Merseyside Gamble?

With Liverpool investing around £112 million pounds in players in a short period of time, I hasten to suggest that there is a time period in which this huge investment must bring dividends…

Throughout pre season many pundits and the like have talked up Liverpool’s chances of regaining a Champion’s League place, some even suggesting they could push for a title. I think a closer evaluation at what they have invested in must be done first before really evaluating what they should hope to achieve, and what they can realistically achieve.

At Liverpool you now find a relatively new manager with a relatively new team, the success this team can achieve is yet to be known. What can be done is to look into the components that will determine the success, starting with the man at the helm, one Kenneth Mathieson Dalglish aka Kenny Dalglish.

I think with Kenny Dalglish Liverpool have a manager who to many has encompassed the best in management, he has brought back memories of the old school manager, not so engrossed in the political correctness and precise media presentation which you find with his modern day peers.

So much is made of his charisma and personality that little is actually talked about his managerial pedigree. As a player for Liverpool he was undoubted world class quality, and a rare breed of British footballer who could easily stand alongside the great names of the game. His career as a manager although successful needs close evaluation for the time in which he was a manager, the teams he managed and how that can correspond to today’s Liverpool.

His first spell as Liverpool player-manager then manager was undoubtedly successful with 3 league titles and 2 FA Cups, alongside 3 Manager of the Year awards. The team in which Dalglish took over however was infamous. The Liverpool team of the 80’s (himself included) is and always will be one of the great English teams.

The set up established by Shankly, Paisley and Fagan (the 3 doyens of Liverpool Football Club) was an institution that became the club and an establishment which constantly brought results, trophies and success. It did not take much for Dalglish, who had been an integral part of the playing staff for many years knowing the system in place, to merely continue the tradition.

This is not to take away from his success, he was able to bring in real quality when needed to replace aging players such as Ian Rush and of course himself, adding to the team the likes of Beardsley, Barnes and Aldridge. What to me most defines his time as Liverpool manager however, is the team he inherited, it was not from scratch or his own doing that he established a league winning force, he was part of one and rather took the reigns and continued the success. The other pertinent issue of course is the era in which he was manager, two decades of football has been played since then and therefore it is hard to say that his managerial style is really relevant to modern day management.

The future clubs he managed tell you more about the manger Kenny Dalglish. At Blackburn he had the financial clout to buy the best of English talent and won the league, almost entirely because, unlike situations you have today, no one team could live with the financial supremacy offered by Blackburn.

Following Blackburn he inherited another great squad at Newcastle, left by Kevin Keegan, a team which had been pushing for titles and was competing in the Champions League. Although with Newcastle they reached a FA Cup final they were unsuccessful and he left acrimoniously with the team finishing just 13th in 1997 and after drawing the first two games of the following season.

What of Kenny Dalglish then, you have a manager with proven success at the club, but the years in which he was successful were over two decades ago, many of the players he will be managing were young children when he achieved that success. It is true that there was a turn around in fortunes for Liverpool when he joined the club last season but there could be many reasons for this. Firstly the general impact of the name joining the club. It gave new impetus to the players allowing them to go beyond what they had been achieving previously, basically in layman terms the team has gone through a ‘honeymoon period’.

The true ‘litmus test’ for Kenny’s new team will be the new season, so we must now look into this new team. Has the great ‘King Kenny’ brought wisely? The players needed to look over are; Suarez, Carroll, Henderson, Adam, Downing and Jose Enrique. The total amount of money spent on these players is around £112-115 million differing on who you talk to.

Now even in today’s standard that is a huge sum of money on 6 players. The kind of money that if you aren’t owned by Chelsea, Manchester City, Malaga or PSG today demands immediate results! The strategy Dalglish has clearly put into place is to buy British, which today means to buy BIG!

This strategy of buying British seems to be him signalling that he is buying what he knows as most managers generally do. In the time that he originally managed, it was much less about looking abroad for new players and with the exception of Suarez he has not.

What has he brought though? The most established in the league by far is Downing, with spells at Villa and Middlesbrough he has proven his ability in the league and also has proven internationally with England that he can at least mix it with the best. He will provide you with assists and will give you natural width, however for £20 million pounds it is yet to be seen if he can live up to that price tag.

Following that you have two young players from the North East in Andy Carroll and Jordan Henderson, both with few England caps to their names, and both with huge price tags hanging over their heads. The money spent on them is most definitely a gamble, they do both of course hold huge potential, living up to the potential however is what now must be achieved in a relatively short time due to the money spent on them.

The other signings mentioned hold less of a gamble in that both Adam and Enrique have proved their worth in the Premiership with full seasons. Along with that neither carry the extra pressure of a huge transfer sum therefore allowing for extra space to either be successful or not.

The final player to mention is Luis Suarez, he undoubtedly has had a relatively successful start to his Liverpool career. His tenacious style and ability to create as well as score has meant that he is already loved by the Anfield faithful. The price he holds is not too extortionate either as he had a number of successful years at Ajax as well as an excellent, if not controversial World Cup. What Suarez has to now do though is back up the initial half a season he has had with a full season of a similar ilk. He also has to fill the metaphorical boots left by Fernando Torres meaning goals must be consistent throughout the season.

So what is it that we have at Liverpool Football Club this year, we have a team and a manager who are not only expected to achieve because of their skill as a group but because of the investment put into the team. Many pundits and people who hold much more credence than myself have placed Liverpool in the upper echelons of the league this year, I am not yet so convinced. I see a team with a huge amount of pressure from all stand points and a team and management that without instant success could feel the cold reality of the Premier League sooner than they think.



Work by Josh Abbott