FanPost

Why We're Going to Take Football by Storm



This time last year, not a lot was going on in the red half of Merseyside, save the ever-escalating transfer buzz surrounding Luis Suarez and Wenger's bid of 40,000,001. The preceding season, Liverpool had clocked in at a rather disappointing eighth place despite the goal-scoring abilities of their Uruguayan Cannibal. Everton touted them to sixth and the soon-to-depart Gareth Bale had helped us to a reasonable fifth place. The next season, after a transfer window of only relatively basic business on the part of John Henry, Liverpool bounced back to claim a Champions League place and contend for the title.

We have ten players who have been around only a season or less. With the (hopefully) impending arrivals of Musacchio and Yedlin with the tantalizing potential addition of some young winger with nice hair (I don't buy the recent Andros and HurriKane to QPR in exchange for Remy rumors. No way is that Levy.) We have a plethora of locked away talent, perhaps manifesting itself most purely in Erik Lamela and Roberto Soldado. Both were total stars in the respective leagues they came from--for his fifteen goal season, Lamela was getting all sorts of hype, with people calling him the Argentinian Bale/Ronaldo/Neymar, while Soldado was scoring left, right and centre for Valencia, registering only marginally less than the two best players in world football.

Management and injury plagued both of these players, as well as most of the rest of the squad. Paulinho, Chadli, Chiriches, Capoue, and Eriksen were the other additions. With the exception of Eriksen, who really could be gunning for some sort of PFA award if he keeps this up, none of the signings were the players we needed them to be. But could El Poche be setting the stage to change this?

At Southampton, Pochettino's pressing football with favour towards youth and development gained him acclaim. Southampton played electric football week in, week out--the only reason they didn't win much more games than they did was a question of depth. To an extent, we can try to work out what MoPo plans to do with the squad by putting it under the Southampton template; we can say that Lamela will fill a Rodriguez-type role, Soldado will be Lambert, Capoue will be Wanyama, Bentaleb/Pauli will be Schneiderlin, etc. If we do that, however, one burning question has to be asked: what about Eriksen?

Eriksen's strengths are incisive passing, set pieces, pace, and long shots. Eriksen likes to, from time to time, place a run down the wing and cut inside before placing a pass to a team mate. However, Eriksen's finishing is less than clinical and usually his shots from inside the box involve getting up to extremely close range and blasting the ball into the goal's ceiling or just rocketing them in along the ground in a way that seems almost accidental (see 3-2 Southampton). If Eriksen has one weakness, however, it's his defensive contribution. Against West Bromwich Albion, he lost the ball early and his tackle to retrieve it was unsuccessful. This led to a goal. Lallana, on the other hand, finds his forte in finishing, defensive contribution, break-up play and short passing. His type of play is similar to that of Oscar, Lampard, Ramsey, Isco, Pjanic, etc. He has little in common with Eriksen and I suspect that a team involving the both of them would have a lethal central midfield. Holtby could prove to be the Lallana equivalent. Be that as it may, Poch is going to have to alter his system to accommodate for Eriksen.

How would he do this, though? Against Schalke, Eriksen floundered. He never made any cut and dry mistakes, but we missed the Eriksen that we saw last season. If this was an FM save, I'd just throw Eriksen in the deep end and play him in the centre of my attacking three and wait until he got acclimatized to it, but what if it doesn't work and we have to keep throwing a struggling player into a system that doesn't fit him? Do we drop him? The obvious answer is we tweak the system, and if we can iron this out then we're poised for an excellent season.

Not to mention our young talent. Nabil Bentaleb, Andros Townsend, Harry Kane, Ben Davies, Eric Dier, Milos Veljkovic--for whom another game I most fervently request--and, uh, Harry Winks, are all a high standard of young player. Davies is the only one who is guaranteed some semblance of a first team place, while it looks the others have got to fight. I can see all of these getting a chance to break into the first team under MoPo and maybe even staying there, as did all those Saints all those months ago.

Look at Suarez in the 2010/11 and 11/12 seasons. He had relatively disappointing runs, especially in the former. Admittedly this year the Premier League is going to be more competitive than ever, especially at the top--Chelsea, Arsenal and City have all completed their squads and we, with United, look close to doing the same. Soldado looks fired up and can make an impact this season, while Lamela is fit and rearing to go. We have a good coach, a strong team with depth, and we can have good Cup/Euro runs, maybe winning a piece of silverware and contending for fourth place. Why shouldn't we?

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