verlaine1979

Liverpool have him under a long contract and know they don't need to sell him unless it makes sense for them to do so. I doubt they want rid of him so badly that they wouldn't be happy to wait until January when Inter Milan or whoever else looks like missing out on the CL this season will be happy to cough up for a known quantity striker.

Benteke is only 25 and has a proven record in the Premier League - 42 in 89 for Villa and 9 in 29 for a Liverpool side he probably should never have joined. £30m is good value for a 1 in 2 striker yet to enter the prime of his career.

You'd think if we signed someone like Boufal, the 4-4-2 diamond would make even less sense as a formation that made best use of our best players... 4-2-3-1 with [Romeu/Hojbjerg - Tadic/Boufal/Redmond - Austin] would have good balance (assuming that Hoj's size and strength translate into decent defensive capability) and plenty of creativity.

Assuming Boufal/Another at the tip of the diamond, would you rather have Davis or Tadic on the left there?

If we buy someone of the quality of Boufal to play in attacking midfield, Davis will be on the bench more often than not.

Don't lose anyone else and plonk £10-15m on a genuine attacking midfielder to replace Davis/JWP in the first XI and it will have been a perfectly reasonable window.

Agree with some of the comments here - Fonte can be quite error prone and his recovery pace is only going to decline further. We're going to need to think about replacing him sooner or later, but it doesn't really sound like the club have got a succession plan in place, so probably best not to lose him now with only two weeks of the window remaining.

Looked to play a couple of really nicely weighted through-balls from midfield too.

I did as you suggested and looked up Ancelotti's Milan - so all we need to do is bring in players of the calibre of Cafu, Pirlo, Kaka & Shevchenko and the formation will work fine?

Might have just been the contrast on the TV, but aside from VVD and Romeu, Watford seemed to physically dwarf us man for man. New formation hardly a resounding success - not a lot of point having two strikers racing about up top if the rest of the team are struggling to advance beyond half way.

My PSG supporting friend doesn't rate him, but he's a bit of a snob.

I wonder how many of the lesser-known/non-PL names on that list would also cost more than our record fee to sign?

Quintero is left footed and has been linked for about 18 months. Also young, arrogant and at a bit of a career crossroads...

Were the Greek team in 2004 all world class?

VVD would be a vastly bigger loss. Already a better defender than Fonte, much better bringing the ball forward, and a much, much better passer - and still not yet in his prime.

Haven't seen anything more than highlights from pre-season, but if this is the case, we'll definitely need to invest in a new attacking midfielder. Neither Davis nor JWP are finishers.

Try 45 goals in 87 matches. Mane's goal scoring record was outstanding when he arrived - people were just dubious about the quality of the league he'd been playing in.

Blah blah, tedious bromide about teamwork, yadda yadda. Very illuminating.

I'll just cut and paste what I wrote when someone else made the same facile point earlier: "Mane was pretty much the whole difference between finishing 8th and 6th. Take any other player away from the team for the last ten games and we might still have staggered over the line into 6th. Take Mane away and we wouldn't." I can't even be bothered to address the preposterous claim that Davis was our most influential player last year. Some people just love a trier, especially when his face fits.

Yup. Mane was pretty much the whole difference between finishing 8th and 6th. Take any other player away from the team for the last ten games and we might still have staggered over the line into 6th. Take Mane away and we wouldn't.

Easy, Mane basically hauled us there single-handedly over the last 2 months of the season.

Long and Davis wouldn't even get on the bench for City, Utd, Arsenal, Chelsea or Spurs. So yes, top six, but only in the sense that there's often a sixth place team that has a squad nowhere near as good as the other five.

Didn't realize quite how much better Ziyech's stats are compared to Wijnaldum, who looked decent in the premier league after some doubt over the quality of the Dutch league.

Romeu a vastly better passer of the ball than Wanyama, though not as dominant as a destroyer in the middle. Romeu is no slouch as a DM, so who knows, maybe slightly better movement of the ball through the middle will mean additional goals which will offset the couple we might concede as a result of the switch.

This may have been the club's stance internally, but I don't think the reaction here is wholly inconsistent with what was being said at the time. A lot of people were complaining about chance conversion and saying we needed to buy an additional striker who could put away a greater % of chances than Pelle/Long (personally I thought our problem was more creativity and goals from midfield, but that's by the by).