And the hunt begins!

WANTED: Football manager with extensive experience, preferably one with the know-how and capabilities of winning the Barclays Premier League and the UEFA Champions League within an unreasonable amount of time. Unbalanced squad with real danger of losing star players. Annual transfer budget of GBP5 million. Manager must also strive towards reducing club debt and possess excellent command of English and Spanish.

The job ad above maybe a work of fiction but Liverpool's board might as well put it up in the classifieds starting this week now that the Anfield outfit has finally parted ways with the seemingly irremovable Rafa Benitez. At a time when signing on new managers has become as expensive as signing footballers, Liverpool's board couldn't have picked a better time to give Benitez the boot.

While the Reds would never have been able to afford the likes of Jose Mourinho, the club's precarious financial state would make it next to impossible to appoint someone like Guus Hiddink, Frank Rijkaard, Roy Hodgson and Martin O'Neill. Compounding the matter is the fact that should either one of these coaches choose to move to Anfield, they face the prospect of trying to restore glory to a club on the verge of losing its stars and with a transfer budget of GBP5 million. In other words, unless things look up on the financial horizon, the odds of any of these gentlemen making the move to Liverpool this summer is as likely as the Reds winning the Champions League next season.

As such, if current conditions continue, only a manager with a deep connection to the club will be willing to take the job. As you might have guessed, the biggest candidate for that job would be "King" Kenny Dalglish. And some fairy tale it would be should Dalglish - the last manager to guide the Reds to a league title - end Liverpool's title drought. But can Dalglish rediscover his winning ways of the 80s considering the fact that he's been absent from the game for almost a decade?

Remember how the Geordies kept fantasizing of the return of Kevin Keegan to Newcastle and when the former Liverpool legend eventually replaced Sam Allardyce at St James Park, it became pretty obvious that his three-year absence from the league before rejoining the Magpies was just too long a hiatus. And if three years could have done that to Keegan, what's to say Dalglish' absence from the game wouldn't turn out the same?

Speaking of Keegan, why hasn't he been considered by the so-called pundits? Keegan has just as much as a bond with club and seeing as to how he's been in the game a little more frequent that Dalglish has over the past 10 years, who's to say Keegan wouldn't be a success at Liverpool? And wouldn't he just "luv it" it if he could snatch title number 19 from right under Sir Alex Ferguson's nose?