Author Topic: Some quality/important posts you may have missed  (Read 768075 times)

Offline Welshred

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #800 on: June 18, 2014, 10:41:57 am »
I've developed a bit of a man-crush on Daniel.

I don't want to fuck him necessarily but I love him and I want him to crawl inside his mind so he can understand me and I can feel what it's like to be inside him.

His skill, his commitment, his style, his attitude, his dance, his swagger, his sense of humour, his morals, his humility, his arrogance, his family, his, character, his loyalty, his charidee work, his comments, his goals, his everything.

Oh, and he's just proved he can bang them in on the worlds biggest stage - In Brazil versus Italy in the World Cup Finals.  That is not a fluke and that is not an everyday occurrence.  Daniel is the real deal.  And he's mine.  Sorry, I mean he's ours!


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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #801 on: June 18, 2014, 11:01:17 am »


Ha ha. That made me look at his other posts. Funny bloke.
"If you want the world to love you don't discuss Middle Eastern politics" Saul Bellow.

Offline Welshred

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #802 on: June 18, 2014, 03:17:11 pm »
Number one... How dare anyone suggest I'm a red cafe cnut. 

Number two... I also post on the guardian, that comment was also mine. I am JeremyHillaryBoobPHD (from the yellow submarine) please check out my posting history there for more utter insanity and flying of the LFC flag.

Number three.... I.m a scouser born and bred.  Living in London.  On my own.  So maybe I'm going a little insane in my alienated state of angry isolation.  Is there a law against that? No.

Anyway, back to Daniel.  I reckon if he hadn't become a footballer he'd probably be a super-hero.  Not in a low-key, sinister Batman sort of way.  Hell no,  This is Daniel.  We're talking balls out (big balls, IMHO) Iron Man style FUCK YEAH I'M DANIEL STURRIDGE super-hero antics.  Or maybe he would have become prime minister.  I'd vote for him, fuck I'd vote for him to finger my bumbumhole with one hand and slap my face with the other.  I sometimes wish I was gay... I'd make a great gay guy and I reckon if Daniel was gay (he's not) me and him would make the perfect couple.  We'd buy a little rustic cottage in the outskirts of Chester, he would run the flower shop that we own and I would stay home baking him cookies and cakes and big joints of meat.  He's insatiable for meat in my fantasy.  Insatiable.
 

:lmao

Offline kavah

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #803 on: June 25, 2014, 01:03:38 pm »
One day there'll be a statue outside Anfield of Suarez biting an opponent. A bit like that one outside the French national stadium of Zidane head-butting the other Italian.

It's hard to know what to think about Tooth-gate. Those people in outright denial that it even happened (a few Reds, all of Uruguay) are clearly a bit mad themselves. Those talking about it as if it's up there with the Armenian genocide as an international atrocity are even madder. I think I read somewhere that Danny Mills believes Luis should be banned from football for ever. The hypocrisy on all sides is breathtaking. Including mine. If it was Rooney who'd done the biting I'd probably be speaking like Danny Mills. So would you. We're all opportunists at heart.

In truth my first reaction was to laugh. Then I thought about it for a bit and laughed again. Then I felt relieved that he wasn't a wearing a Liverpool shirt when it happened. My main concern now is that our club isn't punished for his crime. I couldn't care a damn if Luis misses the rest of the World Cup but what happened in international football should stay in international football.

The bloke's clearly fucking mad of course - at least when he gets on a footy pitch. We all knew that anyway. It's what makes him dangerous, in both senses of the word. I think he probably does need help, although as a Liverpool fan you'd have to fear a little bit that therapy might also tamper with his genius. A gum-shield might be a better idea. It'd be a little bit humiliating at first (like Pennant's ankle tag) but Luis would probably turn it into a status symbol of some kind after a few outings (think of the potential for new goal celebrations). And a gum-shield would allow defenders to concentrate on the game rather than play in fear of the roving incisor.

Then  again, should defenders be totally free of this fear? Here's the hypocrisy again. I sort of think some defenders should be bitten. I especially think Chiellini should be bitten. Anyone who saw the rest of the Uruguay-Italy game will know what I mean (or anyone who knows anything about Italian football, period). The constant kicking at opponents, the feigning of injury when it was in the Italian interest to waste time, the repetitive clutching at his head in order to get an opponent sent off, and even the little dig he gave Luis less than 30 seconds before he got his comeuppance.

Pirlo too was a candidate for a revenge bite. At one point this fraud turned round and gave Suarez a fearful blow with his elbow. The Ref didn't spot it. Commentators did - on the channel I was watching at least - and called it an 'accident'. Pirlo is seen as some kind of Olympian on the field you see. Hypocrisy again.  In a way, when you think about it, it's no accident that Italians were on the receiving end of both Zidane and Suarez's 'interventions'. As a football nation they've probably elevated gamesmanship and cheating to the highest level over the years. Except Borini of course. Oh, and Aquilani when he was at Liverpool.

Someone made the good point earlier that Luis knows he's done wrong. I bet the regret began to sink in at the same time as the teeth. In fact he was so confused and upset by what he'd done that he started clutching his teeth as soon as he did it. It was almost as if he were saying to FIFA, "Please help me. Take these teeth out. They're not mine!" Then of course he cut a disconsolate figure as he left the pitch. He knew what he'd done and he was frightened and ashamed.

I think he's probably got it out of his system now. I always thought he had three bites in him, not just the two. So did a Norwegian fella, according to the Beeb, who just took the bookies to the cleaners with a crafty punt on a Suarez World Cup bite. Well done that man! But though the last Suarez bite was a big one but this is bigger. The globe watched it. It won't go away. The saddest thing for Luis, I think, is that despite the fact that he's done some incredible things on the footy field and will go on to do much more, he'll always be known now as the footballer who bites. Who cares, right? So long as he wins us the League? Well, I'm sure he will. But that's his look out.


Online Robinred

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #804 on: June 28, 2014, 01:54:29 pm »
I don't know how to do this correctly, so I've copied and pasted this, a brilliantly fair-minded, and clearly-argued piece in a thread full of stuff that isn't.

It's not better than doing nothing. Various people seem to be commenting how great the Donal Cusack/Irish Examiner article is (because it's broadly sympathetic to Suarez's problems and critical of the media and FIFA reaction), without actually understanding it's point. Suarez needs help. The article states, quite openly, that Liverpool should not be viewing this as themselves being punished, or victims of a ban which shouldn't have been applied to domestic football.

The only way Suarez can be helped is if he recognises and accepts he has a problem, requests help and actually commits to whatever therapeutic and psychological assistance we can provide.

Pretending that he 'fell' into Chiellini is not helpful. Pretending that the footballing world has an agenda against Uruguay is not helpful. Pretending that this is a grand conspiracy of the English press (vengeance for knocking out England) and FIFA (to distract from corruption criticism, and to remove a dangerous opponent from Brazil's path to the final) is not helpful (and totally nonsensical). The view (repeated several times each page on here) that a bite is less serious than other violent offences is not helpful. It's true, but completely pointless. A bite is perceived differently; and was when the Dutch FA banned him for 7 games in 2010. Or was that an English/FIFA conspiracy, too?

The point of the Cusack article is that Suarez's problems, combined with the pressure put upon him - by us, as much as by Uruguay - need to be addressed and resolved; not for the sake of Suarez getting back on the pitch scoring for Liverpool as quickly as possible (which is all that 90%+ of his 'backers' on this thread care about) but for his own long term wellbeing and mental health.

Work with FIFPro (who have put out an excellent statement). Accept he has a problem. Accept the playing bans, but counter the 'all football activity' ban with a planned therapeutic programme, within his footballing support network. That is what is 'better' for Suarez the human being in the long term, and dare I say, for his football career in the short to medium term. Trivialising his actions ('fell into him/only a nibble'), fighting the ban and getting back to football as quickly as possible - for us, Barcelona or Uruguay - just confirms him as a commodity for the benefit of his employers, piles on the pressure and will, I think, lead to further repetitions (perhaps more serious still) and the implosion of his career entirely.


You'll Never Walk Alone, cited by some for us not abandoning him, doesn't mean we just get him back on the pitch as quickly as possible to score goals while we ignore his issues, either.

"The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology...as long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth." Mikhail Bakunin

royhendo

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #805 on: July 7, 2014, 08:16:24 pm »
Beats the shit out of the Suarez nonsense. :)

Not a season picture, sorry, but I thought it was pretty cool, anyway.

1964.  Bob Paisley and the LFC team on ED SULLIVAN.

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Offline No666

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #806 on: July 12, 2014, 08:21:09 am »
Juan Loco single-handedly elevates a night in the Shite Chat thread:

Just on the idea that Bony didn't score many goals from open play last year. It's not true. It's 12 from 27 starts. If you want to extrapolate that it's just shy of 17 goals over a 38 game season without pens (although we are going to need another good pen taker soon what with Gerrard being 34). The guy's scored 62 goals in 84 games in club football over the last two seasons. It's not like there can be any real doubt over his ability to score goals.

Is his goalscoring rate worse than in the Eredivise? Yes. He was at a goal a game his last season there. Now he's at a goal every two and a quarter games. Suarez's first year and a half in England saw his rate drop to a goal every 2.4 games. Is Bony going to do what Suarez did? Probably not. Suarez is unreal. But if you're going to bring out the tired Eredivise skepticism then at least recognise that Bony's goal record, without pens, is still a marginally better rate than Suarez's when he first came over from there. They're at roughly the same age too. Both came over at 24, Bony about 6 months older.


Is Bony the player I'd target to replace Luis Suarez? Nah. I was hoping we'd use Lambert as the back-up striker and look for someone who can play across the entire front line as part of the Suarez replacement. To be honest, we tried to do that with Sanchez. It failed.

I could sit here and moan about how disappointed I am that we're not going to follow my grand vision for how I want the club to look or some bollocks that I've formulated in my head just from casually watching players and deciding "Oh, he's good, it needs to be him". But why do that? Not going to get any enjoyment out of it and it's not going to change it. Instead I'd rather try and understand why, if we're after Bony, we'd be in for someone like that.

The theory I've got is that Rodgers contingency for Suarez leaving was always looking to be to bring in as many direct goals as possible, and that's probably best done through another, more traditional forward. He's very big on having people "in the areas to score goals". It's got lost in how good Suarez is because when you've got a genius you can dispense with conventional notions and take to building around their gifts instead. Generally though, Rodgers has quite liked number 9s.

