Post-mortem Northampton

[ronanm]

That completely ignores all nuances, well done. Nice massive oversimplification there of last seasons transfers there.

Really? How was last season's transfer budget spent? Enlighten me

[Lecter]

Being honest Neil, would you use those same descriptions if Rafa had signed them?

And furthermore, if Cole's overrated and Meireles maybe good (but may be not), the shining light is that they werent a useless £20m Italian or an appallingly poor £19m Irishman.

Obviously time will tell, but i'm pretty sure they'll both prove to be excellent acquisitions and, for a combined £11.5m outlay, excellent value for money.

I would of on Cole, I think hes overrated (but hey he was free)

Meireles as you say could come good

[DannyMan2006]

Did I say that?

So you weren't happy with Rafa? Or you were?

[Mattshark]

Really? How was last season's transfer budget spent? Enlighten me

FFS, this has been gone over millions of times, go ****ing look it up.

[Kenneth]

Mods, could you please merge this thread with every other thread in the Liverpool forum to keep this discussion all together in one place?

[Leyton388]

Correct. But then if Reina gets injured what happens? and we've already seen the problems a lack of LB' can do for the club.

Should of kept Insua

[CJ]

Insua had a year left on his contract, just like Arbeloa did when we let him go. I think we now know what the biggest mistake was.

for me the biggest mistake is not building on our 2nd place finnish. thats when we needed to splash the cash so to speak rafa did balls up on Aquaman i hiped ie would make it but we will never know and he didnt make it that one season.

Johnson hasnt looked good for us but i can understand the signing of him and the fee was impacted by pompeys problems and the money they owed us for crouch.

We miss arbeloa Johnson doesnt give us the same balance the same when riera turned to a moany ****. We lost balance on both sides. so at the end of that season we needed a left winger a right winger or back a striker and world class centre mid to replace Alonso

looking at it like that we needed alot didnt we and we didnt have the money for that.

losing the balance had a huge impact we looked so much better when balanced

[JohnDoe]

Mods, could you please merge this thread with every other thread in the Liverpool forum to keep this discussion all together in one place?

[Mattshark]

So you weren't happy with Rafa? Or you were?

That is an irrelevancy to my point.

[Arn]

Wow so thats £7.5m that could have gone towards a striker?

You could have added the £6m we played for Poulsen. We have one of the best youth talents in the league(Shelvey) that can play in that position without any problem at all.

£6m down the drain.

£13.5m that could have been used to sign a striker.

[Neil Young]

Alright, is 7th place acceptable then?

You think we're going to get significantly better this season? Or next?

Obviously the root problem is the ownership issue. But if that's the case then why was seventh unacceptable last season when it won't be this season?

FFS, we've even got Liverpool fans defending tonight's result with the cheerful acceptance of the idea we couldn't have won the League Cup even if we'd won tonight. Not that we'll ever know now.

[calvoboy]

Mods, could you please merge this thread with every other thread in the Liverpool forum to keep this discussion all together in one place?

[BigChief]

Lec, Rafa was unlucky not to have Gerrard/Torres for large parts of the season last year. Doesn't excuse Rafa for buying a sh*t Italian and forcing us through a whole year of f*cking Lucas and Masch in the middle! If Roy gives us more Lucas in the middle in the league then I very much agree with you, he won't finish anywhere near 4th. He'll have successfully done a Rafa on us.

[DannyMan2006]

We have more chance of getting Rafa back than we do of getting 4th

Seriously I would be surprised if Hodsgon finished higher than Rafa did last season

Not a chance we will come any lower than 6th.

[-V-]

The only kids he gave a real chance to are Wilson, who played out of position, Pacheco who played out of position, and Spearing who's crap.

Agree but when you have such a big squad full of players who need game time you have to fit them all in don't you?

Ecclestone, Amoo, Ince and Shelvey were rotting on the bench. Spearing and Ngog don't qualify as youngsters, been in the first team games often enough. So it is mainly his fault for not trying the youngsters. Specially Shelvey with Spearing.

I agree about spearing I don't rate him. But the rest of those players starting would have made our team even more inexperienced.

Yes but he is the manager, its his job to make them play together

But he made 11 changes so you can't blame him for them not gelling immediately. Man Utd made 11 changes too. Nobody complained about this before the game, everyone was happy that we were using the compitition to try the fringe players

The fringe players are **** and so are the youngsters. The squad is pretty **** to be honest.

I think only one of the fringe players that played today were really signed by Hodgson.

Bit of a ridiculous thing to say.

There was more than enough on that pitch tonight to beat a ****ing League 2side.

Yes but its also not as simple as saying that its entirely because of the manager. Im not happy with Hodgson either, as much as I wanted Rafa gone I never wanted Hodgson. But I certainly don't blame tonight on him, he picked the team most us would have wanted to see on the park. Infact I would say it was our 2 experienced centre-backs who cost us the goals. That donkey Kyriakos who was a Rafa signing as you well know.

The point us I doubt many were unhappy with the team selection tonight, fringe players getting game time in our 4th priority compitition. You can't purely blame the manager. Is it not Ryan Babel's fault for failing to perform against Northampton? Or the rest of them? This is Rafa's squad remember and Rafa's signings who played ****