NEIL ATKINSON is back on presenting duties, and is joined by Ian Salmon, Mike Girling and John Gibbons. They discuss the announcement, of sorts, of Danny Ings as well as the backroom merry-go-round and why footballers contracts are weird.
There is even a winner takes all school yard game. Who wins? You decide.
I’m with Neil on his opinion of Ings. It in my opinion is an absolutely bonkers signing! We can’t rely on Sturridge and already have a very raw 21 year old coming in, so why get another one??
The sole aim of this summer has to be getting goals into the side and they usually come from top strikers. We only have 1 and he is horrendously unreliable in terms of his fitness. So now we have Ings and Origi with him. Unless we go and get Suarez mark 2 then the signing makes no sense. We should in my opinion have gone and got Tevez on the cheap and signed someone like Vietto aswell. Both very fast, skillful and mobile players who know were the net is. Now i worry we will go and get Benteke and should that happen then we are absolutely fucked for the coming season!
Vietto scored 12 in a team which finished 6th and is 21. Ings scored 11 in a team that was relegated and is 22. The arguement can be made that Ings outperformed Vietto in this season, not only that but he did it in this league. Vietto would have cost upwards of £15mil and has his heart set on Atletico. We’re prob gonna get Ings for less than half that.
Is Gibbons on for a percentage if Benteke signs?. He is absolutely not the front man signing we need ( as seen by Melissa’s fantastic piece t’other week). And to spend anywhere between 25-32 million on him is absolutely bonkers tbh.
Remember ‘Only Fools and Horses’? But cheap and hope to sell dear to a mug on tne pub. Spend a fortune on shite and hope some of it turns out to have sugar on it. We’ve just spent two years doing that.
Aspas, , Lambert, Balotelli, Orrigo, Ings…
For that outlY we could have bought a REAL striker. Have we learned anything?
Benteke, anyone?
Summer 2013 we signed Aspas, Ilori and Alberto for a combined approx £22mil. How much of an impact have they had on our team?! Fuck all!!
£22mil buys you a fucking decent player if you do your homework or can be put towards a top quality striker.
We have the money we just consistently spend it poorly!!
Can John have a go at producing for a bit?
Always enjoy the pod, and usually Neil is the voice of reason challenging and reining in the other voices. I do think Neil is getting a little carried away with his “buy goals” analysis of the transfer business. In which parallel universe do we think we are a bigger enough draw, with the execution ability to bring in two worldies one at least who would run the risk of not getting much game time?
Imagine the transfer window ahead of us if we followed the strategy of holding out for two top top front men, before carrying out any other business. Only a handful of big name forwards move each summer and it is quite often the case that they only end up moving relatively late in the window. We could be left watching the transfer window clock tick down, chasing the shadows of top strikers before they are snapped up by other teams with CL to offer or deeper pockets. You have to think if we learnt one thing from last season, it is to avoid that. Having Ings, Origi and even Balotelli on our books going in to pre-season avoids that nightmare scenario.
It looks like we are still in the market for another striker. Personally I am nervous that we are linked with Benteke, because he doesn’t seem to have much in common with Sturridge as far as playing style goes. (I felt much the same about Bony). I will be delighted to be proved wrong if he does come though, and I think he is closer to what we need than Mario is. He scored more goals that ManU’s top striker in a team that struggled for goals for half a season. Would a more exotic choice like Vietto (just 12 goals in La Liga) offer more? Odds don’t look great on that.
Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Chelsea waltz in and snap Benteke up as a replacement for Drogba. We can then look forward to a few months of listening to everyone bitching and moaning about Ayre’s ability to get the deal done for a player who is good enough to be Chelsea’s second choice striker!
Full of fume listening to this, Neil is so right, buy goals its not difficult, you sell a Suarez you buy the best replacement you can or best two you can. Barca front 3 scored 120 goals and are not very good at the back but it does not matter.
FSG seem détermined to turn us into a Spurs. Buying goodish players with no idea where they are going to play. The Quintessential Spurs player is Glen Hoddle, very good at football but would never get anywhere near the Liverpool team of the time because as a midfielder he didn’t do enough tackling and dirty work to challenge Souness or Case in midfield and be could not score 20 goals a season as second striker. Good player, doesn’t fit in the team. All our signings last year are good players with no position, even Coutinho who is arguably our best player has no set position, he is one of your outfield players but where does he play, behind two strikers, (that we don’t have). Henderson is the same, yes he plays in midfield but where?with whom? doing what? Do you turn him into a DM is he your passing metronome a la Alonso? Without strikers signed how do you play to their strength. Mike was correct because Real Madrid were crap for 20 years before the galacticos because they signed boss players but had no idea where to play them, and that is what normally happens with directors of football and not managers signing players and the only time a DOF works is at a club that can afford to sign loads of boss players like Madrid Barca City Chelsea because loads of boss players tend to be boss. It’s why Torres didn’t work at Chelsea because the other 10 players in the team were not set up to get the best out of Torres, they were set up for Drogba.
It seems that from day one FSG have wanted to impose the DOF model on Liverpool, the one club in the world that has the most historic anti DOF model in the world. The one club that loves iconic managers and that has only seen success with iconic managers, even Kenny in his second spell won a cup and got to the final of another. Rafa spent 4 or 5 years getting better players into his 4 2 3 1 system and then set the whole club and academy to do the same. All that has been systematically dismantled since FSG came in and we are now left with a bunch of ‘good’ players that don’t know where they are going to play or how they are going to play or what a Liverpool goal looks like.
For 12 months it was clear Suarez wanted to go to Barca and yet when he left there was no direct replacement, no Cavani or Tevez or Sanchez. All the club has to do was invest £75 mil in one or two strikers. It has been done before and it will be done again. Give a DOF £75 mil and they pad out the squad, Spurs did it (although they did at least spend £30 mil on a Striker) and now Liverpool have done it and already we continue to do the same shite with Danny Ings and James Milner. Good players with potential but no fixed position, Milner somewhere in midfield and Ings, somewhere up front.
Next year Madrid will play 4 2 3 1 you would expect and they will buy where they are short but even now you can imagine Ronaldo up front, Bale on one side, one of Rodriguez or Modric etc and ANother on the right (sterling hopefully because like Bale, Rafa will want him to do the donkey work as well as score goals). Even with a new manager you know what to expect at Madrid, meanwhile at Liverpool the manager stays the same but even he at the moment has no idea whom
1 his assistants and coaches are
2 what new players he will get
3 if one of those new players will be a boss striker
4 if sterling and Skirtel are staying
5 what formation he will play
But it’s ok because he has a load of Boss players.
Brendon, I never wanted you but I have grown to like you and even feel sorry for you but do yourself a favor and resign in principal with dignity and let some other unlucky fucker avoid the biggest car crash in LFC history.
In the whole hour I don’t think I heard Neil, Ian, Mike or John mention a single striker they think we should sign. Lot’s of talk of theoretical 30mil pound strikers, but no names.
Any names anyone of superstars we would realistically be able to sign if we were prepared to spend?
Whether we can convince them to join or not is another thing but……Higuain, Martinez, Bacca, Aubameyang, Cavani, Mandzukic….and that’s just a handful of players plying their trade in Europe. I’m
Sure there are more and further afield. If the best out transfer/scouting committee can come up with is Benteke then something is very wrong.