Liverpool FC Forum

stmichael wrote:silva is a top quality player but didn't want to leave spain. the same with david villa. the fact is they may be available in the summer as valencia are in a dire financial state but even then you're looking at £50m for the pair. Pavlyuchenko is average at best.

can't believe more bigger clubs weren't interested in podolski though.

KEANE HUNG OUT TO DRY


By Vincent Hogan

Tuesday January 27 2009

Robbie Keane is a powerful reminder just now that professional football is a game, fundamentally, about illusion.

His current plight reeks of a conflict so far removed from the imperatives of scoring goals and winning games that he might as well be a member of the Anfield office staff. In omitting Keane from an 18-man squad for Sunday's FA Cup replay with Everton, Rafa Benitez gave the uncomfortable impression of a manager suspending fairness to wage a private war.

Keane's £20m summer move to Merseyside has, thus, curdled into a nightmarish tale of isolation.

This is, partly, because he has fluttered like a startled moth for so many of his 27 appearances in a Liverpool shirt. But Keane's struggle to make an impact under Benitez has scarcely been any more conspicuous than the struggles of other expensive signings, Ryan Babel, Andrea Dossena and -- latterly -- Albert Riera.

Significantly, those three all featured on Sunday, Babel and Dossena starting, yet Benitez admitted that he had "not seen" Keane.

In any context, this had to be considered a startling admission by the man who made Keane the second most expensive signing in the club's history just last July. In the context of a team struggling for form and goals, it stopped just short of a declaration of insanity.

Struggle

Benitez is, of course, immersed in a power struggle at Liverpool that is popularly distilled into an argument about control of transfers. He has equivocated on signing a new contract until that argument is resolved. The man he wants taken out of the loop is chief executive Rick Parry.

Parry reputedly refused to sanction Benitez's efforts to sign Gareth Barry from Aston Villa last summer, believing the £18m asking price exorbitant. Instead, he backed the late investment of £2m more than that into a striker the manager now seems intent upon identifying as someone else's choice.

To believe this is to buy into a convenient version of the power game.

Keane's unconvincing efforts to adjust to Benitez's system at Liverpool have fed the theory that his purchase from Tottenham was business done, essentially, without enthusiastic backing from the manager. Hence, in his battle with Parry, it now clearly suits Benitez to depict Keane as an Anfield misfit.

To buy this line, however, is to believe that the Dubliner was exclusively a boardroom appointment. Fairytale stuff, in other words. Whatever Parry's powers of persuasion, to imagine him riding solo on a £20m deal should stretch our credulity beyond breaking point.

Remember that the zeal with which Liverpool pursued Keane drew a complaint from Tottenham and led, eventually, to the Merseysiders issuing an official apology and making a donation to the Tottenham Hotspur Foundation. Remember, too, that Keane inherited the coveted No 7 shirt worn by Anfield legends Kevin Keegan and Kenny Dalglish.

If this was an appointment the manager did not want, Rafa ought to be carrying an Equity card.

No doubt, he felt humiliated by the collapse of the deal for Barry. No doubt, too, he held his chief executive primarily responsible. But Liverpool would not have signed Robbie Keane six months ago if Benitez had not backed the move, enthusiastically or otherwise. At best, he is being disingenuous in implying anything different. At worst, scandalously unfair.

This is not to say that Keane should be in Liverpool's starting 11. It is to argue his right to a reasonable opportunity.

Robbie can be feckless and insipid on his bad days, but his work ethic is sound and his career as a professional has yet to decant even the faintest thread of criticism from a club manager. If Keane has a clear fault, it is the sense of being extravagant and vain in areas that demand an assassin's brevity.

His much publicised, 'step over' miss in the Champions' League away leg against Atletico Madrid drew much scorn from a broad range of pundits and the kind of withering glare from Benitez that, you sense, has never quite fully thawed. It was conceited and unprofessional and, perhaps, Robbie is still paying the price.

But Keane scored a wonderful goal against Arsenal at the Emirates on December 21 and, four days later, notched two more against Bolton at Anfield. He suddenly looked empowered, yet Benitez's response was to omit him for the next game, against Newcastle at St. James' Park, which Liverpool won 5-1.

That win may have sealed the manager's conviction that, even without the coveted Fernando Torres in his attack, Liverpool did not need Robbie Keane.

At the very least, it surely blew a massive hole in any confidence the player took from having scored three times in two games.

At Old Trafford, after all, Keane's former Tottenham colleague -- Dimitar Berbatov -- was being indulged a succession of limp, ambivalent displays by Alex Ferguson despite the media's derision for what they saw as a £30m dilettante. The Bulgarian has recently scored in three consecutive games for Manchester United, Ferguson describing him after Saturday's defeat of Spurs as "magnificent".

Benitez, for whatever reason, seems compelled to articulate impatience with Keane. He has replaced the Dubliner more often than his shirt this season and, on Sunday, picked teenage French striker David Ngog ahead of Keane in the match-day squad. As declarations of intent go, this one was writ in neon.

Yesterday, speculation was in ferment that Robbie might soon be on his way to Manchester City, Everton, Aston Villa, Sunderland or even back to Spurs, the assumption being that his time at Anfield may terminate this week.

If so, Robbie will be depicted a Liverpool failure. Another Craig Bellamy or Jermaine Pennant. A gifted footballer somehow lacking the competitive intelligence to thread his abilities into the club's folklore.

But is Keane's failure just a grand deception? Is it simply the human sacrifice Benitez has chosen to inflict PR damage on his chief executive? In any tussle for the supporters' allegiance, Rafa beats Rick Parry hands down. He knows that and so does Parry.

So, if Liverpool is, as the tabloids say, a club at war now -- Tom Hicks and Benitez on one side, George Gillett and Parry on the other -- Robbie finds himself cast as a convenient scapegoat. It's not football and it most certainly isn't justice.

But it's how the game is run. Money first, then politics and players. In that order.

- Vincent Hogan