by bigmick » Fri Feb 13, 2009 12:34 am
Some good posts and it's heartening that when people choose to post sensibly, there's still some good debate on here.
Some things I think are absolutely beyond dispute. One of them is that we have progressed some from the team which Rafa was left by Houllier. It's silly disputing that I think, so my questions are twofold. Firstly, whether or not the manager can improve us still further and win the title with us, and secondly has the improvement, the rafalution been a fair return on much financial investment and five years of effort.
Answering the second bit first, it's a close call I think. We've spent a huge amount of money, and if the squad is closely analysed it is still glaringly weak in some areas and hugly unbalanced. That said, enough of the signings have come off, and Gerrard has matured into the best player in the World which has given us a decent first team. The youth set-up despite much fanfare and investment appears to be unlikely to yield up any superstars soon, while trophy wise we have two in four years, and we are still involved in two this year. Two trophies in five seasons should it come to that is hardly stuff of which legends are made to be fair, and these next few weeks really are massively important in terms of judging any progress. As I've already said I don't think we'll win the league this season, and I suppose the odds from the bookies would probably be against us winning anything but we'll see. Should that come to pass though, we'd be three seasons without a trophy so progress would be gradual at best I think.
The first question is more one of feel I think. The inadequacies of the teeam which rafa inherited were fairly obvious, and he addressed them in the following years. Fairly clearly we needed a goalkeeper for instance, and he bought us a very good one. Equally we needed a good central midfielder, and he bought us one. As time has gone on though, I've had the distinct impression that we are losing our way in terms of focusing on doing what we need to improve. This Summers signings for instance for a 40 million quid outlay were nothing short of miserable.
Equally, although it did look for a while that we'd made progress in terms of rotation, odd selections, odd substitutions and the like, it now looks to me like we're slipping backwards. Equally, our man management techniques seem so far behind our immmediate rivals that I think we care costantly behind the eight ball. Add in Rafa's behaviour this season when we did actually get close to the top of the league, the way he appeared to completely lose his head and it doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
All in all he's done OK. We had a quite a bit of the rub of the green in the Champions League win, and if you take that out of the equation the record would look a lot worse. Of course you can't and don't take that out of the equation, but the margins are fine.
We may end up when the fat lady has actually finished singing no closeer to the Mancs than we were last season. They aren't going to fall out of the blocks next season like they did this, and neither are Arsenal and Chelsea going to concede so readily either. We are in the race still just, but what a chance we had. What a chance. We will never get a better one. To win it in future we will need to be a better team than we are now, and I wonder whether he's capable of taking us there.
Last edited by
bigmick on Fri Feb 13, 2009 12:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
"se e in una bottigla ed e bianco, e latte".
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