I don't think the squad is as bad as some may suggest.
Plenty of quality all over, would love to see Pacheco, Sterling and Suso promoted to the first team squad this season.
The only players who should probably be moved on are Adam, Downing, Spearing and Cole - if we could then get say Ł15m for the lot, I'd love us to try and get two top quality wide forwards.
That would do very nicely.
The problem is that the squad is not so much bad as mediocre. When Benitez left three years ago he had spent two years trying to keep an aging squad together with sticky tape. It was in a bad way after G&H had sucked the club dry. The problem was that the managers hence have not so much rectified the situation as arguably made it worse.
Hodgson brought in dross and the one decent player (Meireles) was let go. To give Hodgson some credit some decisions were forced on him (Mascherano) and some taken out of his hands (Torres). It meant that by the time Dalglish arrived, rather than inroads being made into the rejuvenation of the squad, instead he was faced with the task of getting rid of the Hodgson flops, rectifying the problems of 2008/9 and also stamping his own authority on the club.
That we are cheerfully talking of offloading most of his buys (and whatever was left over from Hodgson) is an indication of the problems facing the club in terms of playing staff. In truth the problems started 5 years ago when G&H started messing about have yet to be dealt with. Instead we are talking about needing a high turnover of new players, not old. We are still depending on the old Benitez cohort. The on saving grace (and not properly appreciated by some fans I believe) has been the success of the younger players coming through.
Players like Spearing (roundly disparaged) have come in and kept the club ticking over when the likes of Adam, Lucas and Gerrard were injured. Kelly and Flanagan coming in at RB and CB have also performed heroically, to help keep the club in good nick. Add Shelvey to the mix (though he, like Ngog - another performer during a tricky period - were youth buy-ins) and the real success of the last few years has been the academy, supplying enough talent to save spending 5-6 million on a handful of squad players who, under Benitez, would hardly have seen the light of day, but still been preferred over young academy hopefuls.
The challenge for Rodgers is to raise the overall standard of the squad but also give the youngsters like Pacheco, Sterling, Robinson and Suso more playing time. The fact that so many youngsters are on the cusp of a break through is credit to the youth system, but also indicative of where the club is. It also probably points to how mediocre the squad is overall. Rodgers, I feel, has to bring in one or two more players, but also start to make inroads into squad trimming.
