From the outside, at least, Liverpool Football Club is in a holding pattern, a theoretical construct that may or may not field a "squad" to compete in various English and European footballing "competitions" in the coming season and that at present exists primarily as a vehicle for endless whisper, rumour, and speculation.

When Liverpool won the League Cup in the midst of their worst run of form in the League in over half a century, the topic of exactly what would constitute a successful season for the club began to come up. With a second chance at silverware on the horizon and any chance of Champions League qualification miles back in the rearview mirror, the question seems more relevant than ever.

If one had made a list before the season began, ticking off the players most important in determining the success or failure of Liverpool's campaign, most would have gone through the same five names: Pepe Reina, Daniel Agger, Lucas Leiva, Steven Gerrard, and Luis Suarez. Of those five, three are injured and one is horribly off-form as the club head into their most important league match of the season against an Arsenal side seven points ahead in fourth place but with Liverpool holding a game in hand.

It seems as though every week we say it all over again: The next three games could decide whether Liverpool have a chance of making this at times infuriatingly uneven season a successful one in the end. And this time around we mean it. At least as long as Liverpool come out with three wins signifying advancement to the FA Cup quarter-finals, their first trophy in six years, and victory over a rival for fourth that could conceivably see them one point out of a Champions League spot.

In our last poll, we asked whether the club needed to sign a striker, winger, attacking midfielder, or holding midfielder in the transfer window to shore up one of the areas of weakness that had become apparent over the course of the 2011-12 season. An overwhelming majority of nearly 70% said that what the club needed more than anything was a striker, while 17% said winger, 8% said attacking midfielder, and only 5% said holding midfielder.

As exciting a name for the future as Joao Teixeira might be, most would agree he isn't going to make a difference when it comes to where Liverpool finishes this season. On the other hand, when it comes to just what the biggest shortcoming of this Liverpool squad is—the biggest thing holding them back—very few seem to agree on anything.

With Lucas out for the rest of the season and Steven Gerrard out until January at the very earliest, Liverpool and Kenny Dalglish face an extended run with their two best midfielders sidelined. The club reacted by recalling Jonjo Shelvey on Wednesday, though few expect he's returning to regular starting minutes at Liverpool despite his success on loan with Blackpool, and even fewer would see him as a direct replacement for Lucas in any case.

We've talked before about the FA's unfortunate scheduling of Liverpool's next two matches to satisfy Sky Sports, giving them the week's biggest game on Sunday for their prime slot and leaving both Liverpool and Manchester City to play their League Cup quarter final draws two days later later on Tuesday evening.

In our last poll, we asked if it was important for Liverpool to include at least one traditional winger in its Plan A, first choice starting eleven. It could mean continuing with Stewart Downing, or it could mean searching for another option in future transfer windows, and it wouldn't preclude alternate approaches based on opponent and form, but on the whole readers overwhelmingly felt that having a traditional winger as part of the club's preferred approach was important to the tune of 66.

We need a proper winger! came the constant refrain. Kuyt may have been a lock on the right for years, and before him Steven Gerrard may have had his best statistical season cutting in from the flank, but neither was a proper winger. Meanwhile on the left, be it Babel or Benayoun or Garcia, it seemed a role largely filled by default, a place to dump an extra creative player who couldn't quite manage to get a game anywhere else.

Fabio Aurelio is always injured and Liverpool will never have a fit and talented left back. At least that's how it began to seem as year after year the Brazilian would struggle through countless injuries while a revolving door spat out failed would-be replacements. Right back, on the other hand, always seemed fairly settled, and with the acquisition of Glen Johnson and the emergence of Martin Kelly in recent seasons, the question most often asked was how the club was going to manage to fit in two players who would be safe bets to start week in and week out for most other Premier League sides.

With all the talk in recent weeks of who needs to start, who deserves to start, and what the priorities should be when it comes to deciding who needs and deserves to start, it seemed like the perfect time for last week's poll to find who Liverpool Offside readers thought was the club's most underrated player.

As last season moved along, a fairly strong consensus formed: Lucas Leiva was the most underrated player on the squad, and quite possibly the most underrated player in the league. Opinion, though, can shift, and by the end of the season he was the consensus player of the year for his club, a starter in midfield for his country, and had won over many of his former critics as the top tackler across Europe's five biggest leagues.

