It seems like, every day there is a new quote from Steve Nicoll, slagging some aspect of the club off. Either Jaimie Kanwar has his email address, or he is spending all his time talking about us these days. Today Jaimie tells us that Nicoll feels that Rafa ruined N'gog by not buying anyone to replace Crouch and Keane and throwing N'gog in when he wasn't ready. But after years of not hearing from him, he seems to have his own LFC newsfeed these days. Isn't he still a manager in the states?
Shows how little Nicol reads from Rafa - Rafa complained that he was undercut over buying forward cover for Torres, and that N'gog, for all his promise, wasn't ready. So another no news shocker there...
Especially looking at how cheap Jovetic was going to be, £8m-ish at the time, when he's now worth about £30m. And the cherry on the **** cake was that Jovetic pretty much knocked us out of the champions league that year.
Dont think N'gog was ever really ruined. Lots of young players show promise, unfortunately very few make it at the very top. Frankly I don't think N'gog was ever really that good, maybe one day he'll turn out to be a decent footballer but never be a 'superstar'. As to him being thrown in too soon. What else was Rafa supposed to do, Crouch and Keane were sold on the promise the money would be made available to him in order to buy new players, we all know now dumb and dumber never had any intention to support Rafa with money. It was also then unfortunate that the ladyboy got injured (alot) so N'gog had to be thrown into the starting line up. It was always going to be sink or swim for N'gog, he did the former.
I'm not going to take SN's words as a criticism of Rafa but Ngog did have too much expectation thrust on him out of necessity, which is a stark lesson for those who'd throw even younger players into the first team because they shone in the U18s. Ngog shone in the reserves, which is why he got the move up. I think he was better than given credit for but he was a regular starter too early and thrown to the lions. Ditto Insua. So yeah, let's get Adam Morgan in there ASAP and do the same to him.