Riquelme being judged on one level as a great player and then failing miserably on another level is probably the best example we could have for this discussion. As some of you may know he arrived at BArcelona with a massive reputation and the label (one of many players to have this label) of being the new Maradonna. Whether or not the label was too heavy round his neck may have been the reason for his failure we'll only ever be able to draw our own conclusions. His performances have improved ten-fold (domestically) since he left Barca for Villareal but as some of you have noticed he was quite poor in a couple of BIG games against arsenal culminating in missing the match leveling penalty on tuesday. I have the opinion that come the world cup he may just be one of the biggest disappointments of the tournament. I just get the feeling that he is one of these players that has the quality in his locker but when he needs his nerve to hold he just isn't strong enough.
It is this sort of player that hopefully Rafa is able to pick out and avoid like a dose of bird flu. The likelyhood that i forsee is that Rafa will possibly bring in players of a lesser known reputation as this seems to be his strong point when it comes to transfers. How many of you on here can HONESTLY say that you knew more about Alonso than he was a spanish midfielder before we signed him. The same obviously goes for MOMO and Mark Gonzalez. OK we've all been keeping an eye on gonzo since we signed him but before that we all knew pretty much fook all (Sabre excepted), he may still prove a failure but i think we all somehow know that is a very small possibility from what we've seen.
I think that when it comes to our transfer activity this summer the best bet when players names are linked with LFC we are more likely to see Dirk Kuyt and not Ronaldo sign for us because Rafa will always go for the more hard working player than the big name star. We'll probably see that unknown Croatian (i think) right sided MF sign than Joaquin. This may be met with accusations of going for second best but in reality i belive it will be Rafa going for the player who fits more into the way he wants to see the team play.
It all boils down to we can't rush to judge the player after a couple of performances whether it be in the world cup or in pre-season but we just have to trust in Rafa that he's done his homework; which he has already shown he DOES do.