This one stinks Chuck Adam.
Clint Dempsey
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Defending from the top would be a given then.
it is not the work rate of players like Kuyt, Leonhardsen, Sissoko, Carragher, henderson, any-given-everton-midfielder- last-three-decades i dislike about them...
I probably missed this, but why wouldn't we gain more money from selling more shirts? Even if we didn't get a cut from each shirt sold(which is what I'm assuming the point is), we would certainly be able to bargain for a higher deal the next time if we can prove how much more we are selling.
Ok, perfect. So we could be buying him to increase our popularity and sell more shirts then.
I don't think we'd do that to be honest, but you never know.
I don't think we'd do that to be honest, but you never know.
In four years time Clint will probably be selling shirts for FC Houston or FC Dallas
Decent read:
As Boris Johnson can attest, criticising Liverpool can be a risky business. Casting aspersions on the club that calls Anfield home is positively reckless but discretion is not always the better part of valour, so with head placed tentatively above the parapet, I’ve got to argue that the Reds’ abortive attempt to sign Clint Dempsey is a backwards step.
The club’s American puppet masters – the Fenway Sports Group – may have jumped the gun when they announced they’d prised the striker away from Fulham on Wednesday but there’s an irresistible sense of inevitably about the story.
Liverpool are going to get their man sooner or later and it is only the fee rather than Dempsey’s fate that remains unresolved.
The imminent debate about the deal will question the wisdom of recruiting Dempsey, particularly as Liverpool prepare to swallow their pride and repatriate Andy Carroll in Newcastle.
Pundits will muse about the American’s age, his Premier League pedigree, his potential partnership with Luis Suarez or Fabio Borini and whether Dempsey was cloned from Dirk Kuyt’s leftover DNA.
The real question though is what the deal tells us about Brendan Rodgers’ state of mind as he prepares for the Herculean task of waking the club from its persistent and stubborn slumber?
Rodgers pitched up at Anfield this summer revelling in his reputation as the man who had transplanted Barcelona’s mesmeric style to South Wales with Swansea, the Jose Mourinho protégé who was actually able to pull of that most elusive of tricks, playing attractive football that actually got results.
Signing Dempsey just doesn’t fit into that philosophy.
The American of course will put in an honest shift, like Kuyt before him. He’ll score goals, he will give Rogers flexibility in terms of selection with his ability to play wide or in midfield and he’ll certainly raise the club’s profile across the pond, no doubt delighting FSG’s merchandising department back home in the process.
What he won’t do is move Liverpool significantly forward.
And that speaks volumes about Rodgers’ ambition. It was no surprise when the Irishman agreed to succeed Kenny Dalglish despite the sizeable shadow the Scot still casts at Anfield. They made him an offer he simply couldn’t refuse but recruiting Dempsey strongly hints consolidation and not revolution is top of the new Liverpool manager’s agenda.
Rodgers is simply playing safe.
The move for Borini earlier this month suggested otherwise. The young Italian, it seemed, would be the vanguard of the Rodgers’ revolution. Liverpool, we assumed, would become a more expensive (and expansive) version of the Swans side he oversaw at the Liberty Stadium and Anfield would become a byword once again for attacking, fluid football.
Parachuting Dempsey into that picture doesn’t work. His heroics on the banks of the Thames last season aside, his top-flight record is distinctly modest and he’s built his career on endeavour rather than artistry. He won’t embarrass Rodgers in the way that Carroll and Stewart Downing did for Dalglish but he’s not going to light up Anfield either.
Sometimes managers buy players to buy themselves time and that is exactly what Rodgers is doing here. He’s acutely conscious that failure to improve on last season’s meek eighth-place finish will leave him dangling by a thread with both FSG and the supporters and the American striker is part of his insurance policy.
You can’t blame Liverpool fans for dreaming, hoping that Rodgers would march into Anfield and quickly transform their fortunes but reality always bites and when the Dempsey story broke, it bit with a vengeance.
