Liverpool the biggest winners on Manic Monday

by Mike Martin

Some Liverpool fans thought it the end of the world when Kevin Keegan was sold to Hamburg for £500,000 in 1977.  Had Keegan stayed, Kenny Dalglish would probably not have been brought in from Celtic and almost certainly would not be at Anfield now.

After an extraordinary transfer deadline day, there can be no question that the two big winners were Chelsea and Liverpool.  Chelsea have two quality new signings and the knowledge that their owner, Roman Abramovich, has not lost interest after spending £70m, which largely offsets three years of neglect as the Stamford Bridge side saw transfer windows come and go with the squad insufficiently renewed.

Liverpool offloaded a striker out of form, partially through poor fitness but more markedly due to the loss of belief in the club's ability to compete for major honours.  They replaced him with the most talented young centre forward in Europe – and there are some of us who believe Andy Carroll, who matches unstoppable aerial ability with superb control and technique on the ground, will end up being regarded as a more complete striker than Fernando Torres – and used the change to subsidize the purchase of Luis Suárez, the Uruguayan inside forward from Ajax.  Liverpool now don't just have one isolated superstar striker expected to make silk purses out of sows' ears but what looks like a genuinely crafted and cohesive partnership.

The large fee paid for Carroll – at £35m, a record sum paid for a British player – can be explained by Liverpool's sudden abundance of money but shortage of time.  Carroll is not Marco van Basten but he already deserves to be considered several notches above Peter Crouch, whom Liverpool never properly replaced after his departure to Portsmouth in the summer of 2008.  Crouch's three failings – cumbersome movement, a lack of a devastating heading ability and long-range shooting so feeble as to be almost self-parodic – are areas in which Carroll excels.

Torres's Chelsea début is set to be against Liverpool, of all clubs, on Sunday afternoon.  It is fanciful to suggest that the supporters in the away end will throw flowers at the Spaniard but Liverpool got three good seasons out of the striker plus a tidy profit.  To admonish the player for breaking his contract in search of money is hypocritical.  Would they have preferred Torres to stay until he was a free agent and leave for nothing?  Why, furthermore, do they think Torres ever came to Anfield in the first place?  If this were a player driven purely by love of his club, he would still be at Atlético Madrid, the perennial bridesmaids of La Liga to whom he gave a season's service more than could be reasonably asked.

Chelsea should reflect that, although £50m is a massive sum, that price was surely preferable to a deal which would have seen Nicolas Anelka return to Anfield as a makeweight.  A lack of depth was the main flaw of the Stamford Bridge squad in the first half of this season, as well as a lack of youth.  No longer can Chelsea's strikers or defenders regard themselves as undroppable now Torres and David Luiz bring genuine competition for a starting berth.  The biggest clubs, almost by definition, need more players than they really need.