Scum

English Football
#9388

The best ability is availability

#9389

Not sure what you mean by that :sweat_smile:

You mean that it only works as long as the players stay fit? Like when Liverpool missed a lot of key players last season and finished ± 15 points behind City?

#9390

What I mean is you can have all the talent but if you’re injured 30 % of the time it won’t mean a great deal.

Liverpool have done a great job in signing key players that are talented but very often available, playing 50 games a season or so.

#9391

That may be the case but you don’t necessarily need world class in most positions, generally very good with a few world class players and you can make noise.

We will need to unearth or sign one or two world class players to really get back near the top though

1 Like
#9392

One thing you need to have any chance is at least 1 world class forward, probably 2.

1 Like
#9393

But that is regardless of playing style right, which was what I was talking about?

#9394

Would be nice to get some Liverpool luck with regard to forward signings, we should be close if Pepe was the real deal but unfortunately didn’t go that way

#9395

I think its underappreciated how badly the Laca and Pepe signings set this club back. Its not just that you’re spending so much money on mediocre forwards, but also that unless you’ve got oil club money the presence of those players (plus Auba in our case) blocks your ability to spend significant sums on other forwards for a while. We essentially missed out on a whole generation of forward players who are now in their age 24-30 primes because we whiffed on both those transfers and consequently didn’t spend significant money on any other forward for about five years. And now we’re relying on 20-22-year-old kids who either came through the academy or were bought for peanuts from Brazil to score our goals.

In an alternate universe, we take the money we spent on Laca in summer 2017 and buy Salah and Richarlison (who both moved that summer) for the same amount instead.

Or for the price of Pepe we could have bought Osimhen, Bowen, and Raphinha who all moved summer 2019 for fees around 20m. :grimacing:

2 Likes
#9396

All three would be transformative signings, damn that’s depressing when you put it like that.

2 Likes
#9397

This is exactly what we lack and, apart from a couple of seasons of Aubameyang scoring, something we haven’t had since RVP.

Kane and Son are arguably the best striking partnership in the PL and the fact that spurs have retained them for so long shows that it is possible to keep your best players rather than seeing them walk away for peanuts like we do.

#9398

And without them they would struggle to even get into the Europa League :slight_smile:

#9399

They had them to start the season under Nuno and were shit anyways. Sure they can produce and have done so in their careers but they also needed someone to organize the team and give them a chance to score goals.

#9400

That’s only because nobody was interested in signing them before Conte turned them into one of the league’s best attacking pairings.

2 Likes
#9401

That just shows the genius of Conte.
Turning two mediocre players, no other club wanted, into such a great striking partnership. :grinning:

1 Like
#9402

The narrative that the only reason Son/Kane are good is because of Conte, has to be one of the wierdest bits of revisionism ever.

#9403

Think they’re joking Jules. :sweat_smile:

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#9404

Nobody said this, only that they were underperforming under Nuno.

1 Like
#9405

InvincibleDB10 said Conte turned them into one of the PL’s best attacking partnerships the other day, I replied and said that was untrue and that they’d both been brilliant for four or five seasons. Today’s posts reference that.

#9406

Truth is somewhere in the middle. Kane looked a shell of himself for a bit now. Maybe it’s more fair to say he’s reinvigorated them.

#9407

What, for a period at the start of this season? He got 33 goals last season, so you can’t mean then.