Trainees And Traitors!

Nice to see most of our players back in training again and it’s hard to believe that in just over a week’s time we will have our first pre-season game and can finally get back to some real football talk instead of just endlessly speculating about speculation. I look forward to these pre-season games not only because they give us a chance to see how the team is shaping up ahead of the new campaign but also because they give us a rare chance to see some of our young prospects getting a run-out in the first team. Our youth system is very important to our future and it’s got to start delivering some talent through to the first team squad. Rafa has already splashed out the majority of his transfer budget on Glen Johnson and, assuming we have no high profile departures and if he can get them at the right price, he may bring in one or two more new faces on the cheap. That’s about it really and finance-wise this is likely to be the level of transfer spending we can expect for the foreseeable future, which is why I think it is vital that we start producing a few players of our own. Despite the tightness of the clubs finances, a lot of money has been spent in recent years on bringing in promising youngsters and developing The Academy, but up to last season it had delivered very little. Last term Insua did a great job establishing himself as a first team player and El Zhar made 22 appearances in the first team and looks a useful member of the squad, but that has been the exception rather than the rule. Between that and Gerrard making his debut about a decade ago, you could count the amount of genuine first team players who have come through our youth system on the fingers of one finger. Unless I’m overlooking someone, Stephen Warnock is the only one that springs to my mind and he’s now at Blackburn. Other good prospects have gone through our system but haven’t made the grade and for the most part have gone on to make careers for themselves in the lower divisions. Clearly this ratio must be improved upon going forward and this is why I think Rafa is now taking a more hands-on approach. For the last 2 or 3 years he’s had his scouts identifying and recruiting some of the finest young talent from around the world because you just can’t produce anything if you haven’t got the right raw material, and that appears to have been stage one of his plan. Stage two came this summer when the powers he gained from his recent contract negotiations allowed him to undertake a major cull of the background staff, many of whom were involved with the youth set-up. It’s never easy saying goodbye to staff that have given the club years of service but at the end of the day football is a results business, and results in this area haven’t been good enough so tough decisions had to be made. It’s all well and good winning FA Youth Cups and the like, but the youth system exists to produce players for the first team squad and for whatever reason this just hasn’t been happening at an acceptable level and changes needed to be made. Stage three is now well underway with Rafa recruiting a new set of coaching staff to oversee the development of what we all hope will be our stars of the future. The icing on the cake of this recruitment drive has of course been the return of King Kenny. I can’t tell you how delighted I was to see this absolute Legend back at the club. He is without doubt my all-time hero who I had the privilege of seeing play many times and for me he was our greatest ever player, followed by Barnes and StevieG making his way into my top three and closing fast! But Dalglish isn’t just back to make up the numbers, he has been given an important role at the club and part of that role is to oversee the youth system, which just shows how seriously the development of these young players is been taken. Yet again I think you’ve got to give huge credit to the boss for some great work in this area that could potentially benefit us for many years to come. As for our current crop, I try to watch our reserves play whenever I get the chance and there’s no doubt we’ve got a talented group of young players at the moment. Players like Pacheco, Nemeth, Spearing, Darby, San Jose among at least half a dozen others, all look very promising but are now getting near to that critical stage where they will need to deliver on that promise. The odds are most of them probably won’t make it as Liverpool players but given the right guidance there’s a chance some of them might. If our system could produce an average of just one player a season good enough to play an active part in the first team squad it would be a very worthwhile endeavour that could potentially save us millions. So it will be very interesting to see in the coming seasons if Rafa’s hands-on approach and this new restructure of the coaching staff delivers better results than the regime that proceeded it. But in other matters it has been another former graduate of our youth system who has been making all the news recently. I think it’s fair to say Michael Owing has well and truly burned his bridges with any Liverpool supporters who might still have had any affection left for him, now that he has committed the ultimate treason by signing for the mancs. While I will admit that seeing the puke inducing pictures of his smiling face as he posed in their shirt was a little bit surreal, to be honest I really couldn’t care less about him or the mancs. In fairness, Owen gave us 6 or 7 years of great service and his goal-scoring record for us speaks for itself but I lost all interest in him after the way he left us. Not only did he lead the fans on but he also led the club on as he ran down his contract and then flew off to join Real Madrid as soon as they fluttered their eyelashes at him, the fact that we were embarking on a new era under a new manager meant nothing to him. This guy has more faces than a second hand clock shop, the kind of guy who wears mirrored sunglasses with the mirrors on the inside! How his move to the mancs might be received by Liverpool supporters won’t have even entered his thinking. Apparently he had a choice between joining the mancs and joining Hull City, which shouldn’t have been any choice at all. One club tries to play good football with honesty and integrity in the finest traditions of the game, the other one plays at Old Trafford! I would normally genuinely wish any of our former players well when they move on to other clubs, but certainly not in this case. He may have once been a Liverpool player but he is now a manc and I despise everything about that club at a genetic level. Since leaving Liverpool, Owen’s career choices have been one disaster after another and I’ll be very happy if this one turns out the same way. I have little sympathy for the guy because Owen has only ever cared about Owen and seemed to view supporters as a necessary nuisance. Even at Newcastle he was initially welcomed him like a new messiah by the Loony Toons, but he had little interest in living up to their expectations. On the rare occasions when he was actually fit enough, he would fly into training by helicopter and fly off again as soon as it was over with no interest in mixing with his team mates or supporters. At Liverpool he scored a lot of goals and gave us some great memories, but he was always a cold fish who often seemed to treat playing for Liverpool as a stepping stone to playing for England and despite his goals and his ability he never really bonded with The Kop. When you think about it, he was a product of our youth system who went on to become one of the best strikers in the world at one time, so all of the ingredients were there and if he had, had the right mentality he might well have gone on to be one of our greatest ever players. But Owen was always far more interested in becoming the next Bobby Charlton then he was in becoming the next Kenny Dalglish, so maybe it’s appropriate the he is now with the mancs!