In Milner and Ings, Liverpool, ‘desperate to be defiantly different’ finally adopt some conventional sense

Richard Jolly writes that after all of Liverpool's outside-the-box thinking has failed, with the signings of James Milner and Danny Ings perhaps their 'new gimmick will be to adopt orthodoxy'.

Brendan Rodgers and Liverpool finished sixth in the Premier League this season. Glyn Kirk / AFP

Ruthlessness can be cloaked in gentility. Liverpool's principal owner John W Henry appears the most urbane of men but Fenway Sports Group's four-and-a-half year reign at Anfield has been notable for sudden, seemingly brutal bloodlettings.

There was the “the night of the long knives”, as some branded it, in 2012 when director of football Damien Comolli and doctor Peter Brukner were sacked. Within a few weeks, communications director Ian Cotton and then manager Kenny Dalglish followed them out the door.

Perhaps, then, the search is on to find the appropriate piece of cutlery to mention in connection with Friday’s events at Anfield. Exit assistant manager Colin Pascoe and first-team coach Mike Marsh after another season of underachievement. If Pascoe seemed too much of a yes-man to manager Brendan Rodgers, Marsh may have been too independent-minded. The only common denominator was that ambitions went unrealised and therefore something had to change.

Maybe it is the inevitable consequence of annual reviews at a club where strategic thinking appears to influence every decision. Analysis is essential, but Liverpool’s seems complicated by policies and principles, factions and philosophies.

They have had buzzwords and bright ideas: Moneyball, death by football. They seem desperate to be defiantly different, which makes them appear revolutionaries when it works but leads to charges that they are trying, and failing, to reinvent the wheel when it does not. Perhaps that is the result of having owners without a background in the sport and a manager who, deprived of a playing career, had to take an alternative route to the top.

Whichever, Liverpool’s has been an ongoing quest for a formula. Few seem as in thrall to the idea that there is a blueprint for success, rather than old-fashioned principles such as simply signing good players to fill a vacancy in the side.

As it happens, they have done that in bringing in first James Milner and then Danny Ings over the past week. These are transfers that suggest a belated return of common sense in the corridors of power at Anfield. They also represent two coups for Liverpool, and not just because the Manchester City midfielder and the Burnley forward were out of contract; these were players some of their rivals wanted.

Yet the temptation is to wonder if deals were influenced by dogma. That, after the failure of their attempts to identify and polish young gems from abroad, they have now gone back to buying British, the plan that backfired when Dalglish tried it.

Last year's disastrous £117 million (Dh659m) spending spree could be divided between Rodgers's preference for proven Premier League players – the Southampton trio of Adam Lallana, Rickie Lambert and Dejan Lovren – and FSG's ventures into the overseas market. Both failed.

Now Rodgers, while losing an ally in the dugout, seems empowered in the transfer market. Liverpool have bid for a fourth Southampton player, Nathaniel Clyne, suggesting they have finally found a suitable target at St Mary’s. They are interested in Aston Villa’s Christian Benteke, who has a track record of scoring in England’s top flight.

Perhaps Liverpool’s new gimmick will be to adopt orthodoxy. The early start to their transfer business suggests they may be planning to do something as radical as deploying players in their preferred positions.

Last season saw midfielders in the centre of defence and wingers either at wing-backs or pretending to be strikers. It reached an embarrassing end – together, perhaps, with the conclusion of that particular project – when the lightweight duo of Lallana and Philippe Coutinho played as twin false No 9s in the 6-1 defeat to Stoke City. Now Ings’s arrival, along with that of Divock Origi after a year’s loan at Lille and, potentially, Benteke, suggests a return to selecting strikers.

As Liverpool’s latest revamp continues, they could do with a defensive coach, or indeed a better defence. Sadly, though, that seems far too prosaic to be their next grand scheme.

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