We’re about to head into August and we’re about two weeks away from our first Premier League match against Sunderland.
Milan Jovanovic and Christian Poulsen are still-STILL-on the squad. Certainly no Liverpool fan would have had it that way at the start of this summer.
Jova has had one foot out the door for the whole summer and it looks like his wages are a sticking point for teams interested in taking him on. His wages are currently £60k p/w and he needs to be honest with himself right now: There is nothing that he has done at Liverpool that makes him worth that. Nothing. I’ll give him credit for coming and giving a consistently high effort but all that effort was really without much quality. He’s just not a Liverpool player, plain and simple.
It’s harder to find Christian Poulsen’s wages but he’s probably getting paid something similar to Jovanovic. I can only hope it isn’t higher.
He was signed to be a replacement for Javier Mascherano and failed massively. He turned 31 last season and it seems as though the game has passed him by. We ended up doing Juventus a huge favor by taking his wages off of their hands and paying £4.5 million for him. We would have been better off keeping Damien Plessis in the long run, the man whose shirt Poulsen took.
Poulsen, too, has been linked with a few teams for a move away from Anfield. When his former club FC Copenhagen were interested in him, Poulsen’s agent Jorn Bonnesen said that there would be no move to Copenhagen and proclaimed that Poulsen’s future was at Liverpool.
No, it’s not. He’s not good enough. He could help at a team like Fulham but for a team that is pushing to get back into the Champions League in England, he just can’t bring anything to the table.
I would have thought that Paul Konchesky-one of Roy Hodgson’s worst deeds at Liverpool-leaving would have prompted the other two to switch. Konchesky realized that the payday was not worth rotting on the bench. If Jovanovic and Poulsen had the sense, and maybe an agent to give them a nudge, they’d realize the same thing.
Joe Cole and David N’Gog are different, at least to me. They can give us something. For Cole, it might be a little bit of neat passing and fresh legs as a sub, and he’s versatile enough to play a few spots. He’s not the star that we thought we signed but he could be a threat from the bench. David N’Gog has shown some promise as a 22-year old striker. Sometimes he looks the part, sometimes he doesn’t. His wages can’t be that expensive at this point and the position depth for less important games like early Carling Cup and FA Cup games would be beneficial for resting our starters. Adam Morgan might be another striker that we could use in this role but I would hate to see N’Gog go and finally realize his potential for another team.