For me, we always aspire to be the best. Yes that might be my naïve Liverpool supporter for life mindset or it might be optimism, call it what you want.

It definitely cannot be anything similar to the continued moaning, the never ending BR out nonsense and downright pathetic negativity by the thousand posts a minute poster on here.

The game against Tottenham showed our progress made under BR from the first game. It also showed just how good the returning England players are Downing, Henderson and Carrol included.

Do not get me wrong I am not saying that BR will be the new messiah but he seems to know what he want his players to do and how he want them to play. It is glaringly obvious that Liverpool will be bold this year as Steven Gerard said a couple of days ago.
Liverpool will play the BR way from the start of the season which for us is August 2.

What was obvious last night and during pre-season:
- The young players are eager to impress and we have a number of them
- The shackles will be off and we will take the game to other teams
- Players we have are talented and will prosper when they are allowed to express themselves
- We will no longer play restrictive one dimensional football with tactical naivety
- Other teams will have to adapt to play against us
- BR showed his tactical awareness and adaptability and that bodes well for the future
- Time will tell just how far we can progress

It is also obvious that we need an injection of new blood players hungry to be successful without silly Man City / Chelsea wage demands. These players will have to be willing to learn and adapt and must trust BR to be able to do that. We do not need egos and pre Madonna’s. We do not need to plash silly money on hype. We now need to be more ruthless than ever to reach our goals to excel as Liverpool Football Club and show the world what we are made of. We not a bloody top four team our aim should always be the Premiere League title, the Champions League and lastly the other cups on offer. Why? Because we are Liverpool FC!

Well said. If you listen to some on here you'd think we'll be relegated. The negativity is way to much. I'm under no illusions that we'll win the league but we'll do better than most think.

+1 Lelle. If you listen to the negativity you'd be led to believe that we have not a scrap of talent in our squad. Nothing could be further from the truth. This season will be a difficult one, not just because of a change of system and manager, not just because of our difficult first 5 fixtures, not just because Suarez is at the Olympics (the last Olympic Games really hurt the early season matches of our players who attended), not just because we may struggle to gel for another six months, and not just because we may or may not sign more players.

It will be difficult because we are Liverpool. But who we are should make it worth fighting for, and if we improve week on week the results become easier. I'm not so worried about how we start this season - I'm much more interested in how we finish, both in terms of our league position and in the quality of our football. You can play well and lose, but if you're playing well you won't lose as often, and as soon as you start to believe you can't lose then anything becomes possible.

surely it should'nt be too hard to do better than last season, dont think we should be looking at that as some sort of strenghth, we were an utter disgrace last season.

your positivity is contagious

We were a disgrace last season I think the worst I have ever seen including the Souness era. But we definetly in witb a chance of fourth spot Arsenal are our main rivals I think we can see off Spurs and Newscastle and Everton are not in the equation for me. They overachieved as much as wse underachieved. I also think we have some good youngsters coming through and a few will be knocking on the door this season.

Charlie Adam...Liability.

Naughty challenge on Bale in papers today AVB up in arms about it

stanley player for player there is nothing between us and Everton, you only have to look at the last 3 seasons to see how close we are so it's nothing to do with us having a bad season. I am also very suprised that you so easily write of Newcastle and Spurs who for me have both got teams with better players than us, Newcastle in the attacking sense and Spurs in there first 11 and squad. I think under Brendan Rogers we can improve as we surely could'nt get any worse but for me this season is all about steadying the ship, we need to stabilise before we look to progress and hopefuly this will be done as the season progresses, to suggest Arsenal are our main rivals is in my opinion foolhardy, we need to be targeting Everton and Newcastle in the next two seasons before anyone else.

I understand what you're saying, but don't think it's that bad.

We should certainly be targetting the top 4. That sends a message to the manager and players, current and future, that that's where the club expects to be. Anything less than that is not acceptable BUT that's not to say that it will result in a sacking.

Hence I agree with Stanley that we should be regarding Arsenal, Spurs, Newcastle and maybe even Chealsea, as our likely nearest rivals.

Everton should be our measure at the other end. i.e. if we're not comfortably clear of Everton then I'd consider that to be a very poor outcome. That's not being disrespectful to Everton. It's just a recognition that we have significantly more resources than them and therefore if we can't pull clear of them then there's definitely something wrong with our setup.