That’s why we need to get the best manager.
Ferguson left nothing to be honest, my worry is the youth set up is left unused rather than the players won’t be good enough.
Alex Inglethorpe deserves praise here as well.
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I don’t want one of those ones, I want one owned by Maria.
He says he does post worldwide.
I am not giving any of my Jürgen mugs to anyone. I am taking them with when i leave the world 
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I wrote it a few times but I will repeat it ad nauseam: there’s no way that FSG will appoint a manager who isn’t good at developing young players and who won’t give them every chance to develop. I love Rafa to bits, always have and always will but I remember the games where he would put Škrtel or Mascherano at right back instead of Darby. Klopp gave debuts to Trent and Bradley instead.
Granted, our academy back then wasn’t a patch on this iteration of it - credit to Alex Inglethorpe, an unsung hero if there ever was one, but that synergy between him and Klopp will have to be replicated with Klopp’s successor.
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I think that’s harsh considering he’s the one who played Insua literally most of 2009-10, who gave Plessis a debut against Arsenal in the league, Nabil El Zhar 15 league games in a season we were competing for the title.
Maybe Darby was just completely not on the right level.
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Before Klopp came along, I thought I’d never love a Liverpool manager as much as I loved Rafa. If there’s one thing that I can criticise him for, it’s his relative inability to get anything significant out of younger players at Liverpool. I remember that particular match against Arsenal, sandwiched in between two other matches against Arsenal, haha, played by two sets of reserves. I really wouldn’t hold it as an argument in favour of Rafa developing kids, to be honest. Then again, our youth ranks really weren’t up to standard back then.
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That’s my entire point. Give him this crop and if he doesn’t do anything with them, then it’s a valid criticism. It’s worth noting that he tried repeatedly to overhaul the academy too.
He did try, as I pointed out, but considering few (if any) of that crop went on to play top-flight football…
Rafa may have inherited a youth set up that didnt have enough quality, but under him we significantly increased the quality of the players being brought in and he still largely failed to get anything meaningful out of it. The likes of Plessis, Suso, and Pacheco all arrived with far more youth pedigree and reputation than the young players getting their shots have even now. It was not that there were not players of the standard who might have been able to make it, but something (lots of things?) that got in the way of them stepping up here. Was that the quality of the first team (easier to walk into an already performing team)? The clarity of purpose and approach those in the first team had to apply? The connection build between the groups that made them step less daunting? Remember, this was Pep’s first job with us and he was specifically replaced after taking the first team role. Did Rafa have anything like that to help bridge the gap? Was it Rafa’s perspective himself?
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The Klopp era has really cured me of my pining for Rafa. Klopp made me realise that what I wanted in a football managers wasn’t Rafa - the cold brutalist tactical chess approach, the churn of players, constantly looking to the market for solutions to problems that were solvable in other ways.
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Rafa was the perfect manager at the perfect time for me - he made the team larger than the sum of its parts, made us feared in Europe and convinced me that he truly loved the club.
Klopp, though, took all of that and went quite a few steps further, especially in terms of playing style and squad- and club-building. I wonder how Rafa’s era would have looked like with FSG but as much as I love him, I highly doubt it would have been as successful, mainly due to his reactive style.
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I hate saying it because it is has often been used as a pejorative, the insinuation that his skill in this department was at the expense of football knowledge, but Klopp has shown all these tactics tims with the UEFA badges that nothing prepares you team for success like being a leader of men. There is no FIFA course you can go on that teach you how to make an entire club pull in the same selfless direction the way Klopp has done with us. The way he has created an environment where everyone can be better at their jobs than they ever thought they could be.
No one could draw up a game plan and match it the traits of his players the way Rafa could, but in that conversation about comparing the two this was something Rafa was never going to get or be able to deliver.
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That’s the moment when he looks for his wife in the stand.
Don’t Zoran:face_holding_back_tears:
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Another few years Ulla? What do you say?
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That’s what worries me the most about his departure. Klopp could very well serve as a multinational corporation’s CEO and be making tens of millions in yearly bonuses alone. He is that special as a leader, perhaps his most unique quality. I can’t think of another manager or coach in sports in general who could lay claim to a similar ability.
That said, and while I totally agree that Rafa Benitez would never be able to bring everyone together and deliver the results that Klopp has, comparing the two is unfair. Klopp was hired by an inexperienced but ambitious and determined set of owners. Rafa initially had to deal with Moore and Parry’s incompetence and limitations and thereafter with Dumb and Dumber’s toxicity. He never had a fair chance. If he had, he probably would have ended the wait for a league title some ten years earlier than it happened.
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This is quite a crossover
I only know one of those people.
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That’s Patrick Mahomes the Kansas City Chiefs QB and Siya Kolisi who has won two rugby world cups as captain for South Africa, and perhaps more importantly is a massive Liverpool fan.
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