Joe Cole

It's the middle of July, so you should expect nothing other than blind optimism ahead of the new football season. You'll get a fair smattering of it here, tempered with the usual caution that you need as a Liverpool fan, following the announcement today that the club have signed Joe Cole.

For nothing. Yes, that's a bargain, but it's also indicative of the financial mess that the club is in at the moment. Who knows what or how they are paying Cole, but for now all there is to consider is the fact that he is at least 20 times better than Dirk Kuyt. Tempering that though is the fact that I myself am around 18 times better than the Dutchman, for whom trapping bags of cement is not on the agenda.

Four years ago I would have really been enthused by the signing of Cole. Although I once referred to him as a playground footballer, useful only for fancy tricks and falling over, he has proved at Chelsea that he can actually play a little. A fit Joe Cole was one of the myriad of things that the England team was missing so badly during their pathetic World Cup campaign in South Africa. Make no mistake, Cole has pedigree. But he also has injury.

The former West Ham man missed most of last season through injury (splinters in his arse presumably) and was called upon very sparingly by Fabio Capello as a result. Yet at his peak he was a player who could be genuinely creative, go past people and score goals. Ironically, his record of scoring goals for Chelsea against Liverpool is fairly prolific, and they always seemed to be winning goals. Jose Mourinho rated him, so I'm not going to go against that.

And yet I can't shake the feeling that all is not well. Chelsea boss Carlo Ancelotti claims that Cole's Stamford Bridge departure was all about money, while Tottenham's failure to sign the player is mysterious given their new found Champions League status. He wouldn't even have had to move house to jump on Harry's bandwagon. Manchester United were linked and then pulled out very publicly, while Arsenal were never more than window shoppers.

So why didn't any of these clubs sign him? Is Cole another of those 'lifelong' Reds that we seem to collect every couple of years, only to find that they actually supported Celtic all along? Or is it that his injury problems are worse than we thought, moving all other rivals for his signature to reach for their barge-poles? Will it be another season on the physio's table alongside Fernando and Stevie Me? Let's hope not, but you fear the worst, don't you?

For now though, we can dream of a brighter future. A future in which Cole slots into central midfield at the expense of Lucas Lieiva. Where he ghosts past people for fun in the style of John Barnes in the late 1980's, laying on goals aplenty for a fit-again Torres as Liverpool romp to the dizzy heights of say........third?

It's the middle of July. We can be optimistic.