Apologies for the lack of posting in recent weeks. It has turned out to have been quite a busy time in the transfer market for once in a summer in which the talk appeared to be solely on our failure to sign Gareth Barry.
Our attempts to seal a deal for Barry remain fruitless but we have significantly bolstered our attacking threat which was needed in the light of Peter Crouch's departure. Robbie Keane is an excellent addition. Costly but entirely worth it.
It's come full circle for the boyhood Red. He wisely chose to move to Wolves from humble beginnings at Crumlin United in South Dublin at 15. There he felt first team opportunities would be more readily available than at Anfield where he was also offered an opportunity to join the Academy or youth development scheme as it was then and it was a smart choice.
From Wolves he's been to Coventry, Italy with Inter Milan where managerial circumstances worked against him, Leeds United, Tottenham and now Anfield. In between he's become Ireland's greatest ever goalscorer and captain and been influential in the stop start success at White Hart Lane these past few seasons.
Under Juande Ramos, Spurs fans justifiably believe that they are heading in the right direction and I would have hoped that they and the Spurs board wouldn't begrudge Keane his dream move.
Disappointingly from the board at least this hasn't been the case. Daniel Levy has unnecessarily thrown his toys out of the pram over the whole affair But it smacks of double standards given their dealings with Crystal Palace over John Bostock.
Anyway, Keane will be great for Liverpool and Liverpool will be great for Keane. He's a superb striker, capable of the sublime and will hopefully strike up something great with Torres. Although where that leaves the Gerrard - Torres partnership that worked so brilliantly towards the end of last season I'm not sure. But I am certain Rafa knows what he wants to do with the trio in the long term. It is a long hard season with many games after all.
His intentions for our other striking recruit, David Ngog are less clear. The 19-year-old Frenchman arrived from PSG last week and is apparently ready for the first team but we know little about him.
His record at first team level saw just one goal scored in 20 games last season. Now there are of course mitigating circumstances in all this - his first season at senior level and so on and I'm not going to write him off just because of his goalscoring record.
Benitez believes that he is ready for first team action. With the new seven substitutes rule, I would expect Ngog to come off the bench at least in the beginning with maybe a few starts in Carling Cup games. It will be interesting to see how often he plays and indeed how well he plays.
At the end of the day we've paid just under £2m for an unknown quantity but seemingly quite a talented player and at 19 he will only improve. It's good that he hasn't arrived in a blaze of publicity. That's what happened to fellow Frenchmen Florent Sinama Pongolle and Anthony Le Tallec and we all know what happened there.
With Keane we expect, with Ngog we hope.
Either way it's nice to finally have some serious business done in the transfer window. I'm not pushed about Barry, I'd like to keep Alonso. If Rafa leaves it at that then it's been a good summer's work and we can look forward to the new season with optimism.
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