The alternatives to Lovren would not have been any cheaper. Unless we'd gone for some one like Caulker. Hummels for example could cost £30-40m. Sakho cost £18m and IMO Lovren is better.
its a fair enough thing to do IF it works, doesn't look great at the moment though, and also if the ridiculous wages utd are paying for Cavani get them top 4, then its paid for itself near enough with what being back in cl will do for them. City,utd,chelsea,arsenal all pay far superior wages than we do to players, you get what you pay for generally. sad maybe, but football has been going that way for a long time anyway.
Sakho is already twice the player Lovren is, and will be 10x once he reaches his peak. Lovren is Skrtel with hair - makes so many mistakes. In his defence, he's only 24 and has zero protection but his basic positioning is seriously poor. We've already seen how he gets on the wrong side of players, goes for balls which he has no right to go for. And for £20m.
We probably did enquire about Lacazette. Arsenal to. But he wanted to stay in France for now. We tred to sign Mkitaryan last summer to. The next one could be Paco Alcácer from Valencia. 21, 4 goals in 6 games this season and recently scored on his first start for Spain. Could be both keeping a close eye on this season.
Costa is on what £9M a year...Times that by 11 if you want a contender first 11 if you theoretically upgrade our buys this year to what people demand we should have got(existing guys like Stevie insisting he gets the same etc etc) then your five exciting youngsters want 70k a week so your annual wage bill is now what? And then we dont make the CL anyway because there are still four or five other teams that can still beat us because they've done the same thing with more money available. I'll get in before Tobes: we are not poor....but we don't have as much as those other 4, not yet anyway..... What do we do then...where does the money come from to pay this lot never mind going to the market again?
I'm still of the opinion that we have a good squad and I still feel that it'll come good this season, the only player I'm not happy with is Balotelli and I've said that from day one.
The Mancs: I don't think their situation is remotely comparable to ours (or any other club for that matter). Theye were/are desperate to get back into the CL. Money was therefore no object for them. They would have paid any asking price for any top player becoming available. Needs must and as some pundits said they could not afford NOT to splash out and they have overpaid by 50% most of their buys. I think the argument about the CL and that we may be perceived not to be regular CL participants. Even top players are more interested in their wages. How did City attract players before getting into the CL? BY offering high wages. I am not saying that Liverpool should have gone over the top. But if we were willing to pay the asking price they would have come here .
We absolutely did a tottenham. We lost by far our best player. We replaced him with a couple of "nowhere near that level" players We Bought many players and many of them start together. We are lumbering, predictable, defensively weak and toothless up front. Sounds exactly like Spurs last season. #forget4thorbetter #forgetCLnextseason #goingbackwards
we was obviously going to go backwards from finishing 2nd last season everyone knew that, trouble is we all also knew chelsea would improve, we all knew utd would spend to pay get themselves out of trouble, and arsenal have done ruddy well in transfer window with sanchez and wellbeck. question is how far backwards have we gone. we have another transfer window to put it right yet, so maybe not end up in a tottenham situation, biggest concern is will we still be in cl in jan window, as it will make a huge dif hopefully to who we can attract, but then you could argue we havent made the most of that up until now any way.
3 pts off 4th place. We've finished better than we've started every recent season. / not too worried. YES, we did a Spurs. I knew we would the moment we started signing quantity instead of quality. I still think 4th is a very realistic probability despite the doom and gloom from some quarters. A win this weekend and people will cheer up a little bit I've no doubt.
We have not "done a Spurs" We only bought quantity because we NEEDED to because we ACTUALLY QUALIFIED for the CL in the first place We did not buy the players before apponting a NEW MANAGER who has already just been SACKED for FAILING in the PL As much as possible we bought players ALREADY used to the PL to minimize the time needed to get used to the new team We are not routinely shipping MORE THAN FOUR goals per game
I've never really believed this. We play over 40 games a season. I fail to see how 6 extra games equates to needing 9 extra people. It's averaging as one extra game a month. We should be able to handle that! Plus- I'd throw European competition and grow my team slowly rather than try signing everyone at once instead of getting quality signings.
and all of this even when we havent even done half a season yet, signs dont look good at the mo admittedly, but we have another window to put it right if needed, we are talking where spurs finished ie 38 games and where we are after what 6-7 games?
Our bench was already too small for just playing the PL anyway. We had almost no injuries and our only viable sub in most games was swapping Coutinho and Sterling as No 10. 1 red card to Henderson and we were ****ed.
And how many of them went straight into the first team? It's not the fact that we bought a lot of players, we needed to bolster the squad, it's the fact that we have radically changed a (relatively) successful combination. Ok, so we lost Suarez. Suarez had three full seasons with us, two of which we ended up 8th and 7th so although he was very influential, the idea that we were a one man team doesn't stand up to scrutiny. He was only one of many factors that came together well last season. He's a significant loss, but he's not the reason we're falling apart- if indeed we are. Imagine if we played exactly the same team as last season with Balo replacing Suarez. No doubt we'd be poorer, but would we be as poor as we have been so far this season? I doubt it. I'm not saying all our buys are poor- far from it, I'll just repeat that if you bring in half a team's worth of new players it's odds on that they'll struggle for a while to form a cohesive unit. Having said all of that, if we go on a 10 game run where we get, say 20-23 points- things will start to look a whole lot better.
The fact is we have only bought at maximum 3 first team players and the rest are potential or plan Lovern, balotelli and Moreno are first team buys, maybe lallana is or not as the guys he had have regressed Manquillo, can and markovic are potential all 20 Lambert is plan z Now we had a gap at lb.... Check We had an unhappy manager due to goals so it was one out one in at cb We bought balotelli after Suarez left... Mad I know Now half on here at least felt midfield was weak. The guy I wanted went to Barca for example So now the midfield is gash, the defense all over the shop and a couple of injuries later we are toast It's that simple. Suarez but ivanovic to get out of us and ended up shocked nobody but arsenal bid, he bit at the World Cup and screwed us over I'd hope he didn't screw his country to engineer a move The moment that was done all Rodgers plans were thrown out the door and we were reacting. I fail to see how lallana and markovic were needed and not a cm and I fail to see how there was not one striker round Europe rather than balotelli... I'm sure we were knocked back by the big names I feel our first team is half what it was as we speak and our bench looks better but is about the same standard We are half what we were due to confidence, injuries, lack of hard work and missing the sides real leader
