This is the Blood Red podcast from the Liverpool Echo, giving you the inside track on all the big talking points from Anfield.

Hello everybody. Welcome to the Blood Red podcast on this gloriously sunny day in Liverpool City Centre. Two out of three of us have got shorts on. I'm going to let you decide who that is later on. We're joined obviously by Paul Gorset Ian Doyle and Mark Jones. I just forget to say that bit, but I am Mark Jones hosting today. And we are reacting to the end of the season. The season is over. Liverpool finished their Premier League season with a one-old draw against Brentford on Sunday, obviously a few more storylines that were emerging from that

rather than just a result. But we'll start with that. It's over. Ian, the season is finished.

Yeah. Liverpool have qualified for the Champions League by finishing fifth. And that's the end of

that. It's all done. It is done. Let's not talk about the season again. Yeah, we have to.

Kind of, yeah. But we've done, we don't really need to talk about Salon Robertson, we have to? Kind of, yeah.

But we don't really need to talk about Salon Robertson, let's be honest.

That's been done.

That was a story of yesterday, obviously, but in terms of, we will come on to them, sorry,

but just looking at the table, the table doesn't lie, as they famously say.

That means there's only 14s better than Liverpool in the league. Four teams better than Liverpool, which sums up the league, perhaps, pretty well. One of them won the Europa League and the other one probably going to win the Champions League, so, and one of them hardly played any games. And Liverpool was the best. And the other one won the two domestic cups. Yeah. So they're great then. yeah what everyone worried about they've tried supporting chelsea yeah yeah well they come 10th um

liverpool come fifth it's done where do they i mean ultimately securing that champions league

plays was the thing that that became the the goal in feels like a long time ago now, doesn't it, when the league was gone? So they've done that.

They've done it. Is it just draw around to that now and move on? Yes and no. The no, the yes bit because it was so bad that they can just go, right, that's it, done. Don't really need to look back at that anymore. There's no point looking back at it.

And, you know, anything that they'll have learned from it, they'll have already learned,

but they've not been able to act on it.

And now is the time when they're going to be able to act on stuff that they've learned,

which has a bit of an obvious thing to say, but this is the truth, isn't it?

Can't assign any players unless it's the summer. You know, they knew certain players were leaving. They've gone now, so they can now have a long time to prepare for what they knew was coming. And the only uncertainty was that in terms of the planning was the Champions League. They couldn't really crack on, I think, with signing certain players,

unless they had that secured. And now they have. So it will be interested to see what happens over the next couple of weeks because we know the World Cup's come in and that's going to be a big distraction for a lot of players. Although there are still, even though there's like 97 countries who qualified, there's still a lot that haven't. There's still a lot that apart from Wales, sorry. There's still a lot that haven't, which means that their players will be available for talks, this, that and the other. But, yeah, my view is that I would expect some movement in the next couple of weeks, certainly before the tournament starts, because we want to get on to all of these things canarty alice and people like that

they've got futures that need to be resolved to a certain degree certainly canarty does yeah um

but yeah overall that's what liverpool have to look ahead now that's to anything they can do and

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