I honestly think that the situation is made out to be much more dire than it actually is. The midfield is indeed a shambles, but if this is fixed in the summer then we still have the best backline in the country as far as I'm concerned (although I think we will need to buy a CB, ideally this summer) and a very good and promising front line with Jota, Diaz, Nunez, Salah, Elliott, Gakpo, Doak and probably Bobby for another year.
The full-backs issue is not going to be solved until we go back to dominating possession because our full-back looking this poor or as good as they usually look is a direct byproduct of the way we play (in addition to their talent of course). I have no doubt that if tomorrow we were to go back to having an effective press and win back the ball high up the pitch and pile pressure on teams the way we usually do then TAA immediately goes back to being considered the best RB in the world. In short, the only thing we can do at the moment would be to plug in a player that will defend much more than TAA and Robbo do, but this is counterproductive to the system we play and hence illogical unless you are willing to just change the way we play altogether (which is pretty much impossible).
Moral of the story is that we need at least a couple of top class midfielders with one of them inevitably being a very high energy box to box swiss knife type of player.
I personally would also look to sell one of Gomez or Matip in the summer and move for Josko Gvardiol from Leipzig which would be a two birds one stone type of situation where you cash in on one of those two and up the quality (and also reduce the average age in your backline if Matip is the one being let go of). The lad is big, fast, strong, versatile and is rarely out with an injury. Best of all is he is a big Liverpool fan and stated more than once that he dreams of playing for us.
With Ox, Keita, Milner and Adrian all coming off the wage bill this summer and possibly a further 2 or 3 other players leaving either on permanent or loan deals (Phillips and Kelleher both come to mind) I definitely expect us to compete both on the transfers fees aspect of the window as well as the wages one. The primary target will be the midfield, but like I said above, failure to secure a quality CB (ideally with some versatility in him) will spell danger of finding ourselves in the same mess we are in with our midfield but next season or the one after because Matip is back to being very injury prone, Gomez is no stranger to long-term injuries and its becoming increasingly clear that Konate is not as injury free as VVD is. It's all good when only one of them gets injured at a time, but it quickly becomes a problem when we lose a couple.
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