The entire team must be on the same page regarding the amount of effort they will put in towards winning games for the club (both in training and at match time). It doesn't matter what they cost the club, it doesn't matter what their wages are, and it doesn't matter what their personal ambition is. If everyone is giving 100% the team will be greater than the sum of its parts. But if someone isn't pulling his weight, the team can at best equal the sum of its parts (one of which is not at 100% of it's own capacity).
Take the way our "second" team played in the early Europa Cup games for example. Admittedly we're talking about weaker opposition, but we were quite short in the manager department at the time and most of our top players were not picked. Yet they won 5 in a row, including in Turkey against a hostile crowd where we had 1000 supporters stuck in a cage and were a goal down within minutes of the game starting. Over those games, N'Gog was the unlikely hero. I think that clearly demonstrates what can happen when you have an entire team focussed on exactly one thing. The same can be said of humble Northampton when beating us; they were focussed, they had a plan, while we had neither and didn't deserve to win.
Kenny now is starting to bring the first XI around now, but someone was pulling in the wrong direction. He's gone now, and regardless whether or not our performances will be "better" without him in the short term, in the long term he was always going to be a liability. Therefore we are better placed in the long term given that we've signed two rising stars who are both much younger and hopefully hungrier to do well for Liverpool. Whether as a partnership they can score goals at the same rate as Torres remains to be seen. But I'm hopeful. I've been saying for some time that if we did sign a striker that player should be Carroll (though most of the time I've been saying we needed to sign a winger, and I stand by that), so I'm anxious to see whether I was right.
