Who do you wish to sell

Yes, but not agreeing withdecisions is a very different pointo to saying they are all lazy skivers who want to sit around a pool.

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LiverPOOL?

I’d get Jorg in to sort this thread out.

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To be fair, AMR actually said beach :parasol_on_ground:

I think at some point we have to move on.

Few will disagree with the point that we have made some missteps, and that the midfield department in particular has been mismanaged. We let too many get old, and coupled with the poor fitness record of prime age midfielders, the load was too great on the young ones trying to come through.

The extent to which we pile in is variable across the forum, but the point is, pretty much everyone agrees that looking back, the midfield department was mismanaged and the poor season we just had might have been improved, certainly to the point of CL qualification, had it been managed well.

So… that was then.

… And this is now.

Let’s see what happens this summer before sticking the boot in. We all know the score about what went before. What happens next? THAT is the question.

The vast majority would say two midfielders, maybe three, are required. Plus a central defender.

So how about we agree that if we don’t sign two midfielders, plus a defender, this summer, then we should let the belly aching commence? Call out the owners. Say they are tight bastards and all the rest of it.

But in the meantime, an appeal, if I may!

Yes, mismanaged before. We know that. But now let’s see if we put it right in the summer. Bare minimum two midfielders and a defender.

Otherwise we keep going over old ground, and the point is very well made and established about what went before.

Peace.

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You’ve made a bit of a leap from me saying no-one is sitting twiddling their thumbs to you assuming this means I’m happy with everything that has happened over this season (let’s keep to the season - this time last year we preparing for a CL final :rofl:)

Well, no. Of course not. The season has not been good and mistakes have obviously been made.

The question is whether you choose to accept that these are essentially good people who have been mistaken in their decisions, or whether you jump to the conclusion that they are lazy fuckers getting their just desserts.

That’s what I mean by unconscious incompetence. It’s easy to believe that you know what you are doing when you haven’t a clue what goes into the job, but you’ve clocked some time on a computer game simulation of the real thing. It’s like how every toddler thinks they can drive a car because they’ve seen mummy or daddy doing it.

I have my own theories what went wrong, but they are only theories. I think a few years ago a proactive decision was made that the squad Klopp had built was good for 4-5 years with minimal investments and could be run over that time before a rebuild was necessary. This allowed resources to be diverted into the stadium and the training ground. It was looking like a pretty good strategy after getting so close last season. We’re not far off everything coming together perfectly.

But I don’t think Klopp or his staff foresaw how badly the squad would drop off, or how badly they would carry coming so close to immortality. In hindsight I think everyone would have done more last summer, but we can’t go back in time.

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To add to what @Mascot said…operating the way we do (constrained by both what we earn and the financial cheats we are contending against) is walking a tightrope. City can get away with mistakes, just pour money into it. If we make a mistake (and mistakes happen, it’s life) then we’ve got egg on our face. But it does feel like lessons have been learned and we will recover.

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It’s that perception of having to wring every last drop out of our budget in order to compete with City, that leads to the club thinking we need to wait and wait and wait for the perfect player.

You suggesting we clone Dalglish & Rush?

Which itself has pros and cons.

We want to be as sure as we can be that this player will do what we need, elevate the team and be worth the money required. That’s not a bad way to operate and something a lot of clubs really don’t seem to do.

But at the same time it sometimes means waiting and then potentially missing out as a player becomes too expensive or attracts attention elsewhere which is frustrating and potentially damaging if we don’t have another option we’re confident on.

Shopping in the bracket we tend to do and only really buying maybe 2-3 ā€œfirst teamā€ type players a season we can’t really be affording too many mistakes. But maybe we do need to look at taking a bit of a risk on some lower value players where the certainty might not be so high. The ceiling if we’re right is worth the risk but the floor if we’re wrong is not so prohibitive that it really hampers us or we can’t move them on.

Carvalho and Elliott have been good examples of this, Ramsey could be but we’ve yet to see anything of him. Minamino is another. But i’d love us to find a way to supplement our business with one of those each summer but perhaps at a slightly higher level. A Kvaratskhelia or Mitoma type who could find their way into our our best 11 but we’re not expecting that necessarily from day one.

The thing is, if what you’re doing is working; you’re fighting for honours and winning the big prizes and doing it in budget, why would you stop doing it - unless it stops working?

The criticism of our approach doesn’t really make any sense until we see how they adapt to the issues that have happened last season. Because up until then it was all cakes and cream.

The problems are a result of the wrong decision being made last summer, I just don’t get why they aren’t being given any time this summer to show what they’ve learned and see how we’re going to fix the problem.

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I think to be fair most people don’t agree that the mistakes happened last summer, most will think that there’d been a clear and obvious need to replace Gini’s minutes from the moment it was decided they wouldn’t renew his contract.

Ultimately I think keita is the one that’s brought down the whole house of cards. He was supposed to be the record midfield signing, in his prime now, leading this midfield in 2023/24. Instead he’s contributed very little and left for no money because he’s never been able to justify a contract renewal.
Shows that for us we can’t afford transfers that don’t work out the way other clubs can.

Right now we could do with cloning Souness, Gerrard, and McDermott

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Not much point cloning them now.

Better to clone Salah and Alisson.

As in their young prime versions. That would be some midfield trio!

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Suppose Dolly the sheep was young but then there was lots of complications and she died.

Anyhow genetics and our understanding has moved on.

Anyhow moving on.

Schalke 04 are in talks with Sepp van den Berg’s representatives over the possibility of arranging another loan deal for the Liverpool defender. #lfc [liverpool echo]

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Schalke have just been relegated so I’m not sure whether this is the progression that we are looking for - unless we plan to sell him.

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It does portray a good look for him though, a team he was loaned to wants him for another season despite them being relegated. So he was probably one of the few bright spots in their team. I did like how much he’d developed when we saw him in the last pre-season, but my only concern is he doesn’t look to have much pace. Seeing as we play such a high line, I don’t know how well CBs without pace will do in our team. They’ll have to have another level of positional sense to make it.

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He needs to be playing top league team action