Liverpool recent profligacy in the transfer market is also a factor. Rodgers of course was not the culprit but with Dempsey set to head to Merseyside for something like £7million, the Irishman is boxing clever.
Replacing Dalglish is brave but slipping into the great man’s tracksuit and proceeding to write big cheques would be verging on the suicidal.
Few inside Anfield dared to berate Dalglish for the £20million he squandered on Downing but they would not be so reticent to snipe at his successor were he to spend the same kind of money on another flop.
Rodgers and Liverpool of course have the luxury of time before the transfer window closes and it would be a shock should they not add to the Anfield ranks before it closes at the end of August. They may yet make the marquee signing that the supporters crave.
But it will not disguise the message the Dempsey deal is screaming out.
As Boris Johnson can attest, criticising Liverpool can be a risky business. Casting aspersions on the club that calls Anfield home is positively reckless but discretion is not always the better part of valour, so with head placed tentatively above the parapet, I’ve got to argue that the Reds’ abortive attempt to sign Clint Dempsey is a backwards step.
The club’s American puppet masters – the Fenway Sports Group – may have jumped the gun when they announced they’d prised the striker away from Fulham on Wednesday but there’s an irresistible sense of inevitably about the story.
Liverpool are going to get their man sooner or later and it is only the fee rather than Dempsey’s fate that remains unresolved.
The imminent debate about the deal will question the wisdom of recruiting Dempsey, particularly as Liverpool prepare to swallow their pride and repatriate Andy Carroll in Newcastle.
Pundits will muse about the American’s age, his Premier League pedigree, his potential partnership with Luis Suarez or Fabio Borini and whether Dempsey was cloned from Dirk Kuyt’s leftover DNA.
The real question though is what the deal tells us about Brendan Rodgers’ state of mind as he prepares for the Herculean task of waking the club from its persistent and stubborn slumber?
Rodgers pitched up at Anfield this summer revelling in his reputation as the man who had transplanted Barcelona’s mesmeric style to South Wales with Swansea, the Jose Mourinho protégé who was actually able to pull of that most elusive of tricks, playing attractive football that actually got results.
Signing Dempsey just doesn’t fit into that philosophy.
The American of course will put in an honest shift, like Kuyt before him. He’ll score goals, he will give Rogers flexibility in terms of selection with his ability to play wide or in midfield and he’ll certainly raise the club’s profile across the pond, no doubt delighting FSG’s merchandising department back home in the process.
What he won’t do is move Liverpool significantly forward.
And that speaks volumes about Rodgers’ ambition. It was no surprise when the Irishman agreed to succeed Kenny Dalglish despite the sizeable shadow the Scot still casts at Anfield. They made him an offer he simply couldn’t refuse but recruiting Dempsey strongly hints consolidation and not revolution is top of the new Liverpool manager’s agenda.
Rodgers is simply playing safe.
The move for Borini earlier this month suggested otherwise. The young Italian, it seemed, would be the vanguard of the Rodgers’ revolution. Liverpool, we assumed, would become a more expensive (and expansive) version of the Swans side he oversaw at the Liberty Stadium and Anfield would become a byword once again for attacking, fluid football.
Parachuting Dempsey into that picture doesn’t work. His heroics on the banks of the Thames last season aside, his top-flight record is distinctly modest and he’s built his career on endeavour rather than artistry. He won’t embarrass Rodgers in the way that Carroll and Stewart Downing did for Dalglish but he’s not going to light up Anfield either.
Sometimes managers buy players to buy themselves time and that is exactly what Rodgers is doing here. He’s acutely conscious that failure to improve on last season’s meek eighth-place finish will leave him dangling by a thread with both FSG and the supporters and the American striker is part of his insurance policy.
You can’t blame Liverpool fans for dreaming, hoping that Rodgers would march into Anfield and quickly transform their fortunes but reality always bites and when the Dempsey story broke, it bit with a vengeance.
