Moroccan winger felt he was harshly treated at Anfield…
Oussama Assaidi signed for UAE outfit Al Ahli for £4.7m at the beginning of the January transfer window, and he’s taken an opportunity to criticise his former employers, reports the Express.
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The North African winger was signed during Brendan Rodgers’ first summer in charge, but he failed to make much of an impact during the 2012/13 season, and was sent out on loan to Stoke last term as a result. This month, we terminated his second loan spell with the Potters so we could move him out permanently, but Assaidi doesn’t think he was given a proper chance.
“To be honest I never got a fair chance at Liverpool,” he said.
“If you look at the games I played I don’t think I did that bad.”
“Liverpool is a big club that tries to buy and buy and buy, but they don’t always buy the right players. They look to big names but big names are not always the thing to look for because the small names are sometimes better.
“But they buy big names for big money and then they have to play them. That’s how it works in Europe, you have to be a bit lucky. I came from a small club in Holland [Heerenveen] and I took a big step to go to Liverpool because they said I was a good player and would get a chance, but I didn’t get the chance.
“I had wanted to join Ajax after Heerenveen, and perhaps after Ajax I could have gone to a bigger club like Liverpool, maybe I made the wrong decision to go to Liverpool early.”
While Assaidi is right that he didn’t get many opportunities, (he only made four Premier League appearances) the fact he couldn’t get in the Stoke side this term proves that he probably wasn’t Liverpool quality. This is confirmed by the fact he chose to follow the money and sign for a Dubai based club when he’s still only 26-years-old.
In fact, it’s practically a certainty that the capped Moroccan will never play for a club as big as Liverpool again.
While Assaidi is right that we ‘don’t always sign the right players’, our batch of summer signings are starting to prove that they may have been astute acquisitions after all. Emre Can is playing superbly in defence, Alberto Moreno provides an exciting option down the left, Lazar Markovic is improving game on game – and £26m Adam Lallana should get back into the side when he fully recovers from injury. Only Mario Balotelli and Dejan Lovren have been real flops so far, although it would be wrong for us to write off the pair just yet.