Soccer: The force is with them

It's amazing the difference one poor season can make. Liverpool find themselves with a new manager as well as those much-treasured public commitments to the club which make Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres somehow seem like new signings.

Those names, allied to the arrival of Joe Cole, conjure images of all kinds of thrilling attacking combinations - especially if Roy Hodgson decides to restore Gerrard to his rightful position behind Torres.

Almost as significantly, the pressure seems to be off for a change. Even Jamie Carragher is declaring fourth to be the primary aim and no one is talking about Liverpool as title contenders.

Hodgson actually laughed off those kind of pretensions when Cole raised them in his inaugural press conference. With Roberto Mancini under the blinding spotlight - he asserted that Manchester City can win the league - Anfield finds itself free of the usual introspective pre-season purgatory and that adds to the club's sense of momentum.

Liverpool are also the beneficiaries of some good fixture scheduling. Arsenal at home tonight (NZT) followed by Manchester City away next weekend might not sound like a bed of roses but better Arsenal in August, minus Robin van Persie, at a partisan Anfield full of the joys of the new.

City will be Liverpool's prime challengers for fourth again and are also best met early.

Hodgson, unlike Mancini, is not presiding over strangers. Some need to up their game several notches but this manager has a track record of extracting more from players than we actually knew was there.

He seems to have taken to Lucas Leiva, pre-season stand-in captain, while Glen Johnson, poor value for £18m ($40m) last time, might be less absent defensively given the new manager's obsessions about good team shape. Nobody really knows if Alberto Aquilani has the qualities Rafael Benitez believed were there.

Hodgson, incidentally, has impressed hugely ahead of the battle. His assertion last week that the big players must look in the mirror and question themselves, rather than blame the travails of the club for their own failures, was an important one. It allows for no excuses.

But the manager still needs to reinforce. He badly needs another striker because David Ngog cannot be expected to carry such a weight as he did in Torres's absence last season.

A left-back is another must because Fabio Aurelio will surely not make it through the rigours of a full campaign.

But don't forget that this forgotten club have a partnership, in Gerrard and Torres, that only 17 months ago was tearing Real Madrid and Manchester United asunder in the space of a fortnight. If those two maintain fitness, and Hodgson stops local expectation running wild as it always does, his side will be some force.

- INDEPENDENT