But there we are in May. It's reasonably quiet on the Suarez leaving front and we're talking to Southampton and they bring up Lambert. Liverpool know they're going to want to add a forward this summer anyways, think they may be able to hold on to Suarez at this point, so they snap him up. It's good business. An option the squad lacks.

Then Suarez makes it be known that he's off. We're fairly powerless here really. We both went into the new contract knowing we'd get something out of it. A watertight buy-out was his end of the bargain. He's going. It's done as soon as Barca say they'll pay it.

Now we've got the dilemma. First thing we try and do is get Sanchez. He's Suarez-lite. He basically plays the same roles, and you can bring him in and everything looks the same if not quite as sparkly. Can't get it done. Disappointing, but whatever. Now the question rears it's head again:

How do you best replace Suarez?

The original contingency was probably always for the traditional striker type, just because that's what was always likely to get you the most goals. You've bought one already though. You did it when you thought Suarez may stay. Having spent so long talking about liking players with positional flexibility, do you basically want two lads up top who could only ever play for Liverpool as strikers? Probably not, but if you can't get in Sanchez then you're going to have to make a concession somewhere. Do you go Sanchez-lite, if you were only ever going for him because he was Suarez-lite. ... Or do you just go out and buy some goals and do what you probably had in mind were Suarez ever to leave, and acknowledge that the Lambert purchase was just a pleasant bit of impulse buying rather than something the club had a grand plan for before it was brought up.

Once you take out the fanciful suggestions of "let's just go buy Reus!" when the money comes in (yeah, check how many teams have tried that. He's not on the fucking market), do you go back to what I'm going to guess was the original plan - Buy a boss prospect or two with the potential to get to Suarez heights (or Torres at least, I don't think you can bank on someone being one of the top 5 in the world) over the long-term, and a guy who is obviously underwhelming compared to Suarez (they all fucking are), but probably gets you 15 goals+ in the league next season. No, it's not 31 (Suarez wasn't hitting that again next year anyways...), but it's a decent tally all the same.

If we're targeting Bony then I think you can use it as a microcosm of the approach to the window in general. We're doing a pretty even split between players I'd guess we're fairly convinced about what they can do, and players of great potential. This isn't a prem-proven debate, 'cos I think we could sign similar players from anywhere, but I'd think the club is fairly convinced about Lallana, Lovren and, if it happens, Bony's ability to come into this team and be of that standard. I doubt anyone's expecting them to come in and be absolute world beaters, just Joe Allen level players. That's what we as a squad lacked. If we had more players of the right level to be able to come into the team and contribute, and not Aspas' and Moses', we'd have been better off.

The other side of that coin is that Markovic, Can, Moreno if it happens. They all feel like players who could explode into potential superstars, but you're not sure if that's next year or 3 years down the line so you can't buy a whole transfer window worth of them. The way I'd look at it is like this - Ferguson bought Ronaldo in 2003, the next window he buys Louis Saha. You know which signing gets you the most excited, but you need the Saha's too. I'm fairly sure that we think we know what we're getting. Bit uninspiring maybe, but there's a litany of players for them lot that Ferguson signed which we'd find uninspiring if they'd been linked with us, but they did what they were meant to.

Bony as a player? Not entirely sure he's what we need, but with the obvious caveat of GOALS. The biggest thing the way we ended the season wasn't Suarez, or Sturridge. It was the pace we attacked at. That, more than any individual is what was at the core of why we were so devastating. If you acknowledge that football is always getting faster, then no team in the history of English football has ever attacked with the pace that we did last season. We were a whirl wind of quick transitions and amazing fluidity. That to me seems slightly at odds with Wilfried Bony. Suarez was a phantom on the pitch. Impossible to keep track of. Bony's not like that. You can always find Bony. Suarez was guerrilla warfare, Bony's a fucking bouncer. He's right there if you want to step up to him. I'm not saying either way is right or wrong. Drogba was the easiest person for a defender to find on a pitch, you'd never have to look hard for him, but it didn't matter 'cos he was practically impossible to stop. That's not what we were about last season though. Rodgers took to calling his front pair "two 9 and a halves". Bony is a 9. If teams played against our strike force last year then they were reticent to push their fullbacks forward because Suarez or Sturridge were incredibly comfortable at receiving the ball out wide in the empty spaces and trying to encourage the centerbacks to come out wide and engage them. Bony isn't going to do that. He's going to stand within the width of the 18 yard box for most of the game. He does have Suarez's ability to make something out of a fairly nothing ball forward. He can make it stick, but more as a platform for the rest of the team to build from than "shit, Suarez has the ball under control in the opposition half, this could be a goal" any time our front two were left with any odds better than 5-2 in the oppositions half of the pitch.

What you do get with Bony is other options though. I guess he's like a luxury Lambert or Giroud. He can let midfielders get ahead of the ball and into the box. What we didn't do well enough compared to City last year was have midfielders who looked like getting double figures from open play. They'll want that from Lallana you'd think, and his relationship with Lambert was always good so it makes sense to have someone similar to that. Rodgers has targeted this attacking midfielder every summer so far, from Dempsey to Mkhitaryan and no he's got Lallana. He's going to want to get the utmost out of that.

I think what you get with Bony as well is that Rodgers has the genuine option of switching between 4-3-3 and a diamond and it not being a case of "look, Luis/Daniel, these are dead good so maybe just stand on their fullback, yeah?" - for me we were able to do this a fair bit last season because most teams we played against had very, very average fullbacks. What we'd do a fair bit of is put Suarez or Sturridge on the side with the fullback we felt was least likely to hurt us with the ball and just gave them free reign to go forward, because more likely than not, their attack will break down and hey, there's one of Suarez or Sturridge in the oceans of space they left behind. Sturridge did this over and over again to Stones, Suarez did it to Monreal (and then Martinez copied that idea and did the same thing with Lukaku a few weeks later). This is great when we're playing against Monreal and John Stones. We can let one fullback go free. After that we started using the diamond more and letting both opposition fullbacks go free. You know why? 'Cos if you think you fullback is more dangerous on the ball in our half of the pitch than Suarez & Sturridge will be in yours, with all that space, if your attack breaks down, you're crazy.  We saw a bit of foreshadowing of what better teams could do against it when we played Southampton. We won 3-0 'cos we had the more clinical team, but they controlled much of the game until the 2nd came in because they actually had *two* good fullbacks who could hurt us. Against City in the 2nd half you really started to see it coming apart when they were able to constantly overload down our left hand side and our attackers weren't able to totally expose their two centerbacks 1-vs-1. We were going to change formation in that game even before the Sturridge injury. Closing down the flanks was what Rodgers said, I think.

 City to me, would be more representative of going away to a Bayern or a Barcelona with two fullbacks who can hurt you, and playing both up top. It's fine when you're leaving Monreal as the spare man in your half of the field. It's not cool when it's Jordi Alba.

With Bony you'd at least have the issue of knowing he's going to be the #2 striker to Sturridge, so you know if we're playing Bayern away, then we're going Sturridge up top and Sterling and Markovic wide and working their bollocks off. But most games in the league aren't those games. Most games are against dross you just have to swat. With the greatest will in the world, Suarez's season wasn't great 'cos he scored in a lot of huge games. It was great because he scored relentlessly against that dross. So when it comes to a mid-ranking team at home or a way, having that guy you can play and know is a 15+ league guy is good. It also lets you keep Sterling where he was at his most devastating. Towards the end of the year he was the one that was starting to look talismanic for the team. I think around April you were beginning to see the very start of the shift away from a team being built in Suarez's image to one that was going to be built in Sterling's. What happening now is basically pushing that forward whether it's ready or not, when it's probably the latter. Still, you want see as much of Sterling picking that ball up centrally and driving at the backline as much a possible - good striker allows that.


I don't want any of this to sound like I'm pushing to sign Bony, just trying to figure out why we may be interested. I find myself in the weird situation of thinking he's a player good enough for a top 4 team (said he should be Everton's Lukaku replacement, think he should've been #2 or #3 on a list of strikers for Arsenal/Spurs to sign) and that the price of £19m is about right in the current market. I'm just not sure the club is. I get where he fits in to a team who have been playing one up front and like to build off him. That's why Arsenal made total sense. I've got less of a sense of where he fits into a team who spent last year working by having players work across the entire front line. If you take out their respective quality, it kinda feels like Arsenal have the player we should have, and Bony is the player they should have, that upgrade on Giroud. Still, I guess it basically comes down to goals, Bony seems a pretty safe bet to do the goals. Not the Suarez goals, but if you get 15 from him and 10 from Lallana playing well with him then that goes some way towards it. I guess the key question for me is whether he could dovetail well with Sturridge, and whether he's able to play at the pace him and Sterling attack at. They're the key men now. We need to be buying players who can play at that pace. Markovic can, Lallana can. Bony I think there's a question mark over (he's got quicker feet than you'd expect, just about mobility) and it's probably not one you can answer until you see how they'd link up if they ever do. I'm fairly certain he'd score goals, I'm just not sure whether he'd allow everyone else to keep scoring at the same rate.


For 90% of this feel free to replace Bony with Jackson Martinez's name for similar thoughts when that link obviously comes up.

Offline flashman

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #807 on: July 12, 2014, 08:41:23 am »
Brilliant post, thanks.

Offline kavah

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #808 on: July 16, 2014, 05:46:28 pm »
This is outstanding.

