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• Sunderland’s Anton Ferdinand set for medical at QPR
• Stoke agree fee with Birmingham for Cameron Jerome
• Liverpool midfielder Christian Poulsen signs for Evian

QPR have agreed a fee with Sunderland for their 26-year-old defender Anton Ferdinand.

Ferdinand, the younger brother of the Manchester United and England centre-back Rio, moved to the north-east for a reported fee of £8m three years ago from West Ham. He is now set to undergo a medical and discuss personal terms with the Premier League newcomers in London.

Birmingham City have agreed an undisclosed fee with Stoke City for their striker Cameron Jerome. Jerome is now expected to hold talks at the Britannia Stadium over the move, with a fee likely to be in the region of £4m. Birmingham rejected a £3m bid from Fulham for the 25-year-old earlier in the summer window.

Birmingham’s Scott Dann, meanwhile, is holding talks with Blackburn Rovers, though a fee is yet to be agreed. The Blackburn manager, Steve Kean, worked with the former Coventry defender during his time as assistant manager to Chris Coleman at the Ricoh Arena.

The Liverpool midfielder Christian Poulsen has joined French club Evian. The Denmark international struggled to make an impression at Anfield after signing for £4.5m from Juventus last summer.

St Etienne have completed the signing of the Ivory Coast international Max Gradel from Leeds United on a four-year deal. Gradel, 23, had handed in a transfer request in the hope of pushing through a return to French football where he started his career as a youngster at Championnet Sport.

St Etienne’s coach, Christophe Galtier, said: “[He is] very versatile, able to play on all fronts of the attack and will bring qualities of impact and finishing.”

Transfer windowQPRStoke CitySunderlandBirmingham CityBlackburn RoversLeeds UnitedLiverpoolSt Etienneguardian.co.uk

• Manager seeks patience from players after Stoke defeat
• ‘I’m a 38-to-55-game-a-season-man’ he says

Roy Hodgson has called on his Liverpool players to resist “doubting what we are doing” following Saturday’s 2-0 defeat to Stoke City. The Anfield club had recovered well in recent weeks after a slow start to the season but came unstuck once again over the weekend, with the loss at the Britannia Stadium their fifth in the Premier League already.

“I don’t see why it [the defeat] should give us enormous reason to doubt what we are doing or doubt what we are capable of doing,” Hodgson told the club’s official website. “I don’t expect this result to dent confidence any more than any bad result does or any end to a good run dents your confidence. We are talking about two or three games in a season. I find it hard to have to explain that every time you win a game things are flying forward and when you get a bad result they are flying backwards.

“I’m a 38-to-55-game-a-season man and I make my judgment over that period. I don’t get euphoric when we play well against Chelsea and I certainly won’t become anything other than realistic and determined to move on to the next step when we lose a game. The conclusions that are being attempted to be drawn are too big conclusions.”

The international break will frustrate Hodgson’s bid to work with his players over the next few days, but he remains confident he will get it right: “All you can do is work, but unfortunately we won’t have a lot of chance to work as some players are going away with their national team. The longer we work together the more the players become attuned to what we want from them.” Liverpool’s next game is at home to West Ham this Saturday.

Roy HodgsonLiverpoolPremier Leagueguardian.co.uk

Someone has to do something about unease at the club of Shankly, Paisley and Dalglish

Rafael Benítez forced a smile afterwards but his customary touchline pantomime – the dissatisfied grimaces, the dismissive shrugs, the odd little shapes he makes with his hands – had carried an extra edge of exasperation and frustration during Saturday’s match. A man accustomed to scrutiny during his five years on Merseyside is now seriously on trial.

If it is indeed true, as a few newspapers reported yesterday, that Tom Hicks Sr and George Gillett have finally managed to identify a Middle Eastern investor willing to fork out £100m in exchange for a 25% holding in Liverpool FC, then the US owners’ undeserved stroke of luck would enable them to prioritise the removal of what is coming to appear the biggest obstruction to the club’s progress. With a proportion of that new money – perhaps £20m, but almost certainly rather less after the lawyers had done their talking – they would be able to pay up the 4½ years remaining on Benítez’s contract and send their manager on his way.

Liverpool’s travelling fans cheered Benítez off the field on Saturday, at the end of a game in which Stoke City snatched a draw with a late equaliser. This was not a genuine salute as much as a sign of defiance aimed partly against the Potters’ supporters, who had consistently managed to drown the noise coming from the away end, but mostly at an outside world which is looking at the club and seeing only the signs of a sudden decline with serious long-term implications.

There can be little doubt that the wrong people are in charge at Anfield, which makes it hard to be optimistic that the right decisions will be taken. Somebody, however, has to do something about what is going on in the name of the club of Shankly, Paisley and Dalglish, where Benítez’s haphazard recruitment policy and cut-and-paste method of selection seem inadequate to meet the challenge presented by the prospect of a barren season.

The unease was underlined by the debut of the winger Maximiliano Rodríguez, a useful Argentina international in his time but now, at 29, seemingly fallen far from the highest standards of his seven years in La Liga and apparently picked up by Benítez at no cost, with no guarantee that he will do any better than the dismal parade of wingers who have trooped in and out of Anfield during the last five years. The failure of so many of Benítez’s mid-level acquisitions to leave a mark on the club reinforces the suspicion that, unlike several Premier League managers with more limited resources at their disposal, he takes moderately gifted players and makes them worse.

In Benítez’s opinion the Britannia Stadium is not the place for a Premier League debut, so Rodríguez was left on the bench until the 78th minute. His first contribution was to barge into Salif Diao in the centre circle, his second to overhit a through ball for Dirk Kuyt, his third and last to make such a cumbersome job of controlling a fine pass from Alberto Aquilani that he was easily dispossessed.

Aquilani himself had not appeared until the 88th minute, omitted from the starting line-up because Benítez feared the effects of playing 120 minutes against Reading in midweek. The £20m Italian began the season with an injury, but this was another example of Benítez’s sometimes bizarre attitude to his players. Given the chronic absence of creativity caused by the departure of Xabi Alonso, the Italian should be starting games at every possible opportunity, even if he cannot complete them. In his few minutes against Stoke, a couple of measured passes on the counter-attack gave a glimpse of what his team-mates had been missing.

Should half a season of poor performances be enough to invalidate Liverpool’s second place in the Premier League last season, not to mention the previous successes under his aegis in the European and FA Cups, and to override patience? The case for the prosecution is hard to dispute when Benítez’s side play with so little coherence, and attempts to defuse the sense of crisis by pointing to the absences of Steven Gerrard, Fernando Torres and Yossi Benayoun are not persuasive.

For several weeks earlier this season Manchester United lost not one but two complete defences. Arsenal have been coping without Robin van