Liverpool recent profligacy in the transfer market is also a factor. Rodgers of course was not the culprit but with Dempsey set to head to Merseyside for something like £7million, the Irishman is boxing clever.
Replacing Dalglish is brave but slipping into the great man’s tracksuit and proceeding to write big cheques would be verging on the suicidal.
Few inside Anfield dared to berate Dalglish for the £20million he squandered on Downing but they would not be so reticent to snipe at his successor were he to spend the same kind of money on another flop.
Rodgers and Liverpool of course have the luxury of time before the transfer window closes and it would be a shock should they not add to the Anfield ranks before it closes at the end of August. They may yet make the marquee signing that the supporters crave.
But it will not disguise the message the Dempsey deal is screaming out.
I'd take him for upto £7m, I think he's worth it for that. As the article says though, we need a marquee signing, not just for the fans, for the players.
Rodgers doesn't really strike me as a 'play it safe' kind of guy, if I'm honest. At all.
Neymar is on the way mate ... Olympics are holding the deal up.
We've been linked with Dempsey for a lot longer than Rodgers has been in charge too.
And that worries me a bit
Not involved in Fulham's friendly again. Their 3rd so far.
Fulham starting lineup vs Kaiserslautern: Schwarzer; Riether, Hangeland, Hughes, Riise; Kacaniklic, Diarra, Etuhu, Ruiz: Petric, Trotta
Fulham starting lineup vs Kaiserslautern: Schwarzer; Riether, Hangeland, Hughes, Riise; Kacaniklic, Diarra, Etuhu, Ruiz: Petric, Trotta
Andy Heaton @Andrew_Heaton
Fulham want Charlie 'The Scottish Alonso' Adam as part of the Dempsey deal? I'd throw him in for free along with a magic tree air freshener.
Fulham want Charlie 'The Scottish Alonso' Adam as part of the Dempsey deal? I'd throw him in for free along with a magic tree air freshener.
Sorry for this super long post.... 😳
In September 2007 Clint Dempsey latched onto a loose ball and steered it left-footed into the Wigan net. The away crowd, jubilant, sang of the scorer: “He scores with his left, he scores with his riiiiight, that boy Clint Dempsey, makes Drogba look [censored]”.
And so it proved. Dempsey has now scored 50 times for Fulham (six against Wigan): 10 with his left; 25 with his riiiight, 12 with his head and, entirely summing the man up, three with ’other’.
Dempsey has gone from the underrated player quietly helping Fulham to a series of good seasons to someone expected to join a big team relatively soon.
The player is not shy about his ambitions: he’s about as determined a person as has ever kicked a football, and if he can test himself against the best he wants to do that. If it doesn’t happen he’ll continue to do his thing for Fulham. So far, so fair enough. But how good is he? Are the recent improvements for real?
Few players seem to prosper after leaving Craven Cottage for what they think will be better things, but few players have been much like Clint Dempsey. He arrived in January 2007, purchased on the quiet by Chris Coleman to little fanfare. Excitement grew a little when we looked at his highlight reel on YouTube, which revealed a player who seemed to have a particular aptitude for anticipating where a ball might end up, then putting himself there, then diverting it into the net. Such gifts are rare in football and perhaps suggested that we might have a player on our hands.
Trouble was, having spotted this rough diamond, Coleman didn’t use it. Dempsey made a few substitute appearances, usually on the wing, and looked a bit disorientated. Only when Coleman was sacked and Lawrie Sanchez came in did Dempsey get regular pitch time, and indeed, he saved our season with a typically scuffed goal at home to Liverpool, his first for the club and probably the most important.
Sanchez used him as a centre-forward, but the club’s next manager, Roy Hodgson, wasn’t quite sure what to do with him, ultimately settling on a left wing cutting in type role that Dempsey took to surprisingly well. In retrospect Dempsey may have felt his wings being clipped slightly by Hodgson’s team-first approach, but equally it seems reasonable to assume that this was a key stage in the player’s development, making him more rounded and aware, a better team player. The real lift off came when Mark Hughes took over from Hodgson and Fulham took the handbrake off slightly: Hughes clearly liked what he saw and Dempsey was pretty much the first name on the teamsheet. Martin Jol took over from Hughes and Dempsey didn’t stop scoring. His goals sequence, in short:
That’s where we are now.
