When Dejan Lovren signed for Liverpool in the summer of 2014, he was arriving off the back of an impressive first season in England with Southampton.
The Croatian international represented his country in the World Cup in Brazil and was tipped by many to be a big hit at Anfield, replacing fan favourite Daniel Agger at the heart of the Liverpool defence.
However, the centre back was far from impressive in his first six months at Liverpool and came under very heavy criticism for his poor performances.
A long spell out of the side took the big money signing out of the spotlight before Mamadou Sakho's injury meant that Brendan Rodgers would be forced to bring Lovren back into the starting line up. Recently the defender has started to show glimpses of the quality player that was so highly praised at Southampton last season, but does Dejan Lovren still have a future at Liverpool?
One of the things that a lot of people brought attention to upon Lovren's arrival was the side of defence that he was more comfortable playing on. Despite being a naturally right footed player, Lovren had spent the vast majority of his career playing as a left centre back at both Lyon and Southampton.
This raised immediate question marks over the possibility of a partnership being formed with Liverpool's other big money centre back, Mamadou Sakho. Sakho - who is naturally left footed - was left out of the team for the first few months of the season to allow for Lovren to play on the left of Martin Skrtel. With Skrtel yet to sign a new contract at Liverpool, they could be about to lose their strongest right centre back.
Unless Brendan Rodgers plans on delving back into the market and spending a large fee on a centre back for what will be the 3rd summer in a row, he will need to find a way to make the Lovren and Sakho partnership work. With a combined price tag of just under £40 million and both players still to reach the real peak years of their careers, you would imagine that there is room for this pairing to blossom should Lovren get used to playing as a right sided centre back.
The main problem with Lovren this season however was not the side of the defence he was played, but instead his continual inability to do his job; defend. When you pay £20 million for a centre back with Champions League and World Cup experience you expect them to at least do the basics of their role with some sort of conviction. For the first few months of the season, Lovren looked so far from a top quality defender it was astounding.
Gradually, as the season has gone on, Dejan has started to settle a bit and win back the belief of some of the many fans who wrote him off very early on. He clearly is a defender with a lot of quality and to be fair to Lovren, when he was going through his rough patch he was playing in what was a very poor defence all round which has was being chopped and changed on a near-weekly basis.
If Rodgers can next season find a settled back four - or three if that's what he likes - then there is no reason why Dejan Lovren shouldn't become an integral able to be a part of it.
2014/15 can't really go down as a success for Liverpool Football Club in many ways at all, so it is hardly surprising that the newest recruits are the ones under heavy fire from critics.
Dejan Lovren more than any other summer signing has taken a lot of flack, and rightly so at times. However, still aged just 25, the defender has a long career left ahead of him and easily has the skillset to prove his worth as a quality defender for Liverpool for years to come.
If he can finish this season with more of the positive performances that he's shown in the past couple of matches, and then continue to do so in what will hopefully be a much more successful 2015/16 campaign then maybe we can all forget about his first 6 months - and that penalty in Besiktas.
