Heinze's future to be decided in court.

To be honest, just few days ago, I still thought that the liverpool defense looked solid.
From certain point of view, liverpool has one of the most successful defense in EPL. Kop's problem seemed concentrated up front. They created a lot of opportunities but failed to capitalize on most of them, in the end there simply wasn't enough products. However, even with such underperformed offense, Liverpool was 3rd in EPL and 2nd in CL. So judging from the results, Red's defense did quite well.

In the last couple of days, I read up on some different opinions.
After a closer look, to my surprise, I'm now inclined to agree with them on the Heinze issue. £6.8m would be money well spent.

Liverpool's defense is Riise-Agger-Carragher-Finnan backed by Hyypia, Arbeloa, Aurelio and the 2 Argentine, Paletta and Insua. The mainline is good, but Benitiz cannot expect them to play all 70 some games, especially not if he wanted to make a stand in both Premiership and Champion's League.

Hyypia and Arbeloa can rest starters, but if one of the starting 4 gets injured, Red's title hopes would be severely jeopardized if it had to rest in the hands of one of these substitutes. Aurelio and Paletta aren't adjusted to English style and had become reliability issues; Insua on other hand, is still far from starting in EPL.

If Rafael Benitiz could "persuade" ManU to release Heinze, not only will he benefit from having a solid backup in the center, Liverpool will gain a more defensive option on the left as well. Riise is more or less a wingback. It would be safer to have a left fullback on the team since sooner or later they'll encounter opponents that focus on exploiting wing routes. A stay at home type LB would relieve some pressure from Mascherano.

Heinze was doing well in Copa and hesitated to buy out his contract (undetermined to leave ManU? After all, they treated him alright there) . Now he has passed the deadline and Alex Ferguson had said no to Liverpool's £6.8m offer. For ManU, letting Heinze go will not only strengthen their opponent that wants to become a competition for Premiership title, it will severely weaken Red Devil's own defense. Heinze departuring meant Alex Ferguson would have to rely on the undependable Evra for LB while losing backup for Nemanja Vidić.

Bah, another Argentine international in the courtroom...
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Since this article is about defenses in general, it's probably somewhat appropriate a place for complains against the Villarreal backline.

last year our defense was:
starters: Enrique-Cygan-Fuentes-Venta
substututes: Arruabarrena-Alvarez-Josemi
Gonzalo Rod hurt.

Cygan is now 33. Venta 32 soon, Arruabarrena and Alvarez gone, Gonzalo looking forward to miss the whole year...

On paper, we are looking for a CB and a LB that could play CB. In reality we'll have at least 3 more (if the Sol Campbell deal goes through) defender positions need replacements within a year (or year and half). This is not what a UEFA Cup side's defense should look like. And even if we throw european competition away, the league season will turn into shit if one defender gets hurt.

we need at least 3 defenders right now. one can be old, but the other 2 must provide stability for at least 3 or 4 years... What a fucking disaster.

My question is, why we kept wasting money on old people! They might of been cheaper for the time being, but none of these contracts will be profitable in the long run. How much longer are we going to bottom feed like this? Haven't we saved enough money to setup some real investments?

I wanted to really ...
screw my brains out tonight, -
- but I'm not
in any condition to fuck.