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Fernando Torres skips past Standard Liege’s Mohamed Sarr but there were few signs last night that Rafa Benitez’s re-arranged side would be knocking at the door of the Premier League title or the later stages of the Champions League. There are good odds on Sunderland grabbing some points off them in the late fixture on Saturday too which suddenly look attractive. The £20 million Robbie Keane was substituted. Steven Gerrard was not fit enough for the 90 minutes although he added some fizz when he came on. Pepe Rainer saved a penalty and the Belgians made most of the running. Benitez’s seemingly thwarted desire to bring in Gareth Barry from Aston Villa suddenly seemed an inspired thought because this was a team without inspiration lobbing long balls up to Torres. As the TV commentary said: where was Peter Crouch? Maybe Benitez is on borrowed time, saved over the years by his luck and the sublime spirt of Gerrard. On last night’s display Tottenham could well fancy their chances of finishing above them in the league. Unlike Sir Alex Ferguson Benitez’s spending seems increasingly to be a churn without yielding real quality. A baffling selection of unknowns, promising kids who might develop better at another club where they could get first team football and only Torres as his real star buy. Torres is favourite to be top goalscorer thisyear, but who is going to provide the service?

Waving the flag - Rafa Benitez introduces Robbie Keane to Anfield

Goals win titles, but whether Robbie Keane is the missing part in the Rafa Benitez jigsaw puzzle remains to be proven. On paper Keane might score 20 goals a season, albeit so might anyone else alongside Fernando Torres. But in fact the best he managed in six years at Spurs was 16 goals in a season. Keane is also a robust player not dissimilar to Dirk Kuyt who impressed for Holland in the the Uefa European Championships. If the on/off saga of Gareth Barry’s move from Aston Villa goes through, then the summer would have seen a significant change in the Benitez thinking, opting for proven pushy Premier League performers or little known younger players he can groom. Last week he also picked up the promising French talent David Ngog who may pop in a few goals too although he might be better employed as far as the Kop is concerned creating them.

Strangely goals were not Liverpool’s major issue last season. They had the same goal difference as Chelsea who finished 11 points clear. They only scored four less than Arsenal. Admittedly they were 19 goals short on Manchester United but that was because United were showboating while Liverpool were scrapping. They are still 7/1 this morning to win the premiership.

Liverpool open the season away to Sunderland where Roy Keane has also been shipping in some proven top flight experience in the shape of Bolton’s El-Hadji Douf, the Tottenham pair Teemu Tianio and Pascal Chimbonda with more to come. Liverpool are 3/4 to win at the Stadium of Light in the late kick off on August 16. It is games like these that Liverpool need to win to get into contention but historically in recent seasons they have been slow starters.

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White hart Lane.

One thing is probably for sure is that whatever shuffle Juande Ramos is thinking about with his £50 million that he could pick up by selling Dimitar Berbatov to Manchester United and Robbie Keane to Liverpool, one name not on his team sheet for next season will  be the £800,000 teenager John Bostock that Spurs bought from Crystal Palace.

Suddenly Ramos finds himself in the thick of football’s increasingly vapid moral debate. At one end selling Berbatov to Manchester United is tantamount to saying that Tottenham cannot keep up with the big four.…..

Berbatov like Gianfranco Zola was at Chelsea and Dennis Bergkamp at Arsenal is a talismanic player. You cannot sell him to the opposition without ripping the heart out of the club whatever the price. Fans pay to see great players and Totenham are the losers whoever they bring in. To sell the loyal Keane too is a double wound. The big money boys at Sky and the BBC of course don’t care where they play. The cameras can move. But a fan is not going to swap shirts. He may abandon the game first.

Another argument of course is that Alex Ferguson is probably right in his judgement that Berbatov can make United that much stronger which is to every other team’s disadvantage. And while it is fashionable to point the money bags finger at Chelsea, Ferguson himself is not exactly frugal in his purchases with a team that was bought for more than £100 million and some. Nor has Rafa Benitez been a skinflint in the trabnsafer market but giving him Keane to partner Fernando Torres is also a bit like saying that Ramos is not interested in fourth place either.

At the other end of the conveyor belt, the disaffected Palace chairman Simon Jordan points out that £800,000 is not a lot for a teenage England Under 17 prodigy, not enough at least to justify and encourage smaller clubs to run feeder training academies for youngsters on the basis that every once in a while one of them will be good enough to cammand the kind of fee that could make talent spotting, training and community effort more than an exercise in charity.

Fabio Capello has inherited an English team in disarray – we won’t discuss the merits of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland – and which can hardly be helped when big clubs follow the movement of labour and prefer to buy, like Arsenal, from Marseille than from Mansfield.

Bostock, the Blackfriars schoolboy who made his debut as a second-half substitute against Watford, added his name to a list of 34 players, including Matthew Etherington, Peter Lorimer and Neil McNab, who have made their competitive debuts for a professional team under the age of 16. He is quick and could have been a hurdler but also academic and might have gone to university. There have been professional footbalers who have done both. Teenage tennis players manage it by distance learning.

