Burning Gold

Every day I become more and more convinced that Everton are just the West Ham of the North

Why even do this? Why not wait until the summer to negotiate? If we agree and announce a deal now for July, we're back to the old problem of every club in the world knowing we've got however much cash Barcelona have given us and raising their prices. They'll do that anyway because we're a big English club and we've shown we're willing to spend on VVD, but we don't want to give them a reason to do it further if we don't have to. There's also the risk that Coutinho will check out mentally for the rest of the season and his performances will suffer. If we wait til the summer to negotiate, there are no distractions to our season and there's every chance his price will go up, especially if we can initiate a bidding war with Real Madrid and PSG. By all means promise him that he can have his move in the summer, but there are risks and no benefits to setting it in stone now.

Rumours are a bit different to an actual guilty plea, though. Releasing Flanagan seems like a no-brainer to me given that it's obviously unacceptable behaviour and he hardly plays for us anyway.

We're also not taking Nike to court. In other news, I assume this stuff connecting the VVD fee to Coutinho is fishing, but I'll bite anyway. The two are unrelated. We had the money to sign van Dijk because our net spend has been low (or positive) every window since Klopp arrived. Every Liverpool-based journalist reported in the summer that we had about £200m to spend before any sales, and the van Dijk fee is the last of that money being spent. In other news, Flanagan has pleaded guilty to assaulting his girlfriend. Shocking

It 'looked like he's off' all summer mate and yet he still plays for us. Until a somewhat reliable journalist even hints that it's a possibility, I'm having absolutely none of it.

Oh ffs do we really have to go through another month of this nonsense. If we wouldn't sell Coutinho in the summer, why on Earth would we do it halfway through the season? Barcelona will continue their bizarre shithouse behaviour indefinitely, but it has no more bearing in reality than a year 8 telling you he fucked your mum.

I reckon he must've had a high pace stat on FIFA or something because almost everything I read when we were linked to him made reference to this blistering pace which he just doesn't have If you read about him you'd be forgiven for thinking he could leave Usain Bolt in the dust on a good day, but watching him on TV you'd see him routinely get outpaced by players you'd never class as quick. I thought I was going mad. As a striker, he's just not that good. You don't have to be to have a good scoring record in France, but he doesn't have anything about him physically, mentally, or technically that'll stand out in a better league. If he doesn't go back to France, he'll be at a mid-table club in a few years time.

That's what you get when you have a shite goalkeeper and defence, a squad and manager who don't know how to close out a game without scoring more, and no leaders on the pitch. Absolutely no one should be surprised by this. The one I'd be interested to see is how many points we've lost after being ahead by 2+ goals. Probably shitloads.

You didn't watch us repeatedly struggle to break down the 'low block' last year then. The lack of a proper striker was a big issue there and it's no coincidence that we battered shit teams at the end of the season when Sturridge was playing. Firmino himself wasn't the problem, but he was nominally playing in the striker position and wasn't doing that job, so he got a lot of the blame. As you say, Mo Salah's essentially our striker these days and it works beautifully

Depending on how broadly you want to define the word generation, I wouldn't have Scholes in the top 5 of his England generation. All this fawning over him is baffling revisionism; there was very little of it while he was playing.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think he's a particularly good keeper, and I'd be disappointed if we signed him as 'the answer'. I just think he's the sort of player who'd improve us much more on the pitch than he would on paper, if that makes sense?

It's not totally systematic, mate. Lovren's not very good, Klavan's bad, Mignolet's shite, Gomez is young and will make mistakes (same goes for TAA when he plays), and our midfielders never track runners even when they are in a defensive position (Can being the worst culprit). Throwing everyone forward and pressing is bound to leave gaps in behind, but we still concede too many goals from innocuous looking situations like City's first or Burnley's goal against us (I know the latter was at home). For me, it's an issue of leadership. Klopp may have been being flippant when he said one of Tottenham's goals wouldn't have happened if he was on the pitch, but he inadvertently touched on the fact that there's no leader on the pitch to be his representative and direct players on the fly. No one to scream at Wijnaldum to just get rid of it shortly before Watford equalised, no one to tell Gomez to get tighter to stop the cross (I can't actually remember who scored the goal I'm referring to, but Gomez gave their winger acres of space and he put in a good cross), etc. etc. etc. That's why I'd actually quite like Joe Hart at the club. He may not be much better than Mignolet as a goalkeeper, but at least he shouts and organises the defence.