But what’s behind this improvement?
First, Dempsey seems to have stopped wasting his shots:
Over time he’s dramatically decreased the proportion of shots that we might term ‘not close’ and at the same time put more on target. This fits with what our eyes told us: Dempsey, like Cristiano Ronaldo, is never afraid to shoot, but under Hodgson seemed to learn to stop just blasting the thing whenever he felt like it. He has started to give the ball a welly again, but now the skills match the ambition and he’s not just providing people at the back of the Hammersmith End with a souvenir.
(and if it’s a souvenir you want, your best chance is just before half-time; half of Clint’s shots in the 5 minutes before half-time are classified as ‘not close’ – after the break he’s a lot more sensible).
These numbers perhaps reflect his roving around the pitch. Here’s where he’s taking his shots from by the same time periods:
Interesting how, in the last ten minutes, he finds himself shooting from the right a lot more. When the going gets tough, Clint gets moving.
I mentioned souvenirs at the back of the Hammersmith End, but really I should have talked about the corners. Here are the percentage of Dempsey’s shots that we might classify as ‘miles wide’. Now, this is interesting in so far as there’s a fairly well established trend below, which suddenly comes to an end last season, at which point the goals total increased dramatically. Is this a real technical improvement or a one-off fluke? Hard to say.
But these trends do more or less equate to the proportion of Dempsey’s shots that have been from outside the box:
The two bars above aren’t mutually exclusive: on the one hand we have shots from outside the box (red); on the other we have shots taken from a loooong way outside the box (blue). Calming down on the latter has been particularly helpful to him and to his team, although he did put 58% of long shots on target last season.
With experience and responsibility has come excellence. Dempsey has undoubtedly improved as a footballer, an improvement that has coincided with him being managed by more attacking managers (the assumption might be that in committing more players to attacks our opponents are spread more thinly and our forwards are getting better chances). We’ve reached a point where Dempsey is on a par with Hangeland and Murphy as the team’s most important players, and while Murphy devises Fulham’s attacks, it is invariably Dempsey who determines whether or not they succeed. He’s a big player now, and is surely good enough for a big team.
Other fun facts: Dempsey has taken 15 shots against Arsenal, with 10 being ‘not close’. But against Chelsea 14 of his 19 shots have been on target.
Mousa Dembele has created a remarkable 22 chances for Dempsey in the last two years, and he’s put 16 of these chances on target. But none have gone in.
This year 41% of his goals came from shots hit low and to the left of the goal. That’s 7 of Dempsey’s 17 goals.
In September 2007 Clint Dempsey latched onto a loose ball and steered it left-footed into the Wigan net. The away crowd, jubilant, sang of the scorer: “He scores with his left, he scores with his riiiiight, that boy Clint Dempsey, makes Drogba look [censored]”.
And so it proved. Dempsey has now scored 50 times for Fulham (six against Wigan): 10 with his left; 25 with his riiiight, 12 with his head and, entirely summing the man up, three with ’other’.
Dempsey has gone from the underrated player quietly helping Fulham to a series of good seasons to someone expected to join a big team relatively soon.
The player is not shy about his ambitions: he’s about as determined a person as has ever kicked a football, and if he can test himself against the best he wants to do that. If it doesn’t happen he’ll continue to do his thing for Fulham. So far, so fair enough. But how good is he? Are the recent improvements for real?
Few players seem to prosper after leaving Craven Cottage for what they think will be better things, but few players have been much like Clint Dempsey. He arrived in January 2007, purchased on the quiet by Chris Coleman to little fanfare. Excitement grew a little when we looked at his highlight reel on YouTube, which revealed a player who seemed to have a particular aptitude for anticipating where a ball might end up, then putting himself there, then diverting it into the net. Such gifts are rare in football and perhaps suggested that we might have a player on our hands.
