blow for blow.

1. Martin Skrtel

Sorry but I’m not going to sugar-coat it for you – the chances are, you’re one of those fans that thought Martin Skrtel wasn’t good enough and warranted being sold in the summer to raise funds for ‘better’ players but you could probably not have been any more wrong.

After a particularly ropey spell last season, Liverpool seemed to have forgotten what the words ‘clean sheet’ meant and somebody, inevitably, had to take on the role of fall guy. That person was Martin Skrtel.

When Carragher retired in the summer and Liverpool were being linked to all kinds of centre-backs it seemed very, very, very unlikely that Martin Skrtel would still be here come August but he was.

And when the season started it seemed even more unlikely that he’d be playing much unless we saw injuries to at least two of Agger, Toure, Sakho, Wisdom, Kelly and Ilori – all top defenders of varying talent and experience in their own rights but I don’t think Martin Skrtel could’ve confounded his critics anymore than he has done.

After not even being deemed good enough/high enough up the pecking order to make the bench in the Reds first three games of the season, Skrtel was fast-tracked back in against Manchester United and starred in a 1-0 win at Anfield, in which the Slovakian was largely deemed Man-of-the-Match after a late rearguard action from the Reds saw David Moyes confined to a huge, disappointing defeat in his first big game.

Since then, Skrtel has kept his place, gone from strength-to-strength and, up until his return due to a switch in formation on Saturday afternoon, kept fan-favorite Daniel Agger out of the side. Deservedly so.

With a player like Skrtel, you know what you’re going to get but he doesn’t get the credit he deserves as a footballer but the man is a real asset and is woefully undervalued by many of our fans. Provided Skrtel stays in form, we have a rock at the back around which we can build and while Sturridge, Coutinho and Suarez will all no doubt take many more of the plaudits this season, there is no denying that Skrtel is the defensive platform upon which our attacking stars will flourish.

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