Roy Hodgson has inherited a bit of a mess at Liverpool, but the arrival of Joe Cole and the news that stars including Steven Gerrard, Dirk Kuyt, Pepe Reina and Daniel Agger are all happy to stay suggests he's doing something right.

He's also been fairly ruthless in clearing out the underperformers, with Emiliano Insua, Philipp Degen, Albert Rieira and co all heading out. For Tim Rich, writing in the Independent, Hodgson has started well by keeping Gerrard and signing Cole and clearing out Benitez's dead wood.

The Anfield boot room, where championships were once plotted, now serves as Liverpool's press room and sometimes Rafael Benitez would point to the pictures on the wall. They showed the team that won Liverpool the European Cup in Istanbul and Benitez would gesture towards the photographs and remark that most of these footballers, the ones he inherited from Gérard Houllier, were not very good. "I wonder how we ever won it," he would say.

The squad Benitez left behind is considerably better than the one he inherited from Houllier but Roy Hodgson knew it needed breaking up and rebuilding. With his half-a-dozen languages and his studied, professorial air, Liverpool's new manager may be the nearest thing to an English Arsène Wenger, but he has begun his first month in office with a deft ruthlessness.

A manager's first signing sets the tone. In his first summer Benitez brought in four Spaniards – one of whom, Xabi Alonso, was exceptional – and allowed Michael Owen and Danny Murphy, products of Liverpool's once flourishing academy, to move on.

Persuading Joe Cole to leave London was an invigorating move. He may have been a free agent but he was a name who did not require a Google search or a subscription to Marca and when he talked of Liverpool being the "biggest club in the world" or recalling the European Cup semi-final in 2005 "when the atmosphere made the hair on the back of my neck stand up" he talked the Kop's language. Curiously, recreating 'atmosphere' in what has been a dispirited dressing room is a word Hodgson uses a lot. More importantly, Cole secured Steven Gerrard's future. The Liverpool captain had not enjoyed last season and he had seldom enjoyed working with Benitez. At 30, he has one move left and did not give his commitment to Anfield immediately after Hodgson's appointment. Liverpool's shortlist to find a successor to Benitez was sufficiently weak for Kenny Dalglish to suggest himself as the new manager. Gerrard would wait and see, although he did not have to wait too long. If there is a photograph that sums up Liverpool's summer it is the one of England team-mates Cole and Gerrard grinning as they cycle beside each other at the club's training camp in Switzerland.

He continues:

Frankly, it would be hard for anyone at Anfield to deny Gabriel Milito's assertion that: "It is unrealistic of Liverpool to think they can keep hold of [Mascherano] when they can't even offer him Champions League football and are not close to challenging Chelsea or Manchester United for the title." As for Fernando Torres, nobody really knows. Perhaps the biggest factor in Liverpool's favour is that there are very few clubs that could raise the fee for the striker.

Perhaps that is why there was a realism about Hodgson as he prepared for his first game, against Grasshoppers Zurich, last night. "It is not going to be an overnight thing," he told the club's website. "I don't want to dupe the Liverpool public by telling them that everything is rosy because Joe Cole has signed. There is a lot more to be done and many more players needed."