Sound reading
http://www.kopsource.com/deadline-day-blunders-leave-rodgers-with-uphill-task/?You’ll Never Walk Alone is not an entirely consistent club motto. Ask Tom Hicks or George Gillette; if you fall foul of the fan-base, you’ll be hearing about it. Examples needn’t be as extreme as that though, as Paul Konchesky, Joe Cole and Alberto Aquilani will testify – mediocrity too can have the power to infuriate.
Opinions vary as to quite how poor a Deadline Day Liverpool had, though fans were largely agreed that watching the promise that comes with the transfer window slip away so hopelessly made for uncomfortable viewing. Clint Dempsey’s last minute move to Tottenham Hotspur sealed a nightmare day for the Reds, who failed to achieve their well-documented primary objective of signing a striker, a loss compounded by the completion of Andy Carroll’s loan move to West Ham 24 hours previous. Not, to put it lightly, the best 31st August the club has enjoyed.
Such a clumsily concluded window, and one of such recognised importance, will inevitably attract myriad criticism. The question is: who is deserving of that ire and who is not?
Before that issue can be settled, we need to establish what went wrong. There are two main issues of contention here; firstly, that after months of protracted talks, when facing competition from two Premier League rivals, Liverpool managed to undervalue Clint Dempsey by almost half the fee required to sign him; secondly, that the signing of the American was, seemingly, the first and last option available to the club, irrespective of the continually underlined importance of acquiring the signature of a similar calibre of player.
We’ll never know the specific goings on at the club, and for now second, perhaps third, hand briefings will have to do, but with the available information it doesn’t feel like either of the two points made above stray far from the truth.
The greatest problem with the frustrations that have arisen is that we do not specifically know who is responsible for their root causes. If Twitter is to be believed then Ian Ayre is at fault both for the grossly under-thought approach to the Dempsey deal and also the failure to negotiate alternatives. Because this isn’t an available or confirmed fact, I won’t be taking up the opportunity to call for his head on a plate, as so many already have.
But I’m not going to sit here and defend him, either. If you are determined to vent your anger towards somebody at Liverpool Football Club by all means let it be Ayre, just so long as it prevents Brendan Rodgers – the most important figure at Anfield – from getting flak for something that he had nothing to do with.
A brief word on Ayre and Rodgers’s employers first, though. Fenway Sports Group, who for the first time have stamped their oft-discussed stringent financial principles on the club’s transfer budget, will not have come out of this window as well as they might have liked. It would be wrong to prejudge their motives during this period, as some have done, in suggesting that the trimming of the wage and transfer budgets is an indication of their imminent desire to sell-up, but lingering questions about their ability to improve the club in the long run are unlikely to be resolved if non-events such as last night’s repeat themselves.
There is nothing simple about spending money on a football club – too much and you can be saddled with crippling debt, too little and you fall behind the chasing pack – but this was not a complicated transaction; the player was, by all intents and purposes, necessary. Failing to secure the window’s primary transfer objective represents a potentially costly imbalance in this regard, and should he choose to implement the same frugal principles next time around, John W Henry could find January to be a brutal month. More importantly still, he will have to recognise that the patience he affords to his manager this year may have to stretch a little further than he had hoped.
And so we come to the real victim of this transfer window: Brendan Rodgers. Following his comments in the past weeks regarding the absolute need to retain at least three strikers, the Northern Irishman has been made to look something of a fool with the failure to sign Dempsey, Sturridge, or any of the host of names linked with the club. Unfairly, too, many lay the blame at his feet for the shambolic end to what had otherwise been a productive window. This, it would seem, is grossly unfair. If there is an underlying theme to the calamitous closing hours of the window it is a lack of preparation; Rodgers, creator of the 180 page blueprint for success, renowned student of the game and contemporary of Jose Mourinho, should not strike any reasonable fan as a man without a clue.
What seems far more likely is that the alternatives researched and selected by the former Swansea boss were not available for transfer. Though supporters are rightly aggravated by the failure to secure a forward, they must remember that the issue will be of far greater – and more immediate – concern to Rodgers, who now faces four long months with an ominously thin squad. That is the real problem here – not that the club is a ‘laughing stock’ or that ‘things were better under Rafa’, but that in circumstances that already possess enough potential volatility, he has to turn around a squad of players who scored too few goals last year, with even less goal scorers.
So, until January, this is it. Without Maxi, Kuyt, Carroll or Bellamy, Liverpool may well struggle to find the net any more than they did last year, but that isn’t really the point. What we should all know by now is that, however frustrating the window has been, the fans cannnot spend the next four months putting their energy into exclamations of outrage; he might have needed our backing before, but Brendan Rodgers will require it more than ever now. And who knows? Perhaps in four months time we’ll be praising the squad’s resilience and this messy affair will be long forgotten. In the meantime, if you’re not satisfied with Numbers 1-11, do your bit to make sure that the Twelfth Man is as vocal as can be
