Comparing it with the other Premier League Sides and the players there who i feel would make the squad (Not necessarily as first choice subs even but people who wouldn’t look out of place in this team. Not including City and Chelsea in this.
I think every club barring Everton , Norwich and Burnley has players that can play a role for us. Even including the other relegation strugglers as well. That’s pretty damning for Utd.
I would say the period between Souness and Evans leaving.
They could put the odd season together but it was never enough. Maybe take away that season when we finished 2nd or 3rd, the team between 1993-1996 probably resembles them.
That team with a few admendments could easily coast about this one.
First 11 no but squad yeah I’d agree.
While both Souness and Evans failed, they at least both had a vision. Souness knew he had an old team that needed youth and modernization, but just did too much too soon which leads to bad choices. Evans managed to put out on the pitch a really really good side, but just couldnt figure out how to overcome its limitations. But in both cases you could see what they were trying to do and could justify the idea, even if you disagreed with it or thought it was executed poorly. Both tenures were evidence that vision alone is not enough to produce success, but with the exception of teams like Real and PSG operating in a completely unbalanced competition with obscene ill begotten resources, I cannot think of examples of succeeding without one. Utd just lurch from isolated decision to decision seemingly with little connection among them as to how it is taking them to a desired end point.
To be fair you are right on Evans and to a certain extent Souness but I don’t think Souness had much of a clue and wanted to put his stamp down on it. (I think Klopp’s slowly recycling his team and it’s the right approach, it’s why I think he expects Mane for another season).
I think Liverpool were a decent keeper away from a challenge and kind of why I like how we go about it now.
You see the clip above and it says it all, you need to work out how you will play going forward and build a system to that.
Not just play FIFA and go that suits us, if it was that simple then Liverpool would be somewhere mid table because anyone can buy a name with enough money let’s face it some managers continued to buy the same position over and over again such as Wenger.
Pep is guilty of that and we trash them for that but I do admire the fact he has gone into this season without a striker saying that I think Saturday shows it might be the reason they falter in the end but who knows.
If Liverpool buy a player it has to work especially if it’s a lot, we didn’t just pick Diaz because he had a Z in his name and something for our fans to cheer during the international break that had no games here in Europe.
And look what has happened in 20 days, the guy looks like he has been here months. That’s data on him and your team as well as the judgement of the right attitude.
Whatever we are doing with data it’s bloody good both Diaz and Jota I would have simply not considered.
Spot on. Who doesn’t love landing a classic fuck knuckle jibe
Souness’ time away from club included a stint in Italy (which at the time was considered far more professional in their approach than England) and a period where he had implemented these ideas as a manager. He came back to Liverpool and saw a club that had not moved forward at all from the one he left ten years prior, and felt it was by then too old fashioned and out of date to compete. In thinking about how to change things he viewed himself as having inherrited too many senior players too invested in that old way of doing things…and possibly too immune from new direction from him given their personal relationship to him. I mean how do you take seriously a man telling you to change your approach to your career when they’ve got personal experience of Souness himself leading many of those extra curriculars?
He will admit more than anyone that the changes were poorly implemented, and once he made mistakes he doubled down on them in an attempt to solve the problems he’d caused. But he was least chasing a footballing ideal. Nothing says it went wrong more than signing Neil Rudduck when you’re supposedly trying to modernize and professionalize the playing staff, but I dont think his interpretation of what he inherited was wrong.
When Souness had the chance to go after signing Roy Keane from Nottingham Forest… He let Utd get him and went for Julian Dicks instead… If he had brought Keane in who knows how successful Souness at LFC would have become eh
Happens a lot in footy.
We were close to signing Ronaldo too.
I dont know we were really close to singing him though. The story was he had a deal agreed to sign for Blackburn, who had just finished 4th in their first season back in the league (a long way ahead of us) having signed shearer the season before, and Fergie guzumped them fairly late in proceedings. Kenny left the balckburn offices on a friday night thinking that on monday morning their british transfer record signing would be made official and got back into the office on monday to find he’d signed for Utd.
Why the fact would you sign Julian Dicks if you were knowledgable in the cutting edge of football at the time mind?
Just bad signing after bad signing. I was 9/10 and it’s my formative years so it’s mostly Evans I have a starting reference from but I look back and the guts on Ruddock and Dicks as well as Barnes who was carrying timber kind of makes me chuckle. Absolute world away really.
Souness arrived to see a team with a soft underbelly. So he signed a bunch of ‘hard men’. He overdid it on that front.
Yeah, when you look at the signings one year to the next there is no apparent connection among them. One year width and pace, the next year not that. the next year it was players to replace those players who didnt provide that. My reading was he made the moves he thought were right to make the team more youthful and clear out some of the more old fashioned attitudes and we got worse, and from there it was like trying to stop a boulder rolling down a hill. It’s very easy to see how a player like Souness could fall into a trap of chasing professionalism, being frustrated at what you call the soft underbelly and confusing thugs who would stick one on a forward with hard working pros.
Souness was the best midfield player LFC ever had IMHO…
Signing Roy Keane would have changed that…!!!
He was some player in his earlier days Keane…
He let the hard man tag go to his head and it took it the edge off his game I thought
Your dead right he was, he had everything.
Souness v Keane, Souness would win, he was hard as nails and Keane wouldn’t have survived
I was standing next to Keane, many years ago, outside the main stand at Anfield. He’s actually quite small, it made me wonder at the time, what all the fuss was, about him being such a hard man. More likely, he’s got a big mouth.
I disagree with this. Souness had the right ideas but was met with a wall that was the old squad wanting to operate in the old way. He wanted to bring his European experience in.
The signings were weird though.
We agree to disagree then, the players he brought in do not for me suggest someone thinking continental ideas.