Date: 6th January 2012 at 5:00pm
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As of Tuesday evening Luis Suarez will serve the 8 match ban imposed by the FA, serving his first match last night against Manchester City. Having not read every word of the 115 page report, I’m in no position to comment but there are still those forming up on either side of the fence, so it’s fairly clear that there is still some part of this up for disagreement amongst the footballing world.

One thing that is pretty obvious though is that we are going to be spending the best part of the next 6 weeks without our best player and need to act. It is bad enough that we lost our most important player besides Suarez not so long ago for the rest of the season but to lose both of our most important players is a bit too much of a blow to take on the chin, especially as we will be without both Lucas and Suarez for the crucial Carling Cup games against Manchester City coming up in the next few weeks.

I have discussed this at length with friends and family in the past fortnight. Shall we sign a new striker? Should we persevere with what we have? Maybe a loan move would be a good option? All of these options have positives but also negatives so it is difficult to decide what the best way forward is.

For one, I wouldn’t want us to rush out and splurge on a striker without having done due diligence first. We made that mistake last January, to a degree, and it is still biting us in the ass. The name Darren Bent is being bandied about at the moment, with the full £24 million that Villa paid for him touted as the asking price. Sure, Bent may have done well for Villa last season with 9 goals in 15 games but he’s struggled with injury and form this season and even before that he was never worth that much. With that sort of money available in the summer – if we were to move quickly, before the Euros – we could snap up any number of talented players from abroad, having done 5 months further homework on them first. A player of Bent’s ability would be worth £12-£14 million, at most, if he were French or Italian but adding on the ‘British’ premium means he shouldn’t even be considered; it is far too much.

Then there are mentions that Chelsea are looking to get rid of Torres, with as low as £20 million supposedly being the asking price. Now, for that much of a loss it would be worth taking him off Chelsea just to further their embarrassment but given his shocking drop in form and the way he left in the first place, you would have to say again: is it worth the risk? On paper, it may well be. In reality, however, he may well need a move to another league to capture the form of the Torres we signed a few years ago.

Another option would be to go for a loan move and on paper this would certainly be the most sensible of the first two options. But if you look around there isn’t exactly a great deal of quality available as it is. And surely – surely – if a player is worth signing on loan for 6 months, he’s worth signing permanently? I mean, in many ways a club of our size takes as big a risk making a big loan signing as a full-time one. As, depending on where the player is joining from, it can take as much as 6 months for even a top-class player to hit his stride. By that time, he’ll be on his way out of the club again and we’ll have spent 6 month’s worth of wages on a player just to send him back to his club, in form.

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8 responses to “3 Options Liverpool have to get past the Suarez ban”

  1. Ashfah Hussain says:

    Whichever option doesnt really augur well for the club. The only thing ood is the timing of the transfer window. Buy 1 excellent striker instead of 2 0r 3 mediocre players like what we had done in the past.

  2. Carrard says:

    The Russian league is only starting in March and Suarez’s ban is over by the end of January: Just try and get Eto’o on a two months loan!

  3. langsambar says:

    let player from reserve team play lol.

  4. TKP says:

    As much as the FA/media want this to be ‘black and white’ – it isn’t – and such binary reduction puts them now in racial profiling waters.

    The FA are now guilty of the very thing they self-righteously tried to rail against. Now we have a murderous political campaign against Suarez, Dalglish, and Liverpool, who have already been politically blackmailed into giving up their appeals and issuing a player apology. These outside groups like Kick it Out are now seeking to further defame a player based on a kangeroo court, a probability case, and the FA’s own admission of character preference (which is legally unethical if not racially motivated). They have ignored Evra’s own slurs and threats to Suarez, Evra’s history of racial epithets supported by video, and the previous FA dismissals of his ‘character.’ The FA took an unprecedented case, an unprecedented procedure, an unprecedented punishment and decided to aim it at a South American player with a poor command of English, new to the country. As it’s official scapegoat, they chose a person of mixed race, denigrated his worth in court, and produced a decision based on lip readers from Manchester. They should be ashamed! This of course deflects from the much more cut and dry case involving a British player, the England captain no less. By the lack of parity in treating these players the FA is promoting something akin to racial discrimination.

    The fact that Lord Ousley is affiliated with Manchester United makes the recent statements all the more regrettable. If you truly want to kick racism out of football you have to be equitable and fair in accessing all sides of the race question, and all cultural associations. You also must consider that you are trying to assassinate the character of a player that used the Spanish word for ‘black’ when the original charge was falsely based around the much stronger N word. What you are seeking to defend will actually bring about more racism in football because now any player can get another player banned and politically assassinated on a hearsay allegation. Recent actions, and the statements from people like Jason Roberts, are actually promoting inequality, subjectivity, and racial profiling. Witness how the media have sanctimoniously jumped in based on such reductive political correctness and how the player’s own mother now fears for his safety. Also,do a modicum of research on Suarez’s race relations, there are videos a plenty on youtube, and you will find that there isn’t a less racist player in the premiership.

  5. killa says:

    you speak as if the club have not been doing their homework for the past 6 months and only just started scouting players. that is ridiculous… if anything they must have identified lots of targets and those are probably not going to change after another 6 months…