A Tribute to Andrily Voronin

Hooray!!! Voronin has gone!!!!

I thought this day had come a year and a half ago when the Ukrainian was packed off to Hertha Berlin but this time he has definitely gone. I feel so elated. It is such a relief to know I have seen Andrily Voronin in a Liverpool shirt for the last time.

When Keane was sold a year ago, people questioned whether we had sufficient strength in depth up front. Minus either or both of Torres and Gerrard, our options were Kuyt, Babel and Ngog. Neither Kuyt nor Babel had done enough to convince they could lead the line while Ngog, at that time, looked a million miles away from being ready for the first team. At that time, I thought it would actually be worth having Voronin as an option rather than having no one else as an option.

When Rafa reluctantly brought Voronin back into the squad, having been denied the chance to reinvest the £16m+ he recouped on Keane, I thought it made sense. Of course I hoped Rafa would never need to use the Ukrainian but if ever a need arose, I thought it better to have him to use than not to.

As it turned out, I was wrong.

My Dad actually hit the nail on the head when he said after our away game in Lyon, the team would have been more effective had Rafa played Plessis or Spearing as an extra midfielder or basically any other player anywhere on the pitch instead of including Voronin in the starting XI. Of all Voronin’s inept performances in the Liverpool shirt, Lyon away was probably his worst and his failure to convert a one-on-one right before half time may well have been the difference between us contemplating a Champions League tie against Real Madrid and a Europa League tie against Unirea Urziceni.

Voronin has been so bad this season that actually it would have been better had he not been in the squad at all. Rafa clearly shares this view with retrospect which is why, after the Lyon game, he allowed Voronin to take a holiday and excluded him permanently from his first team plans.

It is some statement when a player actually makes a squad worse by being in it. That is Voronin’s extraordinary legacy.

He was a signing that always felt overpriced despite costing nothing. Whereas players signed on free transfers usually have much higher valuations and are merely free because their contracts have expired, in Voronin’s case, a free transfer was his actual transfer value.

Given that, it is fantastic that Dinamo Moscow have actually been dumb enough to give us some money for taking the player off our hands. A £1.8m profit on Voronin helps reduce the £2.6m loss we took on Andrea Dossena to just -£800K. That is the best thing Voronin has ever done for us!