I'm at 113 competitive games, need to look at friendlies and pre-season tours sometime  :D

30.09.1969   4 - 0   Dundalk   Oriel Park   EFC 1st round 2nd leg
09.12.1970   1 - 0   Hibernian   Easter Road   EFC 3rd round 1st leg
28.04.1971   0 - 0   Leeds United   Elland Road   EFC Semi-final 2nd leg
25.04.1973   1 - 2   Tottenham   White Hart Lane   UEFA Cup Semi-final 2L
23.05.1973   0 - 2   Gladbach   Bökelberg   UEFA Cup Final 2nd leg
17.09.1975   0 - 1   Hibernian   Easter Road   UEFA Cup 1st round 1L
30.03.1976   1 - 0   Barcelona   Nou Camp   UEFA Cup Semi-final 1st leg
19.05.1976   1 - 1   Bruges   Olympic Stadium   UEFA Cup Final 2nd leg
28.09.1976   5 - 0   Crusaders   Seaview   European Cup 1st R 2nd L
02.03.1977   0 - 1   Saint-Étienne   St. Geoffrey-Guichard   European Cup 3rd R 1st L
06.04.1977   3 - 1   Zurich   Letzigrund stadium   Eur. Cup Semi Final 1st L
25.05.1977   3 - 1   Gladbach   Stadio Olimpico   European Cup Final
01.03.1978   2 - 1   Benfica   Estadio da Luz   European Cup 3rd R 1st L
29.03.1978   1 - 2   Gladbach   Rheinstadion   Eur. Cup Semi Final 1st L
10.05.1978   1 - 0   Bruges   Wembley   European Cup Final
13.09.1978   0 - 2   Nottingham Forest   City Ground   European Cup 1st R 1st L
04.12.1978   1 - 3   Anderlecht   Stade Émile Versé   European Super Cup 1st leg
22.10.1980   1 - 0   Aberdeen   Pittodrie   European Cup 2nd R 1st L
22.04.1981   1 - 1   Bayern Munich   Olympia Stadion   Eur. Cup Semi Final 2nd L
14.09.1982   4 - 1   Dundalk   Oriel Park   European Cup 1st R 1st L
02.11.1983   1 - 0   Athletic Bilbao   San Mames   European Cup 2nd R 2L
07.11.1984   0 - 1   Benfica   Estadio da Luz   European Cup 2nd R 2L
16.01.1985   0 - 2   Juventus   Stadio Communale   European Super Cup
06.03.1985   1 - 1   Austria Vienna   Gerhard Hanappi St.   European Cup 3rd R 1st L
24.04.1985   1 - 0   Panathinaikos   Olympic Stadium   Eur. Cup Semi Final 2nd L
29.05.1985   0 - 1   Juventus   Heysel   European Cup Final
27.11.1991   2 - 0   Swarowski Tirol   Tivoli   UEFA Cup 3rd round 1L
22.10.1992   2 - 4   Spartak Moscow   Central Lenin St.   ECW Cup 2nd round 1L
10.04.1997   0 - 3   Paris St Germain   Parc des Princes   ECW Cup Semi-Final 1L
16.09.1997   2 - 2   Celtic   Celtic Park   UEFA Cup 1st round 1L
21.10.1997   0 - 3   Strasbourg   Stade de la Meinau   UEFA Cup 2nd round 1L
03.11.1998   2 - 2   Valencia   Mestalla   UEFA Cup 2nd round 2L
24.11.1998   1 - 3   Celta Vigo   Estadio Balaidos   UEFA Cup 3rd round 1L
14.09.2000   1 - 0   Rapid Bucharest   Stadionul Giuleşti   UEFA Cup 1st round 1L
23.11.2000   2 - 2   Olympiacos   OAKA   UEFA Cup 3rd round 1L
15.02.2001   2 - 0   Roma   Stadio Olimpico   UEFA Cup 4th round 1L
08.03.2001   0 - 0   Porto   Estadio Das Antas   UEFA Cup 5th round 1L
05.04.2001   0 - 0   Barcelona   Nou Camp   UEFA Cup Semi-final 1st leg
16.05.2001   5 - 4   Alaves   Westfalen St.   UEFA Cup Final
08.08.2001   5 - 0   Haka   Olympia Stadion   Champions L. 3rd QR. 1st L
24.08.2001   3 - 2   Bayern Munich   Stade Louis II   European Super Cup
19.09.2001   0 - 0   Borussia Dortmund   Westfalen St.   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
16.10.2001   2 - 1   Dynamo Kiev   Olympiysky Stadium   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
24.10.2001   1 - 1   Boavista   Estadio de Bessa   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
05.12.2001   0 - 0   Roma   Stadio Olimpico   Champions L. 2nd Group Ph.
13.03.2002   0 - 0   Barcelona   Nou Camp   Champions L. 2nd Group Ph.
09.04.2002   2 - 4   Leverkusen   Bay Arena   CL Quarter-final 2nd leg
17.09.2002   0 - 2   Valencia   Mestalla   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
22.10.2002   3 - 1   Spartak Moscow   Dinamo St.   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
12.11.2002   3 - 3   Basel   Saint Jakob St.   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
28.11.2002   1 - 0   Vitesse Arnhem   Gelredome   UEFA Cup 3rd round 1L
20.02.2003   1 - 0   Auxerre   St. l'Abbé Desch.   UEFA Cup 4th round 1L
13.03.2003   1 - 1   Celtic   Celtic Park   UEFA Cup 5th round 1L
24.09.2003   1 - 1   Olimpija   Central   UEFA Cup 1st round 1L
06.11.2003   1 - 1   Steaua Bucharest   Ghencea St.   UEFA Cup 2nd round 1L
03.03.2004   4 - 2   Levski Sofia   Vassil Levski   UEFA Cup 3rd round 2L
25.03.2004   1 - 2   Marseille   Velodrome   UEFA Cup 4th round 2L
10.08.2004   2 - 0   Grazer AK   Arnold S. Stadion   Champions L. 3rd QR. 1st leg
28.09.2004   0 - 1   Olympiacos   Yorgos Karais.   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
03.11.2004   1 - 0   Deportivo   Estadio Riazor   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
23.11.2004   0 - 1   Monaco   Stade Louis II   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
09.03.2005   3 - 1   Leverkusen   Bay Arena   CL 1st knockout r. 2nd leg
13.04.2005   0 - 0   Juventus   Stadio Dell'Alpi   CL Quarter-final 2nd leg
27.04.2005   0 - 0   Chelsea   Stamford Bridge   Champions L. SF 1st leg
25.05.2005   3 - 3   AC Milan   Ataturk Stadium   Champions L. Final
19.07.2005   3 - 0   TNS   Racecourse Gro.   Champions L. 1st. QR. 2nd leg
26.07.2005   3 - 1   FBK Kaunas   Dar. & Girenas St.   Champions L. 2nd. QR. 1st leg
10.08.2005   3 - 1   CSKA Sofia   Vassil Levski   Champions L. 3rd QR. 1st leg
26.08.2005   3 - 1   CSKA Moscow   Stade Louis II   European Super Cup
13.09.2005   2 - 1   Real Betis   Manuel R. de Lop.   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
19.10.2005   1 - 0   Anderlecht   Constant Vanden S.   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
06.12.2005   0 - 0   Chelsea   Stamford Bridge   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
21.02.2006   0 - 1   Benfica   Estadio da Luz   CL 1st knockout r. 1st leg
22.08.2006   1 - 1   Maccabi Haifa   Val. Lobanovskiy St.   Champions L. 3rd QR. 2nd L
12.09.2006   0 - 0   PSV Eindhoven   Philips Stadion   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
18.10.2006   1 - 0   Bordeaux   J-Ch. Delmas St.   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
05.12.2006   2 - 3   Galatasaray   Ataturk Stadium   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
21.02.2007   2 - 1   Barcelona   Nou Camp   CL 1st knockout r. 1st leg
03.04.2007   3 - 0   PSV Eindhoven   Philips Stadion   CL Quarter-final 1st leg
25.04.2007   0 - 1   Chelsea   Stamford Bridge   Champions L. SF 1st leg
23.05.2007   1 - 2   AC Milan   Athens Olympic St.   Champions L. Final
15.08.2007   1 - 0   Toulouse   Stadium Municipal   Champions L. 3rd QR. 1st leg
18.09.2007   1 - 1   Porto   Estadio da Dragao   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
24.10.2007   1 - 2   Beşiktaş   Inonu Stadium   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
11.12.2007   4 - 0   Marseille   Velodrome   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
11.03.2008   1 - 0   Inter Milan   San Siro   CL 1st knockout r. 2nd leg
02.04.2008   1 - 1   Arsenal   Emirates Stadium   CL Quarter-final 1st leg
30.04.2008   2 - 3   Chelsea   Stamford Bridge   Champions L. SF 2nd leg
13.08.2008   0 - 0   Standard Liege   Stade de Sclessin   Champions L. 3rd QR. 1st leg
16.09.2008   2 - 1   Marseille   Velodrome   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
22.10.2008   1 - 1   Atletico Madrid   Vicente Calderon   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
09.12.2008   3 - 1   PSV Eindhoven   Philips Stadion   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
25.02.2009   1 - 0   Real Madrid   Bernabeu Stadium   CL 1st knockout r. 1st leg
14.04.2009   4 - 4   Chelsea   Stamford Bridge   CL Quarter-final 2nd leg
29.09.2009   0 - 2   Fiorentina   Artemio Franchi   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
04.11.2009   1 - 1   Lyon   Stade Gerland   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
24.11.2009   1 - 0   Debrecen VSC   Ferenc Puskás   Champions L. 1st Group Ph.
25.02.2010   3 - 1   Unirea Urziceni   Ghencea St.   Europa League of 32
11.03.2010   0 - 1   Lille   Stadium Lille Métropole   Europa League of 16
01.04.2010   1 - 2   Benfica   Estadio da Luz   Europa League QF
22.04.2010   0 - 1   Atletico Madrid   Vicente Calderon   Europa League SF
26.08.2010   2 - 1   Trabzonspor   Hüseyin Avni Aker Stadium   Europa League PO. 2L
30.09.2010   0 - 0   Utrecht   Galgenwaard   Europa League GS
21.10.2010   0 - 0   Napoli   San Paolo   Europa League GS
02.12.2010   1 - 1   Steaua Bucharest   Ghencea St.   Europa League GS
17.02.2011   0 - 0   Sparta Prague   Generali Arena   Europa League of 32
10.03.2011   0 - 1   Braga   Estádio Municipal de Braga   Europa League of 16
02.08.2012   1 - 0   Gomel   Central Stadion   Europa League 3QR 1L
23.08.2012   1 - 0   Hearts   Tynecastle Stadium   Europa League PO. 1L
20.09.2012   5 - 3   Young Boys   Stade de Suisse   Europa League GS
08.11.2012   0 - 1   Anzhi Makhachkala   Lokomotiv Stadium   Europa League GS
06.12.2012   1 - 0   Udinese   Stadio Friuli   Europa League GS
14.02.2013   0 - 2   Zenit St. Petersburg   Petrovsky Stadium   Europa League of 32

TBC...Sep 14


Offline Shaved Crossbar

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #809 on: July 16, 2014, 08:28:03 pm »
Hell of a post, and must have been a hell of a life

Offline the good half

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #810 on: July 23, 2014, 10:40:05 am »
That first game saw my Uncle Tommy on the bench.

LFC always had a good relationship with Dundalk FC.

Offline kavah

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #811 on: July 24, 2014, 06:32:04 pm »
The men that play the game we love

Have to see how Zarate goes like others have said hell either be sensational or gone out on loan by the January transfer window .

Teddy been appointed attacking coach , well he was a class player with intelligence & knew where the goal was so hopefully can only be of benefit .


Thought I'd post this by Jack Collison who we've released a real shame injury stopped him progressing , but this is worth a read, touching & a classy young man




Midfielder Jack Collison has penned an open letter to supporters on his departure from West Ham United

Hello everyone,

The time has come for an end to my West Ham United career. What a rollercoaster it has been - I have experienced plenty of ups and downs during my nine-year spell at West Ham!

Signing at 16, I wasn't sure if I was ready for the challenge but with the love and care of Bob and Val, who run the Academy digs, I soon settled and found the new challenge exciting. I had to pinch myself at times, moving from a quiet village into a big house in Essex under the guidance of the one and only Tony Carr - the man who brought through the likes of Frank Lampard, Joe Cole and Rio Ferdinand.

I went from being star-struck by the first-team players at Cambridge United to rubbing shoulders with the likes of Teddy Sheringham. I often doubted my ability in my early days, but Teddy was one of the senior players who gave me confidence to go out on the training pitch and express myself. I always felt he believed in me and, with a man like that behind me, I felt there was nothing I couldn't accomplish.

I made steady progress over the next couple of seasons and went on to captain both the youth team and reserves, as well as be in and around the first team. Alan Pardew allowed me to travel with the first team on a couple of occasions while he was in charge and both trips will stay with me for very different reasons.

On my first away trip to West Brom, I found out I had to sing In front of the first team at dinner. Needless to say, I was an absolute wreck the whole journey up. I spent my time watching the older pros, trying to learn the words to Wonderwall and sweating at the thought of what the night may bring. Dinner soon came around and the tapping on the glasses began, so I knew it was time. I stood up shaking, sweating and nearly tumbled off my chair. I closed my eyes and produced the worst ever rendition of Wonderwall!

To be fair to Christian Dailly, he tried his hardest to help me along in between taking the mickey with the rest of lads. Once it was over, I felt like my shoulders were lighter immediately - now I could concentrate on playing football!

Unfortunately I didn't make it onto the pitch the next day, but being in and around it made me hungrier for more. Kyel Reid made his debut that night and I remember how excited I was to see one of the young boys out on the pitch playing and putting in a fantastic performance. After that experience, I had a new belief that maybe I could make an impact on the first team.

The second time I travelled that season was with the squad for the FA Cup final. I knew I wouldn't be involved, but it was great to be part of it and to witness first-hand one of the greatest finals in history. The boys went so close that day, I was devastated they didn't take the trophy home. I remember Kevin Keen taking James Tomkins and myself onto the pitch before the lads went out to warm-up and I couldn't believe the atmosphere.

It was also on this trip that Nobes and Chrissy Cohen trashed our room! It was little things like this that made me feel part of it. I went home over the summer and came back more motivated than ever before.

The next couple of seasons, I worked very closely with Kevin Keen and still, to this day, I believe he is one of the best coaches in the game. I felt he really developed my game and every session was a joy to be involved in. Alan Curbishley was in charge now and I was close to the first team, but not quite there.

My debut finally came and it was Arsenal away at the Emirates. What a start! I remember the whole day as if it was yesterday. Tonks and myself had been travelling with the first team a lot that season but never made the bench - we'd had lots of close calls that always ended in disappointment.


I'll never forget my debut at Arsenal on New Year's Day 2008
That morning, Curbs caught us both in the lift on the way to breakfast. It was that awkward lift ride with the manager and two young lads who didn't know what to say. It was at that point he turned to us and said 'Make sure you're ready lads. You're both on the bench today'. Of course, we acted cool until the Gaffer stepped out, then we couldn't contain the excitement any longer. Left alone, we celebrated like we had won the World Cup, then off we went to prepare. Curbs must have heard the celebrations and had a laugh to himself but I'm not sure he will ever know how happy he made me at that precise moment .

I'm not sure the Gaffer had any intention of playing me but Freddie Ljungberg picked up a knock early on and before I knew it I was prepping myself and getting ready to come on. I couldn't believe it - that feeling from the lift was back, but even stronger this time. It was a mixture of sheer joy and disbelief but I didn't have any time to worry about what could go wrong, I was floating at that point.

The manager soon brought me back down to Earth when his last words were: 'Try and get close to Fabregas'. I tried my hardest, and covering 7.5 km in the second half alone was some sort of record that season. I never did manage to get close to Fabregas in that game, though. He didn't give me a sniff and, in fact, I probably only had about ten touches in 60 minutes of football. I didn't care, though, as I had made my debut, and where better than Arsenal away. What an experience and a day I will never forget. I remember leaving the game disappointed as I thought I had a bad game, but Anton Ferdinand had some words of encouragement that picked me up again.

I only featured once more that season, in a loss to Bolton, but the following year was my breakthrough season. Gianfranco Zola was now in charge. I couldn't believe it. One of my heroes was teaching me how to play the beautiful game!

His first session I will never forget - we were playing a game of two-touch and, of course, he wanted to play. The ball was fired into him and with his first two touches, without thinking, he managed to swivel on a sixpence, nutmeg one of the lads and then dink Robert Green from 20 yards. Silence spread across the training pitch as the boys stood there in amazement, mouths on the floor. I think at this point the manager realised what he had done as the whole team gave our new Gaffer of 24 hours a round of applause.

Instead of lapping up the attention, the Gaffer seemed slightly embarrassed and gave a genuine apology to the boys. This showed the character of the man - an absolute wizard on the pitch and possibly the nicest man I have met to this day in football. He was different to any manager I had worked with as he seemed to care about everyone - even the young boys who were nowhere near it like myself.

We spent hours on the training pitch after training, working on ball skills and areas where I could improve. I finally made my breakthrough around October time and came in at Manchester United, and this time I left feeling pleased. I felt like I could make an impact and here I was playing for a manager I would run through a brick wall for, as would the rest of the team. I think this was the reason why we did so well that year.

We finished ninth but really should have got into Europe, along the way playing some great football, and scoring some great goals. I also scored my first goal for West Ham that season against Everton at home. Although we ended up losing the match, it was a moment I will never forget. Scott Parker made a great run and flicked the ball back for me and I managed to open my body up and stick it in the top corner.


Celebrating my first senior goal for West Ham United
At that point as the ball struck the net, I felt a feeling I will maybe never feel again - so much excitement, so much emotion and so much relief. I had made history. I had scored in the Premier League. Not just for anyone, but wearing the famous Claret and Blue.

It was at this point I felt the start of my special relationship with the fans - one that has helped me through tough times and also many shared great times. It was at this point I felt part of the West Ham family, a family I was desperate to be part of I finally felt like I belonged.It was the following season when tragedy struck and that I really realised what it was to be part of that special family.

That night against Millwall in the Carling Cup will be remembered for many reasons, but for me it showed me what the West Ham family is truly about - real people, with real feelings who pulled me through the toughest time in my life.

After playing Tottenham at home the previous weekend, my Dad unfortunately died on the way to watch the game. At 20-years-old I was distraught to say the least. I had lost not only my Dad but the man I had looked up to my entire life.

I made the decision to play in the Millwall game - something my Dad would have wanted me to do. I was a mess, I remember walking onto the team bus before the game and nearly bursting into tears. It was at that point it began - team-mates picking me up, staff giving me words of encouragement and then I walked out onto the pitch.

Wow! I was carried that night by every single person inside that stadium. My legs were jelly, my head was all over the place and the lights were brighter than ever before. I ran my socks off that night, so desperate to win and when we went 1-0 down it was disaster. It was not looking like a memorable way to give my Dad a proper send off, then Junior Stanislas scored and took it to extra-time.

Then we won a penalty and I'm not a man of many regrets, but one of my regrets is not stepping up and taking it. I knew Junior would score so I let him take it and of course he did. I was so desperate to score and I even hit the post.

As extra-time continued I slowly found myself looking round the stadium, everywhere I looked I could feel people willing me to do well and showing me support like you wouldn't believe. Zavon Hines nicked the next goal to make it 3-1, and so much relief went through my body as I ran over to celebrate. I remember thinking 'That's it, we've won' and it was at that point Zav whispered to me, 'That's for your Dad'. At that moment I could feel the tears starting to come.

What a gesture. Who better to score than someone I had shared digs with, come through the youth team with and spent hours talking rubbish with. Zav will never know how much that meant to me that evening and I'm not sure the West Ham fans will either, but hopefully this will go some way towards that.


I will never forget the support I received during the Millwall game
That game should be remembered for one thing - the West Ham family uniting and all coming together for one of their own. The staff, the players and the fans carried me that night and that will live with me for the rest of my life. I tried my hardest to thank everyone after the game when I walked around the pitch, and it was at that precise moment I was overcome with emotion and tears started to flow as reality once again set in.

Football was my escape, and I wasn't playing for anyone, I was playing for West Ham, I was playing for every fan who carried my night, every fan who took the time to write to me. I was playing for the memory of my father and, after that night in particular, I always felt a special bond with the fans.

After this I experienced a nasty injury and witnessed the boys going through relegation, helpless until the very last games, pulling my hair out, feeling how every fan felt, kicking every ball from the stand.

I was chucked in for the Wigan game, and as hard as I tried I was helpless to stop the end result and it was that day we were relegated. It was a serious low in my career but it's after that game I promised myself I would do everything in my power to help get West Ham back where they belong - the Premier League.

The following season was possibly one of my most enjoyable in a West Ham shirt. I made my biggest contribution towards the team in terms of goals and games and was thoroughly enjoying my football under Sam Allardyce.

Kevin Nolan was a fantastic captain and we built an amazing team spirit that year. Although we didn't get automatic promotion, the Play-Offs were one of the best experiences of my life. I hope those two goals in the Play-Off semi-final will go some way to paying the people back who stuck by me and supported me.


The 2012 Play-Off semi-final first leg is one I'll never forget
Of course we won the final and celebrating on the pitch afterwards was an amazing experience. Not just winning promotion, but winning promotion with some of my best friends, was really fantastic.

I got another injury at the beginning of our first season back in the Premier League and struggled after that to make enough of an impact.

I hope I'm remembered as someone who gave his all in every game. Even when things weren't going well, I always tried my best to have a positive impact, not just on pitch, but also off the pitch and around the training ground.

It's at this point I must thank the medical staff at West Ham. They have stuck with me through everything and have been fantastic throughout. The moody days, the down days, the rainy days, I have experienced every moment alongside some of the best medical guys I have ever had the privilege of working with. Through my darkest days, they keeping me going, but we also experienced some great moments and my goal at Arsenal in January 2013 was dedicated to the medical team for getting me back fit time and time again. That moment has a special place and although we lost the game I had been through an awful lot the previous seasons and felt we deserved to enjoy that moment together, where it all began.

I must also thank all the other staff members who work day after day behind the scenes making West Ham what it truly is. There are lots of unsung heroes, too many to mention. They know who they are and I hope they know I have fond memories with every single one of them.

And lastly, as I move forward with my own career, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the fans once more. You have a fantastic set up, great staff and some wonderful players. As you move closer to the Olympic Stadium I wish you lots of luck.

I'm looking forward to coming back to the Boleyn before then, of course. You deserve good times and I'm sure they are on the horizon. I'm sorry I didn't get chance to say goodbye but I hope I will in the near future.

Not many can say they have had the honour of wearing the famous Claret and Blue but I hope they know I truly feel blessed for the opportunity. I have been lucky enough to work with some great people and during my time and have played alongside some truly inspirational and talented players.

As we part ways I have many fond memories of West Ham as a Club and would like to once more thank you for letting me be part of a very special family, one that you will never truly understand until your part of it, one that I have experienced every emotion known to man with - the West Ham family.

JC x



royhendo

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #812 on: August 19, 2014, 02:42:08 pm »
The Funeral went well a lot lot more people there than I thought there would be, seeing that Tracy had no family and I just have my two brothers it was packed with people from past jobs and friends.

I shocked myself that I managed to read out what I had written about Tracy I'm very shy in real life and it was really hard for me and I didn't know at least 90% of the people there.

Mind you I did make one silly mistake during the last song I thought I would leave first and wait outside the door so I could say thank you to everyone.

I was waiting outside the door, but I didn't know there was two doors and everyone started to leave via a door on the other side of the building. I thought every must have thought I did a runner or something because I left by that door so I had to quickly run all around the building so I get to people to thank them Tracy would have been laughing so much.

This is what I read out at Tracy's funeral.

I firstly would like to thank everyone who has come today,

Tracy would laugh and  be shocked if she knew I was going to speak in front of people, I've only every done this once before and that was at school for my English oral exam, which I totally failed at, how Trace would laugh when I would tell her what a disaster that was.

I cant believe I am doing this I thought we were going to grow old together, retire together, and many years down the line sadly Trace would have to do this for me first.

Tracy was a only child and had to suffer the early  lose of her mother at the age of her 13, and was brought up by her Dad you also sadly died at a very young age, he suffered for many year near the end of his life with ill health so Tracy had to look after her dad as well.

Tracy would always stand up for herself and be forward with her views, and she always told me that was how her dad taught her to be, and to prepare her for life after he was gone and it was something I loved about her.

As some people know Trace and I had been together for over 30 years in fact the relationship when back further than that, we were in some of the same classes together at school. I can always remember one day at school me and my mates were bored one dinner hour, and we played this stupid game sat in side G block, and saying that the next girl that comes in would be your girlfriend and when it was my turn Trace walked in the door, and from that moment on it always seemed like our fate that we would be together. And not long after we had left school fate yet again intervened and we ended up working at the same place and we got on really well.

And in the end Tracy asked me out, just as well  as I would have been to shy to ask her out. Of course relationship has it's up and downs but the many many years of happiness far out weighted the downs.

In her early days Tracy was very politically active for the Liberals at a local level, knocking on doors, delivering campaign leaflets, taking a petition to 10 downing street. They were even thinking of putting her up for election as a local councillor, I never knew about this until sometime after we we going out and Tracy said she gave that gave that up when she started to go out with me. Tracy should have told me I would had help her, but like she said to me not long ago “That's when you knew what they stood for.”

It used to make me smile when Tracy used to Tweet Cameron, Osbourne and Clegg giving them a piece of her mind about how they were treating the poor, disabled and the vulnerable in sociality, not because she hoped to get a reply or think they will change their policy's but there maybe was a very small chance they may read what she thought of them.

Tracy also loved to learn new things and had a great force of will, She  told me she always enjoyed her time at school and most of the jobs she did and hated when she wasn't working something that summed both of these things up is when she fall and badly broke her leg just below the knee. She spent about 3 months in hospital and Tracy spent weeks in traction which didn't work, her leg came infected, she had loads of ops on her knee and skin grafts even spent a couple of nights in intensive care it got so bad a at one point the doctors thought she might lose her leg, but she fought though all these set backs and finally came home Tracy spent a while in a wheelchair and then onto a leg brace, where she did work at the time sacked her because they thought Tracy would never work again, but Tracy was determined to prove them wrong, she signed up a course at Trowbridge college a computer maintenance and databases course, and Tracy went there every work day for about 2 years she would go on long walks to strengthen the knee and when she was nearly ready Tracy volunteered for the Citizens Advice Bureau, and finally got a full time job it was a long hard struggle for her but I remember how happy she was on that day. Even the week Tracy passed away Tracy was just about to enrol in an Open university course.
     
Writing this as helped me, Thinking of all the greats times we had, like for the years we used to go to heavy metal concerts 2 to 3 times a week.

Tracy looked so different then permed hair, heavy metal t-shirt and a denim jacket covered in badges from the bands we had seen a big Blue Oyster Cult back patch and autographs on the shoulders from the bands members we had met.

I can remember when we went to see Iron Maiden and it was standing only
usually we made sure we got to a place where Tracy could see. But for some reason this time when the concert started we were stood right behind 4 huge hells angels, big beards, leather jacket with skull and crossbones on the back the whole thing, it was so packed you couldn't more to the left or right. And to my total dismay Tracy decided to try to see if she could make them more herself and started to dig her elbows  into the backs of the two in front of her to see if they would move, The trouble was they didn't and they kept looking around to see who was doing it, looking over Tracy and not seeing her and just seeing me looking all sheepish and smiling like an idiot.  This went on for a few minutes and then they suddenly noticed it was Tracy and they couldn't have been nicer, let us go in front of them and made sure Tracy got to a spot where she could see.

After the show they even came across to check that Tracy was OK and took us for pint, that was a little surreal, me being all Shy and Tracy asking all types of questions about their motorbikes, tattoos and their lifestyle like she had know them for years. When we had to go she even got a kiss on the cheek from them  I just got a grunt. Tracy loved it when things like that happened.

There are many things I  could tell you about like when we when to Brussels to go to a concert and we went for a walk at night and I got us totally lost late at night in what looked like a totally dodgy area and our way blocked off by what looked like a large wall and I noticed a metal staircase and I said like I knew lets use that it will be a shortcut, but it turned out it wasn't wall but a building and we spend next 10 minutes in the dark scrambling about like a couple cat burglars across the top of strange shaped roofs to find a way down on the other side in the end we did find a way down and back to the hotel and it wasn't a shortcut.
I could go on all day about the memories I have with my time with Tracy and I will deeply miss the nights we would having a good laugh taking about them.

We had plans to do so many more things, like for this summer holiday Tracy made a list of things to do and places to visit, we had got about half way down the list. We were just getting things ready the next thing. We had brought a small 4 man tent, a wind up torch and a camping stove and Tracy wanted to go wild camping on Dartmoor for a few days. Sightsee in the day and later in the afternoon go for a little walk and find a nice place to camp and have a great night chatting and looking at the stars I was so looking forward to that.

Tracy had a great love for wildlife and the countryside. She enjoyed our tip to the peck district and when we went to Wales she just loved watching the 
Red kites. One of her favourites places to was on Westbury whites horse taking a picnic and looking at the great views and watch and listen to the Skylarks. she was so happy.

Tracy used to get really excited when All Hallows Forestry school  updated there face book page with new photos she loved to see what the children had been up to. Tracy loved to watch all the Spring watch programs.and used to get excited  when she saw Simon King at work but could never pluck up the courage to say hello to him.

As most people know Tracy was a big Liverpool fan. But it wasn't just the club she loved she loved the city and the people of Liverpool.

When I was working, we were up there all the time going to every home games we could they were great times, Tracy always wanted to move there.

Tracy used to join in with fan lead campaigns at the club  like the marches and protests to get the then carpetbagging  owners Guillite and Hicks out of the club, The marches about how they were treating Rafa, Tracy just loved Rafa not just as a manager but the kind of man he was.

And of course the long 26 years campaign to get justice for 96, Tracy would do anything to help that long struggle and at least she saw that justice is on it's way. Tracy would be so excited right with the Football season just about to start, and even happier that her beloved Liverpool won Manchester United lost.
.
And finally a few thank-yous.

I would like to thank Paul and Michael my brothers and Debbie my sister in law and their children for helping get though these hard 2 weeks.

I would like to thank Karen and Clive sadly Karen can't be here today because she is out of the Country I know she loved you dearly thank you for all the help and support over the last 2 weeks and the many years of friendship you gave Tracy.

I would like to thank Mel a close friend from All Hallows thank you for all you help and support over the last 2 weeks.

I would like to thank All hollows school Tracy always said it was the most enjoyable job she ever had she like everything about it. Tracy was always telling me how nice the school and children were, how friendly the Teachers were, and how she enjoyed working with the people she was work with. Only a few days before she passed away Tracy said she was looking forward to going back to work to she what changes had been made over the summer.I would like Jackie a teacher at All Hollows  But Tracy would always say how nice you were and how she enjoyed the chats.and you did inspire her it was the reason she was going to do an open university course.

And finally I would like to thank Red and White Kop a Liverpool forum Tracy used for over 13 years and Liverpool fans from all over the world who have sent words of support and memories of Tracy it helped me greatly and again proves LFC is a global family.

Tracy I miss you more and more each day and I am totally lost without you.

R.I.P Tracy you were my heartbeat, My first Love, My everything I miss you so much

I know Tracy would want me to get on with my life, I guess at some point I will, but it will be so hard when Tracy was my life.

And once more just for you Tracy Never buy the Sun and Justice for the 96.



Offline The 5th Benitle

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #813 on: August 20, 2014, 01:53:07 pm »
Beautiful that, and very impressive. Well done Trada.

Offline Pheeny

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #815 on: September 1, 2014, 09:57:40 am »
Jonno on his team's plight. (He's one of our best posters, and a Man United fan of several decades' standing.)

It's interesting to read the opinions of how come Manchester United are spluttering and farting their way this season thus far ( to 2 points from 3 games).
Leaving aside all historical bias/rivalries/hatred between our two teams ,my view on the global franchise that used to be my football club is that this franchise is deep in shit street - from both an on-pitch quality and in global business-promotion sustainability terms.

The nonsense of the now under the "leadership" of our Dutch manager is difficult for me to wrap my head around. 60 Mill for Di Maria when the screaming priority is EITHER to promote a home-grown top drawer central defender  (does such a talent exist in the ranks of United's Academy numbers and if not, what's the point having the academy?) OR securing the services of an international standard proven performer at this level from SOMEWHERE.
It's frankly sickeningly painful - never mind difficult - to try and recall exactly who was the football club's last home-grown central defender acknowledged to be of proven international standard.
Looking back over the 64 years or so since I started following United, names that roll out of memory tell me that Bill Foulkes who recently departed this world was the last home-grown centre half we've produced (and even that's subject to debate). David Sadler, Kevin Moran , a young and sober Paul McGrath and a luckier and less injury-prone Wesley Brown could have shouts for this particular home-grown title too although with the greatest respect - other than the excellent Paul McGrath in his prime - I could not hand on heart claim any were truly international quality standard defenders.
What is wrong with the business franchise that used to be my football club? In fact what HAS been wrong with the club's production of top class defenders since the early mid 1950's?

Almost all of the quality centre backs I can recall have been outsiders or imports beginning with Mark Jones and the incomparable Duncan Edwards (though Duncan was only a young lad when he signed . . .)through Big Jim Holton, Martin Buchan, Gordon McQueen,  Steve Bruce, Gary Pallister, Jaap Stam, Ronny Johnsen, Henning Berg, John O'Shea, Rio and Vidic.

Successful football clubs are not and never have been all about attack, attack attack. They always have been about the achievement of the right measure of balance and excellence between attacking flair coupled with midfield dominance and founded on accomplished and resolute defending. Where oh where the fuck has all the quality gone?
 For all the hype that surrounded the arrival of our Dutch master in succeeding our lamentable ex-Evertonian Scottish leader, there's little or nothing to choose between the two of them.  Hapless and hopeless springs to mind.

Offline Harinder

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #816 on: September 1, 2014, 02:09:20 pm »
Hey all

This is a story of a wonderful family reunion, RAWK superheroes, and how two cousins' dream came true. Excuse the length, I got carried away.

Background

I started supporting Liverpool when I was 6. I was fortunate enough to be taken to a Coca Cola Cup game by my 2nd cousin's now ex-husband who was a steward. Robbie Fowler slotted in the last minute to give us a 1-0 lead in the 1st leg of the Coca-Cola Cup semi-final in 1995, against Palace.

Football support was divided in my family, with my gran and uncle supporting United  >:(, with my mom and aunt supporting Liverpool loosely (apparently Kevin Keegan was dreamy). I took up the fervent LFC support because of my interest in football and probably to piss off the family Mancs. This is how I think my cousin became a fan.

In 2005 my aunt moved to Ireland with her two fragile-X boys for the special-care and support system, which is much better than here - South Africa. Aran, the older of the two boys, kept up the Liverpool support and passionately supports the team, especially his idol, Steven Gerrard!

The holiday and getting tickets

My mother planned a months holiday in England in France for my younger sister's school holidays. I was able to free up two weeks work in advance to join them for the first time. The part of the trip that interested me was a trip down memory lane for my mother and aunt on the Wirral, to revisit where they grew up, to see family in the area, and see what became of their schools. This fell over the first home game of LFCs season, so when flights were booked the priority for me became getting tickets for the Southampton game.

I signed up for a membership to try get tickets in the membership sale, with my mom and aunt trying through the phone lines on the same day. With no success and after a 2.5 hour queue, I began looking elsewhere. I made this thread here looking for 2-5 tickets and hoping for some kind hearted RAWKite to come in and save the day. I have been lurking RAWK for over 3 years and have always thought the posters to be generally intelligent, respectful, and kind to one another (except in transfer forums or ownership discussions). After my first dealing with the official channel, this seemed to be the best chance.

After receiving some good advice from RAWK on how to get tickets, I wrote an email to the club revving up the guilt trip spiel to see if they would accommodate my cousin. They emailed back saying they required all medical forms, doctors notices, birth certificates, and recent STD blood tests to put my cousin into the random draw for a handicapped person to see the game. Since this was not feasible for Aran and my aunt we did not go down this route. 

The three of us (aunt, mother, me) tried the same phone/internet/carrier pigeon method during the general sale. With a shorter online queue, I hoped my chances would be better, but the tickets disappeared within minutes. When I got on my flight to Heathrow on the 11th of August I was determined to do everything possible to get to a live game at Anfield.

I met up with mom and sis who had been down to Brighton to visit a second cousin five times removed or some ridiculously-related relative. We stayed in Stratford-upon-Avon (y'know - fecking tourists) for a night. The next day was the late availability sale (LAS). I looked online for an internet cafe in the town. An address of one came up. Setting out at 10AM on the 13th of August I was determined to get at least two tickets. Obviously the internet cafe no longer existed as such enterprises are made redundant by free wifi everywhere. A friendly local directed my sister and I towards the public library. £2.50 got me an hour of internet access, and an estimated waiting time of 6 minutes for the LAS. 12 Minutes later I was in! The virtual ticket store I'd been waiting for. Frantically trying to negotiate the system it kept returning "no tickets of this quantity available" or whatever the hell it says, despite only trying to get 1 ticket at a time. Different stands kept coming up and disappearing. With only 5 minutes of my session left I clicked on the upper main stand, and two glorious open red circles showed up. Lightning reflexes filled the circles and the buy button forcibly clicked - I had done it!... or not. "The system cannot reserve these tickets for you". Heartbreak. I was browsing RAWK at the same time and posted in the Ticket Exchange thread. Time expired on the internet session and our drive up to Heswall began.

We stayed at the Premier Inn where I met the night clerk, Carl. A special thanks to him for trying his best to arrange us some tickets through his friends - this didn't work out unfortunately. I checked my emails that evening on my mobile (potato crapberry) and saw something amazing - an email titled 'two for southampton' - the best email I've ever received. A 10 year RAWKite, johnny foreigner, told me he had two tickets available in the Annie Road section, block 127. Another special thanks here to AlanX/Random Alan, for guiding me through the ticket exchange process and helping me verify a few things. He also informed me his friend was coming over with the member cards on the Friday evening. Swept up in the flurry of excitement I must have seemed like a babbling idiot (probably not helping my case with this short story), because I thought johnny foreigner was coming over, that I would get the tickets from him, and that we would meet up. Luckily he was patient and replied to my numerous questions and texts to clear everything up. I phoned his friend, henceforth known as Super Norwegian Man, from my aunts phone (I only had SMS roaming) on Saturday morning. I couldn't hear the name of the hotel and was inexplicably on a very loud road in Heswall so I asked him to text it to me. We were meeting from '14-15' at the Adelphi Brittania in Liverpool.

With butterflies in stomach I was dropped off outside The Vines pub across the road from the Adelphi at 14.15. I texted Super Norwegian Man (SNM) saying I was outside. No response. I was pacing and looking visibly fraught, deciding to walk to two men dressed in Liverpool shirts outside The Vines. They were quintessentially scouse, warm, welcoming, and offering to help with tickets if my venture didn't work out. They also had Aldo speaking in the pub at 3pm, which brilliant to see, despite not being able to attend. I went in and out of this pub, keeping my eye on United getting battered by Swansea. A smoke, 5 texts, and 30 minutes later I was clocking in at 160BPM. Still no response from SNM. I sent a text to johnny foreigner and the other number that had texted me, what I guess now to be SNM's travel phone. I didn't know it at the time, but this was the last text available on my phone due to limited funds. I got the surname of SNM so I could ask to call his room, and from the other number a text saying he was in the hotel bar wearing a red jacket. I ran down into the bar, frantically checking around for red jackets. A somewhat taken-aback individual ushered over the crazed loon calmly. It was him! We started talking about the tickets and it was a face value exchange. Having never seen a membership card for the club I didn't know what to expect. I examined everything and it all seemed legit. I was ready to hand over the cash right then but didn't have enough to pay for the pint he was going to order. I also had to fetch my mom and sis who were waiting for me in The Vines. I ran across the road to them, where they'd ordered me a pint, downed it, ran to the cash point in the Adelphi, drew some more cash, ran back down into the bar to pay for the freshly ordered pint, and drank that at a fast rate too through sheer adrenaline. I handed over £100 for two cards, and a print out saying row 24, seat 70 and 71, Anfield Road End Block 127. I told SNM that he was making something special happen for my cousin and I. We thanked him and left, having to get the car back to Heswall to pick up my aunt and cousin.

We went for dinner and drinks with more relatives that evening in New Brighton, most of which were LFC fans, former and current season ticket holders. I showed the cards to my cousin, Mike Cropper, who said they looked good, and could be the best forgeries he's ever seen - the scouse humour did not ease my sense that this still could all be one big scam. Later that evening I went out for a few more drinks with Carl, who also said the cards looked legit.

Match Day bacon

I woke up feeling 80% excited 10% apprehensive and 10% hungover. I helped my cousin get his 2012/2013 home Gerrard 8 kit on. I put my own 2011/2012 Suarez 7 kit on, as well as a warm grey jumper, and we headed out to make sure everyone else was ready. Packed into the car, over the bridge, advice to be dropped off far from the stadium because of the crowds in mind, we arrived at the Kop End gates (which we had to been to on Friday during a stadium tour and trophy photo) an hour early. Aran and I got out and he was advised to stay close to me. We walked in and around the shops and other fans. A feeling of awe and wonderment washed over Aran and I as we walked around the family park, checking out the fan wall, and buying a match day programme at one of the outlets. With 45 minutes before kickoff and seeing the players warm up in mind, we entered the stadium. The moment of truth. Was this an elaborate and well crafted fraud to make £100 and get a free beer? Was the stoic and proud looking Norwegian an excellent actor? Card under the sensor. Beep. Green. I walk through. The Marshalls call me back. Oh no. Is it a false green? Have I not seen enough LFCTV episodes of José's favourite cat pictures? No. They are just checking Aran's bag. He says "thanks dude" to them and I put the other card under. Beep. Green. He walks through. We are in. Its real.

