Pre-season starts today for Liverpool as the lads return back from their holidays (obviously Euro2008 lads will have longer).

What can we realistically hope for this season ?.

Well personally without get expectations up too high i can not see why a title challenge is not beyond us and like Rafa himself has said if we are in the mix near the end then there is nothing stopping us making a push.

Obviously new top quality players help but even if we were not to sign any players during the summer then i still think we can mount a challenge but the players have to raise their games.

When i look at our team we are extremely strong and only lack strength in the wide areas but even then the players we have there would be more then enough against the majority of the Premier League.

The spine of the team currently is as strong as any in Europe for me. Players such as Reina, Carragher, Agger, Mascherano, Alonso, Gerrard and Torres give us a superb platform to build on and that’s seven players who should be playing week in week out next season.

When you then add to the spine players like Ryan Babel who hopefully thanks to having a season experience of the Premier League under his belt he will push on and instead of been classed as ‘raw talent’ he will start and become more consistent.

If Babel does find that next level in his development he will instantly make us more of a threat upfront.

We witnessed at the end of last season Rafa changing to a 4-2-3-1 formation and this allowed us to go on a very good unbeaten run and hopefully Rafa will continue this into next season and sign any new players around this formation.

We have already signed Degen an attacking full back who not many people have seen much of and the reports on him and our record on free transfers suggest he could be more Voronin then Babbel but as is always the case he will get complete support from me and hopefully he will prove to be a success.

Dossena is another player who will complete his transfer this week after the structure of the deal was sorted out and now he has returned from honeymoon i would expect to see him and Degen alongside Rafa at Melwood holding aloft Liverpool scarfs in the near future.

If there is one thing i hope Rafa has learned from last season it is not to over complicate things and stick with a settled side and a settled formation and allow the lads to go out there and win the games and not to be obsessed with avoiding defeat.

Hopefully this season we will have learnt the lesson of last season on how to kill games off as the draws we suffered cost us a title challenge last season and its important we learn to score the second goal in games we are vastly on top but seem to struggle to finish teams off in.

So start of a new season and hopefully the start of a very successful one.