All Leagues, EPL, England, Europe, Features, Ian John, Leagues, Regions POSTS

Benitez to take the Roman road to revive Liverpool’s flagging season?

Published by Ian John on November 12, 2009

It is all very odd isn’t it at the moment as regards transfers. The way things are with the window being closed for large portions of the season, does give rise to some of the most frenzied speculation that perhaps you only used to see occur during those long summer months without a World Cup or European Championships to tide us over and where the only solace for the bereft sports hack was to fill the back page with “HARRY SET TO SIGN MARADONA!” because he heard a bloke in a pub think it was a good idea that Dave Bassett should sign Diego Maradona to play alongside Vinny Jones at Wimbledon.

However today I chanced upon the news that Liverpool boss Rafa Benitez has reportedly shown interest in Tottenham striker Roman Pavlyuchenko. Yes him, Roman of the flagging confidence and ‘psychological problems’. Quite how these issues will be alleviated in coming to Liverpool at the moment is quite beyond my ability to grasp, but as fantastical as this story may seem, I actually think that Benitez, for once may have picked the right man for the job.

Pavlyuchenko’s main gripe at Tottenham is that, given Harry Redknapp’s predilection for signing strikers, he is currently something like 367th choice striker, falling behind Harry’s office filing cabinet and just in front of Mrs Redknapp’s euphonium. With the World Cup coming up, Pavlyuchenko wants to play and unfortunately Redknapp cannot offer the out of sorts striker the frequency of games that he would like. Of course at Liverpool, where the current strike force consists of Fernando Torres whizzing around in his wheelchair and David Ngog failing to understand the concept of gravity not to mention Andriy Voronin, a player so bad it makes Liverpool fans harken for the glory days of Sean Dundee, Pavlyuchenko would be Liverpool’s second striker and given the news that Torres faces three months of rehabilitation on his groin injury (a move which I fear may well end in tears for both player, club and country), one would assume that the Russian would see a lot of the action he so craves.

I wrote a piece a while back about Pavlyuchenko and in doing a little research of the player, I viewed a couple of you tube videos mainly from his time in Russia. When you see them, it is hard to imagine that he is the same player who seems to be struggling at Tottenham now. In the video (which I have linked to here in this paragraph) Pavlyuchenko shows absolutely first class abilities in front of goal. He reminds me very much of a young Andriy Shevchenko. Watch this to see what you think.

As such, I think this would be an excellent move for all concerned. I think Liverpool would get a quality striker they badly need, Tottenham would offload a hefty wage and receive some money for Harry to spend on his next thirty four transfer targets for the week and Pavlyuchenko would get the opportunities at first team level that he craves and needs in order to stake a claim to travel to South Africa in the summer, should Russia qualify from the European play offs.

A good deal all round? What do you think?

Image Courtesy of ***Alexander Mysyakin*** on Flickr.com
Video Courtesy of ***globalPREVED*** on Youtube.com

Readers Rating: