Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers believes his team will be ready to challenge for the Premier League title next season.
Rodgers has been criticised in recent weeks as his side have dropped off the pace in the race to qualify for next season's Champions League, with Liverpool also beaten in the FA Cup semifinal against Aston Villa at Wembley.
Yet the manager who led Liverpool to a second-place finish in last season's Premier League is convinced his team will get back to that kind of level when the next campaign commences in August.
In a daily newspaper briefing ahead of his side's game against Hull on Tuesday, Rodgers was asked whether his side could be title challengers next term.
"Absolutely," he said, in quotes appearing in several outlets. "We have great hope we can really push on again. I have absolutely no doubt it will happen.
"It will be a big summer for us to find the right type of player that can come in and do that. Then we can go and work how we've worked for a lot of the last 18 months.
"I'm as hungry as I've ever been. I'm ambitious to win and there is no greater place than here to win. I am still committed to doing that here."
The 25th anniversary of Liverpool's last English title success will pass on Tuesday, with some of the club's supporters fearing the long wait for an end to that drought is set to continue for a few years yet after the setbacks of this season, and yet Rodgers remains upbeat.
"Of course it's been disappointing not to have had a challenge [for the title], but when I came in here that was a long way off," he added. "The club was eighth and you'd never have even talked about it.
"It's a mark of how the club has moved forward that there's such disappointment we weren't challenging this year, but you can't just accept it.
"I think it's something you have to continue to fight. We have to continue to find ways to develop players and find a way to break that."
Liverpool had 74 points to their credit at the same stage of last season, but they head into the game against Hull with just 58 collected from their first 33 games this time around.