Is the only criteria that matters that the club now appears to have owners who aren't interested in bleeding it dry? How much of a damper does the last minute sucker punch of Meireles to Chelsea alter things? And are you too deliriously happy that Philipp Degen is finally gone to think straight?

Certainly the club went hard for their targets early on—Henderson, Adam, and Downing—but opinion on the particular costs and merits of each of the trio remains somewhat less than universal.

With preseason done and Liverpool's new midfield signings all having seen a fair bit of action, the focus shifts to the forthcoming season and questions of just how the club is going to fit everybody in as what looks set to be the deepest midfield in years faces a more limited schedule without European competition for the fist time in a decade.

Player of the season. It's the final poll. The last question. The end to our attempts at gathering together with fellow bloggers, fans, followers, and supporters to look back at some of the best and worst of the 20010-11 Liverpool season. And let's be honest: This one was never going to be close.

Along with Flop of the Season, the results of which will run tomorrow afternoon on Paisley Gates, Worst Loss represents what seems like something of a bygone era of the 2010-2011 season. Like those least impressive on an individual basis, none of the nominees here had anything to do with the second half of the season and are best left banished to the corners of your mind where you keep the memories of your failed attempts at combining hip hop and exercise.

Today we wrap up the polls with a fantastic guest post by nate of Oh You Beauty.

After a week of this nonsense, I reckon yet another introduction's unnecessary. Don't worry, there's only one more week left. On Monday, we'll start revealing the results, starting with Young Player of the Season on Oh You Beauty.

Today's post is courtesy of Sam from Anfield Asylum.

Once again my cheerful nature leads me to tackle a wonderful subject, this time about just which player wasted the most time and money we'll never get back. The fact that there are so many contenders for this award on Liverpool alone this season lets you know just how bad it was at times.

Today's guest post was written steven. of Paisley Gates fame. Also, today will be a little different as four new polls will be running simultaneously on the four participating blogs. So along with voting here, please head to Oh You Beauty to vote on Worst Loss, Paisley Gates to vote on the Performance of the Season, and Anfield Asylum to vote on the Goal of the Season.

This is a guest post from Nathan, aka. Grubb, former regular commenter here and current contributor to Paisley Gates. While you're around, don't forget to take part in yesterday's Young Player of the Season poll.

One of my least favourite football phrases, guaranteed to make my teeth grind, is the age-old chestnut about football being "a game of two halves.

Liverpool's final standing in the table may not be mathematically decided quite yet, but with Sunday's loss to Spurs, the club moves into the uncomfortable position of needing to rely on others if they are to have any chance of improving their final standing. Still, it's been a heck of a ride, this rollercoaster of a year that's gone from fears of relegation and administration to dreams of Champions League qualification and future glory, and with the end at hand and Liverpool having moved as high as they'll be able to manage on their own it seemed fitting to gather together with some of the best regularly updated Liverpool blogs on the net for a season ending extravaganza, one that will take the next two weeks to look back at of some of the year's best and worst.

A simple question in the poll this week: which competition do you want to see Liverpool put more effort into as the season approaches its final quarter?

Previously, talk was that Liverpool's only route back to Europe was to win the Europa League, but current form has them for the time safe in sixth and with an extremely slim chance of wrangling fourth.

Polls polls polls, poley poley polls, I love polls...

No, wait, that could be taken the wrong way. Unless it being taken the wrong way doubles our traffic. Because I'm a real whore when it comes to hits...

Wait, no, that sounds pretty bad, too.

There's been a lot of discussion lately about Liverpool's use of a three man defence in the past two matches, and so perhaps it's been easy to forget, but up until Stoke there was a clear preference for four defenders in a 4-3-3. There's room for both systems, of course, but over the course of a season a side will tend to have a primary system something that suits them best, and that they can use to impose their style of play on most opponents when either the level of the opponent and some special threat don't require a radical change of approach.

Is it too late to start a poll on which Liverpool player gets the first yellow card for a foul on Torres? Or how long it takes before he mopes when a call doesn't go his way? Nevermind. But hey, speaking of polls (woo!

The transfer window's winding down already, though it feels like just yesterday Liverpool was getting hammered by Wolves at home and I was writing poor Conrad knock-offs to cope with Hodgson's continuing employment. But back to the transfer window, and today's poll question: If you could force one transfer through, at which position does the squad most need strengthening if it is to move up the table and see success in Europe?