🚨 EOTK Insider with Neil Jones: Signing Summerville over Bakayoko makes more sense, the young LFC star who could save Reds a fortune, January window latest and much more!

Join Neil Jones for his weekly column with EOTK Insider, exploring all the latest and greatest transfer and news stories around Liverpool Football Club

[From left to right: Goncalo Inacio, Crysencio Summerville and Jarell Quansah]

Hello and welcome to my column with Empire of the Kop! You can read about all the latest updates around Liverpool Football Club and its forays into the transfer market right here, every week, with EOTK Insider. Thanks for giving this a read and let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Today’s top stories:

• Why signing Crysencio Summerville would make more sense than Johan Bakayoko

• Why Ibrahima Konate is attracting comparisons to John Terry and Jamie Carragher…

• And further updates on Michael Olise, Goncalo Inacio, Trent Alexander-Arnold and more!

Arsenal review

Full credit to Liverpool as a team. To go back to the league meeting between Liverpool and Arsenal when they came away with a 1-1 draw, I don’t think many conclusions were drawn, but if you were hedging your bets at that stage I think some might have said it was a better result for Arsenal and that they looked in slightly better shape all-round after getting a decent point at Anfield. But you look at what’s happened since and it shows that those conclusions are premature. Liverpool are getting stronger as the season goes, which is what we were hoping for and what we were talking about earlier in the season whilst wondering if everything was going to click. The evidence is starting to mount that Liverpool are turning into a serious team - they’re already a serious team having only lost once domestically since April. They’re top of the Premier League, are favourites for the Europa League, in the semi-final of the Carabao Cup, and have just knocked out one of the big guns in the FA Cup without the captain, without their first two left-backs, without Joel Matip, without Mo Salah, and without Wataru Endo who has become so crucial in recent weeks. Everything is pointing in a good direction.

Mo Salah has since jetted off to participate in the AFCON - (Photo by Jan Kruger/Getty Images)

In the Arsenal game yesterday, they were under fire, especially in the first 20 minutes. They’ve got this tendency against Liverpool to start really quickly and they’ve carried out this way in the last few meetings; they did it at Anfield in December, last season at Anfield, and scored inside a minute at the Emirates in the league game last season. The game I would compare it to is the first one in the last calendar year against Brentford where Liverpool just weren’t able to cope with that kind of assault. They just wouldn’t have been capable of getting back into a game like that, regaining their composure, putting their foot on the ball and working the game out. It’s very different now and I thought that, once Liverpool got through that first 15-20 minutes, they were the better and most dangerous side which was always, for me, in the second-half (despite Arsenal carrying a threat) the more likely to go on and win it, and so it proved!

My seat in the press box was quite close to the away end (and a huge away end at that with more than 7,000 fans). Anyone who tells you the FA Cup doesn’t matter or it’s low down on the list of priorities needs to watch the scenes when that first goal went in. I tell you, it was one of those where I was very glad to be there.