yellow jumper

luke garbett.

mignolet's a decent number two. hopefully Karius a good no.1, shame we don't get to find out sooner.

i suspect not, but tempo slower, less aerial, more control of midfield. do remember him being quite s*** in EL final they won while he was there though.

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full back is a position on the pitch where generally you're seeing relatively limited footballers being asked to be competent in lots of things. there's also a modern, continental move to put emphasis on forward thinking, which some fans in england struggle to get behind if there's any sense defending still a work in progress.

and conversely, think attitude is one of the reasons moreno is hanging in there, when many fans would have him shot.

did caulker even play more games than illori at centre half? one maybe. think as well as needing injury cover it was felt we had specific issue aerially/physically at that time and no doubt since. i think that's probably where the doubts with illori lie. more that then simply caulker > illori. also why skrtel gone. matip arrived. doesn't look like illori got much of a chance of first team here, but if he does stay probably on the basis that you can develop a footballing centre half physically more easily than other way round.

impossible to fathom a view of football he describes.

given who he'd be replacing not sure that'll be the biggest concern. recovery pace more of an issue maybe. but manager clearly thinking forward from that position and delivery. think in a lot of other countries milner probably a 150 cap full back. they're never or very, very rarely complete, the issue is more often about where people would like to see the emphasis. steady isn't really good, but lot's would see it as an improvement. he likes moreno.

not sure he's got a great eye for a player really.

allardyce's idea of adjusting seems predictably deluded. like he's playing free-flowing footy every other week, but will park the bus when needed. he got booed out of west ham and newcastle ffs. rodgers has adjusted far more in his career already than allardyce ever will. too often at times and not always sensibly, but nowhere near the same sense that he puts a ceiling on what his players can achieve.

he play makes for germany now, but he was playing wide/attacking at leverkeusen/bayern at times. got far more legs than alonso, who he replaced at the club, but not sure exactly in role. obviously going to be behind modric as the lynchpin. probably fair to say he hasn't been an unqualified success there though.

maybe. and it makes sense to add another left footer. does seem to be an element of klopp perhaps having a less than obvious contingency. even in the scenario that we'd got chilwell, our only real long term target seemingly, it hardly screams reliable here and now back up,

he also said he was just messing. might be that clyne switches at times if we see bad moreno too often and milner gets his game at RB. as much as anything i think moreno played far too many games last year just from a fitness point of view anyway. so something needs to be done. .

it feels like you look at the game through a very narrow prism at times: english league/players sub-standard and benitez/05-09, king. nothing wrong with that, but, i dunno, in terms of setting criteria for what's good v. what's bad it probably isn't the most sensible starting point. maybe i'm being unfair?

well everyone's analysis is a bit different. i addressed the accumulation of points. i know where we finished. i genuinely have no idea where we will finish, seems massively open. lots look to simultaneously have potential, but also with a few question marks. i would like to see everyone play before writing anything off.

always looked the desired outcome to me.

batistuta and shearer clearly both amongst the top strikers of their generation. can understand a preference for one over the other, but neither of them belong in this conversation really, imo.

i don't know what's going to happen next season. but i don't really get the on paper analysis of us that just says we're a 6th-8th place team with many of the same glaring weaknesses. a. because i don't know and b. because actually 'on paper' we don't. we've got a top manager in his first pre-season with a squad he already improved, and the 'benefit' of a more forgiving schedule. a new keeper, a new centre half, a goal scoring midfielder, a goal scoring wide player. pace all over the shop. that's before you even get to what's already there, fitter, and/or closer to maturing/settling. a clutch of talented young players behind that. and we've spent a lot of money on it.

the mid-noughties are over. not sure it matters what are rivals are doing really anyway. think we'll be fine without the ball against them. and presumably the idea against everyone else is to carry a goal threat. europe might be different, but we're not in that.

the super organism is the team. the sense the manager makes out of his footballers, 99% of whom are limited in one way or other.

we'll dominate games of football at home, as we did last year, and now with a more goals from more areas. and we'll be more dangerous on the counter away. there may be some games in between that where a home side doesn't commit just opting to make it into a battle with their support behind them, but i see us being better in that scenario too, just for being better off physically.

they're ants, the brains are in the super-organism.

quite a few so-so strikers winning the golden boot in italy during an era when batistuta only won it once.

i dunno, honestly. i suspect in the dortmund scheme he's seen as an option to do the gundogan role (box-to-box playmaker) or the mkhitaryan one either ahead or wider of that. hard to say if he's at their level really, it's possible, although more likely in the second instance. dahoud, if we had him, a bit more of a passer probably, but still, i think regarded as more of a forward thinking midfielder, even at BMG until he develops a bit. sven bender, nuri sahin and sebastian kehl the other regular midfielders at dortmund during klopp's time, but none of them of such dominant quality that i think he can't use some of our options in same way. may be occasions where we come to regret extra quality in there. but my suspicion is it'll be as much about trying to be collectively really hard to control with or without ball.