Firstly, the original post was a superb read and many of the replies and responses have been excellent to read through.
I’m fully behind Brendan Rodgers and the team this season. We’ve not had a great start, but we can and will improve over the season. It’s going to be a difficult and long season, but the hope is that we will progress in our style of play and move forward. Providing that the signs are there, and providing that we’re getting results, then I suspect that Rodgers will be rewarded with patience from the fans at the very least.
We’ve already played two teams that finished in the top three last season and we’re adjusting to a new system and style of play. We’ve also seen our goalkeeper and our defence make some strange blunders. Hopefully they will up their games and improve as the season progresses. We can’t be making such silly mistakes. There will be ups and downs throughout this season and I don’t expect us to finish in the top four either. It will be a miracle for us now. We’ve not really improved our attacking options enough to be a major threat. But I guess we’ll see.
We do need another striker to come in but it’s about finding that man and most importantly, acquiring him. We left it far too late again this summer to address the issue. In the end, what’s happened has happened and we need to move on and learn from it. The window is shut now and we can’t do much about it. It’s far easier to moan about it but Rodgers will have to work with what he has. He can’t be too happy about being let down on the last day and our squad isn’t full of depth and quality as such. You only have to glance at the bench to see that. We’re lacking that quality and depth which could cost us a few positions over the course of the season.
It might be a chance for some of the younger players to have more minutes on the pitch. It isn’t ideal but we’re going to have to use our resources. We still need to protect the youth prospects and that includes Sterling who has been pretty impressive for us so far. But patience really is the key, especially with these younger players who might be seeing more minutes on the pitch.
My only hope is that we can dig deep until January and then look for that striker that we need. It’s a difficult market and a difficult time to be searching for players though. But we did land Luis Suárez in a January transfer window and we could do with someone like him again. In hindsight, Suárez was a pretty cheap acquisition on our behalf. I would put him in the same category as Fernando Torres. Just over twenty million pounds for a player like Luis Suárez or Torres, is great business.
I also think that our dealings over this summer have generally been good. The players that we brought in excite me and clearly fit in with what Rodgers is trying to build. I hope that Nuri Sahin will fall in love with the City and the club. If he performs well too, then that’s brilliant and we might stand a chance of landing him on a permanent deal. He’s a very talented player but Real Madrid often offloads talented players. Remember when Inter landed Wesley Sneijder from them?
The biggest disappointment would have been our failure to land in another striker for the first team though – given that we let Andy Carroll go out on loan. We struggled for goals last season and Suárez was really our main guy for not only scoring goals, but creating them too. To rely so much on him is not ideal because despite impressive goal tallies for Uruguay and Ajax, we’ve all seen that he can fluff easy chances and score seemingly impossible efforts.
Anyway, I’m not knocking Luis because he’s a fantastic player, but he’s not had much rest either for some time now. They say that professionals are never 100% in any given sport – but it would be fair to say that Luis looks fatigued at times and could do with a rest. Given that we’re also in the Europa League this season, it will put more of a strain on the players who have International duties to deal with. Last season we didn’t have the Europa League and we still struggled to get the results that we required.
There was no major surprise with any of the exits. I think FSG and even Rodgers were keen to offload these players and rebuild our team again, though the latter would have been certainly keen to see one or two more arrivals. Many of the players who left no longer offered us enough to keep them on the sort of wages that they were on. Some of them clearly wanted to move on elsewhere and in the end both parties wanted the same thing, which was great. I wish them well, but we’ve needed a change because we’ve stagnated in recent times. Some of those players were just not of the standard that we wanted or needed.
We can’t be signing players like Alberto Aquilani, Joe Cole or Andy Carroll and loaning them out! Yet, we’ve done just that. That’s a crazy way to do business and we as a club can’t afford to make such costly errors because it sets us back. Some clubs can afford to bring in a player for twenty million pounds and not see him work out, because they have the financial power to cover it. Manchester City might be able to get away with it but it hurts us far more.
Next summer will see further changes but hopefully on a smaller scale to this summer. I fully expect Joe Cole and Jamie Carragher to be gone, which will free up even more wages – which could be used on players that will offer us something in the here and now. I say here and now because I don’t want to sound disrespectful to Jamie Carragher. He has been a superb servant to our club but the time for change has come. The time for being sentimental is over.
The jury is still out on FSG and rightfully so. They’ve made some very good decisions but also, some pretty poor decisions as well. They still have many issues to resolve and we as fans should be wary of what their plans are and rightfully so. We cannot expect them to get everything right, but if the club isn’t being run properly from the very top then there’s a fat chance it will be run properly from the bottom.
People are quick to point to the managerial changes and that’s fair enough. After Rafael Benítez left in 2010, I wrote on another LFC forum that it would set a dangerous precedent. So far they’ve removed Roy Hodgson and Kenny Dalglish. In terms of Hodgson, I think that the majority, if not all, of our supporters would feel that Hodgson was given too much time. That would be the criticism of FSG.
But to be fair to FSG, they were new to the club and it wasn’t an easy decision to make given that we were lacking any real structure at the time. Some might argue that we’re still lacking structure. Kenny Dalglish was a temporary appointment in their eyes but because the team did so well under him, they had little choice but to make him permanent. They removed him during this summer following a frustrating league campaign.
I’m hopeful that they now have a clear vision of where they want to take this club. I hope that they will back Brendan Rodgers more in the future, because for me, he’s an interesting young manager who could take us forward if he has the right backing. If they cannot back him and provide him with the funds and resources to bring in two or three more players for the attack then he will struggle to push this club forward.
There will be knock on effects for everything. We have managed to keep certain players this summer and even give them new contracts – but failure to progress and move forward will make the key players question the direction that the club is going in. If they are performing well in an under-performing team, then the chances are is that another club will come in and take them away at some point.
I certainly don’t want to see us searching for a new manager within the next 12-18 months, unless results are absolutely dismal – but then again, it isn’t down to one man and Rodgers has a mammoth of a job on his hands. FSG needs to back the man that they hired and they need to back him well.
