Hey man, I am not sure if you're going to go several pages back to read my reply to your post so I think I will copy and paste it here as well.

First of all I think you may have misunderstood what I meant by 'Rafa wasting money on "gems"'. So I explained that with this post.

________________________________

Rafa did well here, but I hate when people think that he was some untouchable, un-loseable God. And that just like magic he will come back to Liverpool and save us because he is the only capable manager in the world. So what I did was to highlight some of the negatives of his reign. He is not a bad manager, in fact he was a pretty good manager but I really don't feel he is the right person for us at the moment.

Imo he is a type of manager that you bring on when you know the owners are going to invest heavily in players, and you want to quickly push for something, but he isn't the type of manager that will slowly grow a club competitively (e. G David Moyes, Klopp, SAF etc) at a revenue-related budget.

I never said he spent a lot of money on flops, what I meant was that most of the good players he bought were not really "gems" (in that they were already known to be great players and would be really expensive if the money spent then was converted to today's market [e. G Torres, Masceherano]).

If 20m (what Torres cost then) was spent in today's market, you would expect the player acquired to be someone that will make an instant impact. But that 20m back then converted to today's money would be somewhere around 35-40m, so if that kind of money is spent on a player it would be hard to call them a gem.

Imo, the only players that he bought that could be considered as "gems" were Alonso, Lucas and Reina but even then Alonso was 10m and Lucas was 6m, if that was converted to today's market Alonso will be around the 15m-20m range and Lucas would be around 10-12m which is pretty expensive.

Gems for me are players like Michu, Demba Ba, Papiss Cisse, (majority of Newcastle players), Benteke, Coutinho. These were cheap, relatively under the radar players that made an instant impact and will be very good in the future. I wouldn't consider Hazard, Aguero or Oscar for example, as gems because of their transfer fees.

So if a manager spends 40m on Aguero, I wouldn't think they were some transfer mastermind, in fact I will consider that a waste of money, especially when compared with a manager spending 2m on Michu.

I guess you mis-understood me?

______________________

In order to clear up any other potential misunderstandings, in a second post I explained what I meant in the other paragraphs of my first argument.

_______________________

When I began my argument I stated that we were no longer a team with a surplus amount of money, so Rafa wouldn't be able to spend big on players.

I then highlighted that on a weak budget Rafa would be more likely to struggle, as he did when we finished 7th. I did not intend the 'Rafa started to sell' part to mean that he purposefully sold our good players to make us bad or that it was his fault we sold our players, what I meant was that even when he 'had' to sell some of our good players, we still had a pretty decent side. A side I would consider better than the one we have right now and we still finished 7th.

I had highlighted his spell at Inter, because when Rafa was hired Inter were an already established top team, they already had good players and so it would have been easy for him to keep them playing well but somehow he messed it up.

I did this to show that even with a great team Rafa is not perfect, and like any manager it will take time for him to instill his play style on a team. I was trying to compare him with Rodgers. Rodgers inherited a mentally weak and over-paid, average squad of players (overall) and managed to improve on many aspects of the previous season by replacing the average players with younger un-proven players.

The general point of my argument was not to show that Rafa was a bad manager, but was to show that he isn't the right manager for today's Liverpool.

Imo, many managers would have done well with the kind of squad and money we had when Rafa was here, but not many would have managed our team as well or even better that Rodgers has done this season. This is not to say that Rodgers is having a fantastic season, imo he isn't, but there are many signs that he has started to build something good here.
__________________

Link: www.footylounge.com/films//youngredcomps/jamie-car...

Hi,

I am sorry to say that the prizes for the Euro 2012 game were only for positions 1-5 (smaller, shorter game). The new Dreamfooty season is open and that is back to positions 1-25

You were right.... The Walking Dead did have to be mentioned in that good tv shows discussion, it just had to. Haha.
Loved it and I can't wait for season 3!

Hey mate

2 cool votes for you mate Hope you are enjoying footytube to its fullest Hope to see you around the forums in this site and good luck with Liverpool Football Club this season

Cheers

Tdsmufan (Tristan)