A certain clarity came after we were through the turnstile. The predominant thought was that we were home and that this would be incredible. We walked up towards our seats. The Marshall on the corner greeted us and got a thumbs up from Aran. We walked up to row 24. Good seats. Unobstructed view. The stadium started filling up and two guys walked up to us. 'You are in our seats'. Fuck. "I'm sure we are row 24 70 and 71" 'This is row 25'. Phew. We clambered over to the row in front. A few non-participating players walked across the field to loud applause, especially Daniel Agger  :'(. Then the players came out. Warm-up. Stadium filled to the brim. YNWA. Nearly in tears. Aran singing at the top of his lungs next to me. I'm trying to video this (upside down on the potato) and get him to hold up the other side of my scarf and 'sing' (see: wail, holler, caterwaul). Time for the game to start. 'Come on Steven Gerrard!' yells Aran. Good tackle and pass by Lucas. 'Who is that?' asks Aran. "That's Lucas" I say. 'Come on Lucas!' he encourages on every touch he takes next. Liverpool Liverpool Liverpool. Steve Gerrard Gerrard. Poetry in Motion. Fields of Anfield Road. Henderson. Interception. Through ball. Sterling. Eruption!! Arms fling out, gripping the ecstatic scouser next to me, and my screaming-with-joy cousin on the other side. 1-0. Football enthusiasts chatting behind me, why does Johnson keep leaning back when he shoots? Davies curls a freekick, good save Migs. 'Come on Simon!' 'Good one Simon!'. Nervy end to the half.

Half-time. Time for a drink and a snack. We shuffle out with everyone else. Now I'm not too sure how comfortable Aran is in big crowds. He is a happy-go-lucky guy and nice to everyone he meets. We are packed in the refreshment area tightly and caught between the flow to the toilet and the flow to the bar. I keep him close to me and ask "Aran, are you OK?".

He turns to me, smiles, and says "Yeah everything is fine, I'm just happy".

He's just happy. I'm tearing up now thinking of it. Then I was dumbstruck. I didn't know what to say. It was one of the most amazing moments in my life. My 22 year old mentally afflicted cousin who has been through enough shocking events for a lifetime over-and-above his day-to-day struggles tells me he's happy. With me. Here at Anfield. The place that feels like home. It was so very special.

We waited in the line for refreshments for an age. I didn't mind. I had a silly grin on my face. "NO MORE HOT FOOD" "NO MORE COKE" "STAY IN YOUR LINES". I became apprehensive thinking about the second half. We can't lose this. It will devastate Aran. After what he said it would dampen the day. We got to the line just before it closed. A fanta and a coke light. We rushed back up to our seats, past the smiling Marshall, past the patient fans who stood for us, to our seats. 51 minutes gone. 1-0. An unease around Anfield as Southampton press. 56 Minutes. Clyne down the right. 1-2. Easy goal. Silence apart from a moderate noise to the right. Away fans. They don't sound as loud in real life as they do through the microphone placed right next to them for the telly. More tension. Groans. Johnson reacts late as a high ball is taken off him. Unmarked Davis in the box. Good save Migs. 'Come on Simon!' 'Come on Steven Gerrard!!!' 'Let's go guys!'. Aran the lone cheerleader coming out of Annie Road giving each player an individual cheer. Rickie and Joe on. 'Come on Rickie!' 'Let's go Steven Gerrard!'. I'm sitting there stoney-faced and clammy. We just can't lose this. 79th minute. Hendo. Cross. Raheem! HEADER?!? DANNY!!!!!!! Screaming! Hugging! LIVERPOOL LIVERPOOL LIVERPOOL!!! Tense confidence. Southampton bomb forward. DEFEND. They press harder. Aran shouts more. 'Don't lose now you silly monkeys!' 'Come on Steven Gerrard!' 'Go on, get it!'. Save onto the crossbar. Ball cleared. Ball away from our goal. YNWA starts. Its amazing. So great to be there. Feel it. Still tense. Time ticks on. You can't see time added on here. Final whistle. Joy!! Aran cries 'WE WON WE WON!'. He has the biggest smile I've ever seen (see below). We wait a bit for everyone to get ahead. Say goodbye to all the friendly fans around us. Cheers to the guy next to me with whom I shared two hugs and never spoke to. The chatty guys behind us with excellent football analysis. The dad and his son next to Aran who were patient and kind.

We walked out with Aran saying 'WE WON WE WON we did it Dude!' 'Come on Steven Gerrard!'. We went to go give the cards back to SNM next to Shankly's statue. A firm handshake and a massive thanks came from me. I introduced him to Aran, who seemed shy for the first time that I've seen. "This is Super Norwegian Man, he got the tickets for us" I said to Aran. He shook his hand and said 'Thank you, Dude'. Aran was respectful and courteous. I felt almost embarrassed in the presence of this man who had done so much for us. We left shortly afterwards as SNM had his Norwegian friends with him and we didn't want to impose. They were so nice, and the one said YNWA as we were leaving. I said it back. For the first time I actually knew what it meant.

After that we got curry and chips and chicken chow mein from the Chinese/Greek/English chippie and were picked up. Mom, aunt, and sister were happy to see us and swear they had seen us on tv celebrating the second goal. They watched it at The Vines, where the owner apparently had two leftover tickets for the game - anyone looking in future could ask there. The family asked us how it was - "A dream of mine came true today".

Thanks

- AlanX/Random Alan for answering my PMs and helping me through the process
- Everyone who replied to my threads and pointed me towards ways to get tickets
- Carl, the helpful lifelong fan who tried his best to organise through his friends
- My mom, sister, and aunt, for being there for us, letting us take the two tickets we got, and getting us to and from the game
- johnny foreigner, for contacting me, answering all my texts and emails, helping me through the Saturday panic. Please add him to the list of trusted ticket exchangers
- Super Norwegian Man, for bringing the tickets, arranging to meet, dealing with a panicked-looking wild person, and trusting a stranger from the internet. You made a dream come true
- My cousin Aran, for making the day so special for me
- All other unknown happy LFC fan and steward faces who were so kind and accepting to my cousin and I
- RAWK, the users, the admins, and the site for making this all possible


Pictures




Aran and I touching the sign at the stadium tour on the Friday before the game



Mom sister and I in the dugout.



Brendan Rodgers unveiling Aran Moreno.



Just through the turnstiles.



Aran and I in our (wrong) seats.



View of the main stand from our (right) seats.



Dejan in action.



Half time in line for refreshments - nice photobomb.



WE WON! WE WON!



Walking away with a pocket full of memories.



Thank you everyone for reading.
Just clicked on the main board and my virus scanner came back with this

"When we visited this site, we found it exhibited one or more risky behaviors."


:lmao

Strip his knighthood https://submissions.epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/47770

Offline The 5th Benitle

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #817 on: September 1, 2014, 02:51:45 pm »
Fucking outstanding that. Great stuff.

Offline Twelfth Man

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #818 on: September 2, 2014, 05:44:33 pm »

E2K on the Spurs game. http://www.redandwhitekop.com/forum/index.php?topic=316014.msg13189817#msg13189817



Last season defied conventional wisdom in so many ways. It’s one of the reasons why the ride this team took us on was so beautiful and why books have been written about a campaign that ultimately ended trophyless. Failure to understand that is ultimately a failure of imagination and, quite honestly, football is not the sport for anyone who lacks that. That ride really began with this fixture on 15 December 2013. Up until then it had been a hugely encouraging season (the victory at White Hart Lane sent Liverpool back to second and only two points off first place – they would ultimately sit top at Christmas). Nonetheless, the fifteen results that had preceded it were all fairly standard, even expected – Stoke City (1-0), Manchester United (1-0), Crystal Palace (3-1), West Bromwich Albion (4-1), Fulham (4-0), Norwich City (5-1, complete with the routine Suárez annihilation of the Canaries) and West Ham United (4-1) were all beaten at Anfield, with Aston Villa (1-0) and Sunderland (3-1) dispatched on the road; points had been dropped away to Swansea City (2-2), as they had been on each previous visit there since their promotion, and Newcastle United (2-2); the Derby at Goodison was even more eventful than usual but had still ended in a draw (3-3) just as it had the previous season; Liverpool had failed to win at the Emirates just as they had in 8 of the club’s previous 9 visits there (losing 0-2 this time); and even the two most eyebrow-raising results, the 0-1 defeat at home to Southampton and the 1-3 loss at Hull, were in keeping with similar lapses in seasons past (e.g. 0-2 at home to West Brom and 1-3 away to Southampton earlier that very year).


In other words, nothing outlandish had happened in the first three months of the season, nothing to predict what was to come in the new year. And while Liverpool were very much a team on the rise with plenty of potential in the ranks, conventional wisdom had it that they were only one member of a pack of as many as seven or eight teams vying for a top-four finish (11 points covered the top-nine after 16 games last season), and with a squad thinner on both quality and depth than many of their rivals. A top-four finish was possible, a title challenge out of the question. And there were many of us thinking the same way ahead of a trip to a ground where Liverpool had won 5 of 23 stretching back 20 years and lost on their previous 6 visits. Jon Flanagan was the left-back, Daniel Sturridge was injured, and the cavalry consisted of Luis Alberto, Iago Aspas and Victor Moses. And while the way in which things subsequently came together that day wouldn’t have necessarily come as an outright shock to anyone who had been watching the evolution of Brendan Rodgers’ team since the twin arrivals of Sturridge and Philippe Coutinho the previous January, who had followed the development of Jordan Henderson, who had seen signs in his goal against Norwich and performance against West Ham in the previous two games that Raheem Sterling was finding his feet, and who had allowed themselves to recognise Luis Suárez as one of the preeminent players on the planet, the nature of the scoreline (5-0) and the fixture in which it happened did mark it out as a particularly unusual result.