“Bostock will not just be a good player? He can be a great player. He has a good left foot and that makes him easy on the eye, he is a good size, can run all day, pass short and pass long,” said former Palace manager Peter Taylor.

“When he first started training with the first team he would take three touches of the ball, but I encouraged him to watch Gareth Barry and Cesc Fabregas; they take one and still they never lose it.”

Bostock probably should have stayed at Palace for another season where at least under Neil Warnock he could have expected first team football and a bit of a clattering from Championship halfbacks. But football’s problem is that it will inevitably blame the boy, not itself. England’s problem is that Ramos is a Spaniard and will probably compound the malaise. Spurs are 64/1 against winning the league. As they don’t even know their team at the moment, that looks short odds, indeed. The moneymen of course though know the balance in the bank. An A side ticket on the Upper West Stand is £75. That’s a lot of money to pay not watching a teenage prodigy or one of the most elegant centre forwards in Europe.

Robbie Fowler joins up with Paul Ince at Blackburn which is an interesting one, although Blackburn might be 15/1 against relegation which could be a good bet, even if a bit depressing for a bright young English manager…Peter Crouch’s much heralded move from Liverpool to Portsmouth where he teams up with Jermaine Defoe looks another shrewd Harry Redknapp move and probably securing their contention in the top half of the table and maybe even a Uefa possibility. Portsmouth are a romantic 500/1 against winning the Premiership but stranger things have happened. Who won the FA Cup last year anyway? And goals is what you need and those two could score 20 apiece next season. Meanwhile Anfield welcomes the Swiss defender Philipp Degen on a free. The much injured full back arrives after three years in the Bundesliga Borussa Dortmund. Also arriving is Andrea Dossena , a stopper with 63 appearances for Udinese who finished sixth in Serie A last year and his perfromances against the top flight clubs impressed.  Plus also there is Steven Gerrard’s new pal Gareth Barry from Aston Villa, which looks like Rafa Benitez accepting that for Premiership football an English style midfield may be more effective tha silky Spanish skills. None of these three set the pulse racing the way a move for David Villa to partner Fernando Torres up front might. But Benitez this week ruled out such a move. It looks like more tinkering round the edges and another season of missed opportunity perhaps for the Reds. They are 1000/1 against relegation and 8/1 to grab that elusive title.  Gareth Southgate has signed the former sprinter and Dutch Under 17 international winger Marvin Emnes who scored eight goals for Sparta Rotterdam.  Southgate has also bagged Paris defender Didier Digard who will have endeared himself by turning down Newcastle and saying that club looked in a mess.  Middlesbrough are 8/1 to be relegated which is the same odds as Liverpool for the title,  neither of which look likely. West Bromwich Albion have bought the promising 21-year-old defender Gianni Zuiverloon turning down other clubs he said because he liked the Baggy style. West Brom are another team in the relegation odds mix but at 2/1, that looks a bad bet.  Another interesting move will be Steve Sidwell to Aston Villa. Can Martin O’Neill regenerate the career of the former Reading midfielder who was eclipsed in the Chelsea galaxy?  Similar questions will be asked at the Emirates where the long saga of Samir Nasri’s departure from Marseilles was completed for an undisclosed fee while Alexander Hleb looks set for the Deco role in the Barca midfield for £15million. There is also speculation that Marseilles fans are planning to have a £22 million whip round to get Didier Drogba back from Chelsea.

Each time that Rafa Benitez gets his ducks nicely in a row then that Scotsman, that Portugese, that Frenchman comes along and spoils it. And this year there is another Spaniard in town with Juande Ramos at Spurs. Each time Benetiz says he needs more money but the squabbling Americans umm and err over the cash. His great success was Fernando Torres, but he probably needs more class and the cash for David Villa would be a tantalising proposition. The trouble is the money men seem more interested in building the new Stanley Park stadium about which they now talk as if it is a leading edge football team. It could well be the world’s first 4-3-3 architectural build.

But Benitez has often bought strangely and there are conundrums to his management style. Peter Crouch is surely the foremost shock tactic attacker in the league and should be brought on with a winger to feed him on 75 minutes in every game and yet the rumours say he will be sold which could make Portsmouth with Jermain Defoe a force to be reckoned with. And then there is Steven Gerrard, to some England and Liverpool’s footballer of a generation, albeit his trophy cabinet is more naked than www.sapphicerotica.com. Is he the disrupting force that stops the others from playing? The solution of playing him up front as Torres strike partner also changes the complexion of the team.

Dirk Kuyt played tirelessly for Holland at Euro 2008 on the right and obviously would rise to the kind of fast end to end movement that Van Basten believed in rather than the slow slow Spanish style push and shove. And where in this mix does the luring of Gareth Barry from Aston Villa quite fit, unless it be to free Gerrard even more?

The Anfield faithful believes it is entitled to the Premiership title again. They are 7/1 The Anfield faithful believes that they can be champions of Euope again. The odds are 14/1. On Saturday August 16 they open the campaign at Sunderland, for once perhaps they can get off to the kind of start they need and not be looking up the table from mid September onwards. Roy Keane may have other ideas.

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