How long after the international break though? Someone fell for his 3 games on, 10 games off routine. There's a good player in there somewhere, but he's horribly inconsistent. Beyond that, though, there are key things that hold his game back which he may never overcome; he's not going to get more mobile, for example, which is especially problematic in our system. The other problem is that he wants to play as a holding midfielder for us, a position at which he's fucking terrible, and one which limits his opportunities to utilise his best attributes.

Apparently he wanted assurances that he was going to play CDM, which is by far his worst midfield position, before he'd sign a new contract. I'm not too bothered that we're losing him. What pisses me off the principle of letting a decent player go for free in this market.

Dejan Lovren's been voted our player of the month. I really fucking loathe Liverpool fans sometimes.

I love a good bit of Rugby League, but I honestly think their world cup could be the worst of any sport. Every single time, you know with 99% certainty who the finalists will be, and you just have to watch the three or four decent sides embarrass everyone else or half-arse it for three weeks until they meet each other in the late rounds. There's the occasional high quality fixture early on like today's, but even then there was nothing riding on it because we all know both teams will qualify for the knock-out rounds. This, by the way, is what the Champions League would be like if the 'league champions only' crowd got their way.

First of all, if our people couldn't find anyone better than what we have other than VVD, they need to be sectioned immediately because I can only assume they're severely retarded. Second of all, depth and competition.

It's a terrible argument. What harm did Balotelli do? Okay, he was shit, didn't score many goals, and was generally a bit of a waste of space on the pitch, but he didn't actually do any harm, did he. If there was a Balotelli type character out there who could sort of play centre back, I'd have him in a heartbeat, because currently we're stuck with four centre backs, two of whom are prone to injury, two of whom are shit, and one of whom is 20 years old and also currently our first choice right back. It's absolutely inexcusable, mate. Heads need to roll. They're simply on too much money, mate. No one's going to sign a player whose wages are so far out of sync with his ability. It's by no means just Lovren that's vastly overpaid at Liverpool, but he's on £100k a week. I don't think the clubs on his level can afford to pay any of their players that much, let alone a player who demonstrably isn't worth it.

Because who else is there?

It's always a laugh listening to people like that. They spend half the time saying Manchester United are great and Liverpool are rubbish and the other half saying they have to play defensively at Anfield otherwise they'd get battered. It's an incredibly stupid argument, but it isn't new; we heard the same sorts of things after United played exactly the same game at Anfield last season. To his credit, Neil Custis (whoever he is) did offer a new piece of stupidity by completely misdefining 'parking the bus' and then arguing that that's not what Mourinho did

There will always be a shitload of money in football. The only thing a salary cap would do is ensure more of that money goes to people other than the players. I'm in two minds about this one and I think I always will be. All of the things you've said are correct and desirable, but I just love Christmas football.

Yeah, it wasn't just quality that was an issue, it was depth as well. Regardless of ability, going into a season with 4 centre backs, 2 of them being prone to injury and one also being required to fill in at right back (Gomez), was absolutely retarded. Add to that the fact that we can't seem to defend as a unit even when we do have our first choice back 5 and I think we're fucked.

As much as I also hate most United fans, I think it's a shame we don't have any serious fans of one of the biggest clubs in the country anymore. I miss the contributions from the likes of Deadlinesman and CCisKlaas even if they were usually wrong

I see. I'm a little annoyed with myself for getting dragged in and not getting done some of the things I wanted to yesterday, but I'm not angry, and certainly not with anyone else. In the spirit of that, though, I'm done with this back and forth. If you look back at my posts on this subject, you won't find anything I've written that's based on a guess.

That's not an answer. What that I said do you believe to be a guess? I'm not angry at all mate. Where has that come from?