Ah right, so we can expect to see all the players you are after from Southampton sitting on the bench next season
Yes you can expect them all to spend a decent amount of time on the bench and being rotated. Was that honestly a serious point?
Lambert will expect to be a bench player, Lallana and Lovren will expect to start. Yes it was serious.
I would never want us to sign a player that expects to be a bench player, they should always believe in their own ability and their own expectations should always be the first team. However, it doesn't always work out like that
Lallana will be rotated with Coutinho and Sterling in a CAM positon and Henderson and Allen in a CM position Lovren will probably rotate with Sakho and Skrtel as our 3 main CBs (Agger probably sold due to high wages and poor injury record) I posted this line up yesterday for what I expect our starting XI to be in the first game of the season (though Flanagan ahead of Johnson is more hope than probability): please log in to view this image Contrary to popular tweets we have not bought Southampton.
Because that team stopped being good about 6 months ago when Cortese resigned We are bulding our squad after a successful season and are not in need of the massive overhaul that Man Utd are crying out for, and LVG has responded to by playing 5 at the back just to stop the rot
Seems to be working, two games ten goals, long may this defensive line-up continue, with RVP back we may start to score a few
Nah, pre-season means little to me, but playing 21 players in a game we win means thet at least the players we brought in held their own.
I heavily predict he will become a world class star. He already is one, and with better players around him he'll just get better and better. Imagine - Messi, Suarez, Neymar. Teams are gonna get ****ing humiliated on a weekly basis...I just hope Barca see the sense and ****ing buy a couple CB's so Mascherano can be the DM, as in my eyes he's head and shoulders above any DM in world football. He's seriously being wasted playing at CB.
I expect Lovren to be a nailed on starter. He's an organiser and that's what we're missing. When he signed for Southampton they played him from the off and he hit the ground running. So I think it'll be Lovren and Sakho/Skrtel. I'd like to see Lovren and Sakho get a good run together as we need to think of the future, with Sakho being young he needs to be playing - especially after having a great WC.
Until all of those players are training together and playing matches, we have no idea if and how a rotational policy will be employed. What we do know is that for the first tome in a long time, we can go to the bench with confidence.
Exactly - by the end of the window our bench will be solid. Compare that to last season and we had the likes of Aspas etc to come on and change a game (not gonna happen clearly).
But at the time we thought Aspas and Moses added a bit of quality to our bench. It's all subjective, and you never know, in a couple of months time we may look at our bench and have the same uninspiring thoughts from last season.
Like you say it's all subjective, because I certainly didn't think those wasters added anything but ****e to our bench