Trouble was, having spotted this rough diamond, Coleman didn’t use it. Dempsey made a few substitute appearances, usually on the wing, and looked a bit disorientated. Only when Coleman was sacked and Lawrie Sanchez came in did Dempsey get regular pitch time, and indeed, he saved our season with a typically scuffed goal at home to Liverpool, his first for the club and probably the most important.
Sanchez used him as a centre-forward, but the club’s next manager, Roy Hodgson, wasn’t quite sure what to do with him, ultimately settling on a left wing cutting in type role that Dempsey took to surprisingly well. In retrospect Dempsey may have felt his wings being clipped slightly by Hodgson’s team-first approach, but equally it seems reasonable to assume that this was a key stage in the player’s development, making him more rounded and aware, a better team player. The real lift off came when Mark Hughes took over from Hodgson and Fulham took the handbrake off slightly: Hughes clearly liked what he saw and Dempsey was pretty much the first name on the teamsheet. Martin Jol took over from Hughes and Dempsey didn’t stop scoring. His goals sequence, in short:
That’s where we are now.
But what’s behind this improvement?
First, Dempsey seems to have stopped wasting his shots:
Over time he’s dramatically decreased the proportion of shots that we might term ‘not close’ and at the same time put more on target. This fits with what our eyes told us: Dempsey, like Cristiano Ronaldo, is never afraid to shoot, but under Hodgson seemed to learn to stop just blasting the thing whenever he felt like it. He has started to give the ball a welly again, but now the skills match the ambition and he’s not just providing people at the back of the Hammersmith End with a souvenir.
(and if it’s a souvenir you want, your best chance is just before half-time; half of Clint’s shots in the 5 minutes before half-time are classified as ‘not close’ – after the break he’s a lot more sensible).
These numbers perhaps reflect his roving around the pitch. Here’s where he’s taking his shots from by the same time periods:
Interesting how, in the last ten minutes, he finds himself shooting from the right a lot more. When the going gets tough, Clint gets moving.
I mentioned souvenirs at the back of the Hammersmith End, but really I should have talked about the corners. Here are the percentage of Dempsey’s shots that we might classify as ‘miles wide’. Now, this is interesting in so far as there’s a fairly well established trend below, which suddenly comes to an end last season, at which point the goals total increased dramatically. Is this a real technical improvement or a one-off fluke? Hard to say.
But these trends do more or less equate to the proportion of Dempsey’s shots that have been from outside the box:
The two bars above aren’t mutually exclusive: on the one hand we have shots from outside the box (red); on the other we have shots taken from a loooong way outside the box (blue). Calming down on the latter has been particularly helpful to him and to his team, although he did put 58% of long shots on target last season.
With experience and responsibility has come excellence. Dempsey has undoubtedly improved as a footballer, an improvement that has coincided with him being managed by more attacking managers (the assumption might be that in committing more players to attacks our opponents are spread more thinly and our forwards are getting better chances). We’ve reached a point where Dempsey is on a par with Hangeland and Murphy as the team’s most important players, and while Murphy devises Fulham’s attacks, it is invariably Dempsey who determines whether or not they succeed. He’s a big player now, and is surely good enough for a big team.
Other fun facts: Dempsey has taken 15 shots against Arsenal, with 10 being ‘not close’. But against Chelsea 14 of his 19 shots have been on target.
Mousa Dembele has created a remarkable 22 chances for Dempsey in the last two years, and he’s put 16 of these chances on target. But none have gone in.
This year 41% of his goals came from shots hit low and to the left of the goal. That’s 7 of Dempsey’s 17 goals.
We're over spending by 2 million. Can't we make it 2 million + Adam?
It would be a bit too much for me, but not so bad, I could live with it, assuming he's on relatively modest wages.
You mean gap toothed Adam dont you?
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