IT was almost as if Rafa Benitez had been there before. Earlier this week, the Liverpool manager felt compelled to explain the reasons for the £17million he shelled out to bring in a right-back.
”Sometimes you have to spend a little bit more,” admitted the Liverpool boss following his capture of Glen Johnson from Portsmouth, confirmed last night when the 24-year-old signed a four-year deal. “You can’t compete in the top four of the Premier League unless you spend some money.”
Spoken with the calm assurance and matter-of-fact reasoning of someone completely at ease with smashing the club record fee for a defender.
As the Spaniard should be by now, of course. He currently has four players on his books who, at the time of purchase, were the costliest defenders in Anfield history.
The one thing that sets Johnson apart from Daniel Agger, Martin Skrtel and Andrea Dossena, however, is the amount he beat the previous record by.
With the best part of £10million being added on to the former highest price, that was paid to Udinese for Italian left-back Dossena last summer, the pressure on both Johnson and Benitez has been raised a fair few notches.
And yet that situation is nothing new in L4 history.
It was 15 years ago that Roy Evans not only broke the club transfer record – as well as the bank – on defenders twice in the space of two days, he almost beat the British mark too.
John Scales came from Wimbledon for £3.5million followed swiftly by Phil Babb from Coventry for £100,000 more.
It was only weeks earlier that the British record was set at £4million by Chris Sutton’s move from Blackburn to Norwich CIty, while Babb’s fee was the same amount his Irish team-mate Roy Keane had gone for a year earlier when moving form Nottingham Forest to Manchester United.
And Evans had deemed both his new centre-backs to be more expensive than Alan Shearer, whose market value at that time might have been rising rapidly, but only cost £3.3m when he left Southampton for Blackburn in 1992.
Evans’s gamble didn’t pay off and one League Cup was all he had to show for his four years in charge, in which he failed to re-establish Liverpool’s domestic dominance.
But there are examples which should give Johnson considerably more heart.