Milestones by their very nature can only be defined as such after the fact following a reasonable elapse of time; well from a perspective 8 and a half months removed, that day was a milestone. It was the day that Sterling announced himself at the expense of poor Kyle Naughton and began his rapid transformation into the tormenter of Premier League (soon Champions League) and international defences that he is today, the day Flanagan became the Red Cafu, the day Henderson took charge and scored (with a first-time volley, no less) in the same end where once he had missed an open goal, then played a sumptuous backheel in the lead-up to the third, the day Liverpool announced that logic, reason and, most of all, conventional wisdom would no longer be applying that season. And, for the most part, none of it did – Arsenal were beaten 5-1 with Flanagan and Aly Cissokho in the full-back positions, Stoke and Cardiff were spotted three goals apiece and beaten on an aggregate score of 11-6, Liverpool kept only 5 clean-sheets out of 19 in the new year and still came within a whisker of winning the League Championship, and all of that with Aspas and Moses still the primary attacking alternatives on the bench. Yesterday, then, seemed an apt time not only to examine whether the ride which began in this fixture last season has survived the trauma of the last five games (in particular the defeat to Chelsea, the three-goal lead coughed-up against Palace, the sloppy 2-1 win over Southampton on the opening day this season and the 1-3 defeat against Manchester City last Monday night) but also to assess just how far Liverpool have come since that afternoon in north London eight and a half months ago.


And there’s really no better place to start than the sight of Coutinho sitting on the bench for 90 minutes where once that seat would have been occupied by Aspas or Moses, Assaidi or even Brad Smith. Or we could start with Emre Can, a substitute himself, controlling a lofted clearance and deftly getting the ball out of his feet while simultaneously holding off all 6’3” of Moussa Dembele, then spinning and sprinting clear up the centre of the pitch as the Spurs man vainly gave chase. That particular attack ended with the phenomenal Sterling bamboozling the entire Tottenham defence (having graduated, seemingly, from picking on the weak link last season to taking them all on this time) before finishing weakly, but while Sterling’s run will rightly get most of the attention, Can’s was arguably every bit as impressive. This was a substitute; Dembele, a £15m player, bounced off him. He controlled, bullied, sprinted, passed, and he made it look like nothing. There was a time not too long ago where Liverpool supporters were being treated every week to a different level of mobility and athleticism by the club’s midfielders, namely that exhibited by the likes of Charlie Adam, Jay Spearing, Joe Cole and Christian Poulsen. Yesterday, by contrast, the fantastic Henderson broke into the box to set up the first for the tip of the midfield diamond (Sterling) to slot home, Allen broke into the box to set up the second when Dier pulled him back, Can ran most of the pitch to set up a would-be fourth for Sterling again, Lazar Markovic has only made a couple of cameo appearances so far, and Adam Lallana still hasn’t played a competitive minute. For those still wondering how Liverpool are going to go about mitigating the departure of Suárez, look no further. 


Speaking of context and contrast…not too long ago this club coughed up a couple of promising youth players (one of whom has since represented his country) and £5m for Paul Konchesky. I don’t mean to harp on about a lad who gave of his best every time he played for Liverpool (it’s not just him anyway – more recently than Konchesky, Brendan Rodgers’ first visit to White Hart Lane as Liverpool boss saw him employ a left-side tandem of Downing/Enrique). I hope he does well back in the top division with Leicester (obviously with the exception of any fixtures against Liverpool), but what Alberto Moreno did yesterday was almost a different sport from what Konchesky could ever offer. It makes you wonder what the man who signed him in the dark days of 2010 made of it from his seat in the stand yesterday, particularly given that it was Andros Townsend (one of the first names on Hodgson’s teamsheets for the upcoming Euro 2016 qualifying campaign, I bet) who was robbed of possession and then outpaced over three-quarters of the White Hart Lane pitch. The most impressive thing? Even more than the sublime finish, it was that Moreno was able to effortlessly control the ball travelling at that pace. It’s been the best part of a decade since Liverpool had a goal threat at full-back (unless you count Johnson as a goal threat, which I don’t), but Moreno has the potential to be so much more than that, both individually and in tandem with the rest of the team. One of the fringe benefits of Suárez was that, by last season, defenders were terrified by his mere presence in their vicinity. The only thing more likely than genius to terrify a defender is pace. It was noticeable against City too that Moreno’s closing speed is frightening (Dzeko was going through on goal in the second half at 2-0, I think, and Moreno appeared out of nowhere and won the ball cleanly). With the raw speed of Moreno, Markovic, Sterling and Sturridge around, one miscontrolled pass or bad touch can spell curtains, and they’ll know it too. Again, for those still wondering how Liverpool are going to go about mitigating the departure of Suárez, look no further. 


Yesterday’s performance was, in many ways, even better than last season’s in this fixture. Then, Andre Villas Boas’ team, down to ten men after Paulinho’s red card, persisted with a suicidal high line which was arguably unwise anyway given the lack of pace (Dawson) and inexperience (Capoue) at the heart of their defence but certainly should have been discarded once the scoreline went to 3-0. It wasn’t and, in the last 15 minutes, a bad defeat subsequently became a humiliation as Coutinho and Luis Alberto picked holes at will in the home defence for Suárez and Sterling to apply the finishing touches. Yesterday, by contrast, Liverpool were content to simply see the game out and, what’s more, they were comfortable doing so. Once it went to 2-0, you got the sense that they were humming along in second gear the rest of the way (Moreno briefly applying the afterburners for the third notwithstanding). Even then, it could have easily been four (Sterling’s effort) or five (Lovren had a header from a corner, Sturridge curled one wide off his right), and that’s not even including three good chances for Balotelli in the first-half (two headers and the open-goal miss) and two decent shots by Sturridge (one just wide, the other saved by Lloris at full-stretch). Spurs, for their part, much like City on Monday night, profited almost exclusively from indecision and confusion in a defensive unit with three new members (and, including Mignolet, four different nationalities). Time will surely smooth-out those rough edges if the players are good enough (and I believe they are), yet even then Liverpool’s ‘keeper had but one save to make over the 90 minutes. Against a probable top-four contender, away from home and bedding-in a new defence, that’s pretty impressive.


There’s no doubt in my mind. Neil Atkinson said it yesterday: “we’re back on the adventure...these are definitively now two connected seasons”. This is unlikely to prove a prominent milestone like the last visit to White Hart Lane did, more a reassurance, a confirmation. In this case the milestone is an invisible, almost imperceptible one, because when a 3-0 win on a ground that has been historically tough against an expensively-assembled team with top-four ambitions and an excellent manager becomes just another three points, you know something has changed.
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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #819 on: September 3, 2014, 02:10:22 am »
Johnno on Best

It's difficult to know how to start by categorising George. It sounds like a cop-out I know but it's true - probably the best thing to do is not to attempt to put him in any category. That's honestly how good the lad was.
No-one I have ever seen play in world football - and that includes ALL of the following ; Pele, Maradona, Duncan Edwards, Stanley Matthews, Tom Finney, Di Stefano, Platini, Cruyff, both Ronaldos and Messi - could have tolerated the physical intimidation that George had to contend with and yet still do the things that damaged and destroyed opponents on the park that he invariably did on his finest of form.

I was privileged to be at Old Trafford to witness a 17 year old George destroy Manchester City's youth side virtually on his own. Think the score was 5 or 6 - 0 and to quote the late great Joe Mercer (another lovely warm bloke I had the honour of meeting back in the day) City's kids were lucky to get nowt! George was figuratively and literally leagues ahead of everyone else on the park that night and George was only 6 months younger than me. I must have been going on 18 and as United daft as you could get. BUT my old fella God rest his soul always raised us to be respectful of quality opponents a la the mode of Busby and Shanks.

That night was the only time I can ever remember feeling sorry for anyone wearing sky blue! George was merciless and incomparable. He was everywhere. If it had been a boxing match the ref would have stopped it after an hour. Yes he pissed half of his life up the wall, yes he was flawed, yes he should have (and believe me had things been different between his ears, he COULD easily have!) been THE greatest and most highly skilled player the game has ever seen. He was the supreme matador taunting the goriest of the blundering bulls back in the day to do their worst - and many , many tried to really damage him because he was forever taking the piss out them - and always, always he would come away from any encounter leaving them on their arse or more accurately, on their collective arses. I remember listening to Bobby Charlton speaking at a dinner when he was describing how frustrating playing with George could be. He described a moment in one game when him, Denis Law and George broke away - can't recall against who - but both him and Denis were screaming at George to part with the ball as both of them were better placed. George was going about what he did best tormenting the life out of a succession defenders who were intent on collecting a souvenir from his ankles, his shins, thighs wherever and Bobby said both him and Denis were ready themselves to deliver one of the biggest bollockings they'd given him when he turned inside out swivelled left and then right and smashed an unstoppable shot into the top right hand corner with the keeper rooted to the spot Their collective complaint he said went from "George you greedy little bastard"  to "aw hey , what a fucking goal!" He said he could only imagine how bloody hard it must have been to be playing AGAINST Georgie.

My cousin Paul who is 8 years younger than me played for City and Everton and to echo an earlier post in this thread, he confirms that all the City players he grew up around had George as the single finest exponent of the art of the game they had played against - remember in an era when it was almost permissible to break a leg in a bog standard acceptable to the ref tackle - it was THAT physical back in the early 60's. Paul also confirms the pro's themselves widely regarded Souness as the dirtiest player in the game.

George was simply ahead of his time but yes indeed sadly he was flawed. Had he been blessed with the temperament of a Lionel Messi or a Bobby Charlton who knows what praises we afficionados of the game might have been singing about him. But he didn't possess such and he was what he was and I was one of the many thousands who were so privileged to see him at his glorious best. Best by name Best by nature. RIP George and thank you.

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #820 on: September 5, 2014, 04:58:20 pm »
Ripping Roy a new one, but doing it so eloquently

After two and a half years of cordiality and mutual appreciation between Roy and the media (and, seemingly, the vast majority of England supporters), some of his behaviour is now definitely beginning to resemble the manager we saw at Liverpool. I don’t know about anyone else, but when he says “the fact of the matter is that we haven’t got many more (players)” and argues that “you can’t play five games for England, be a regular in the Liverpool team for six or seven months, and be David Beckham. You can’t come in like Phil Jones after all the injuries and nail down a place in the central defence of Manchester United and become John Terry. You can’t be Jack Wilshere, who has lost all that football through injury, and all of a sudden be Bryan Robson,” I immediately hear echoes of “whoever takes my place will be doing a similar job with similar players” and “fans are waiting for a man with a magic wand that can turn all of the ills that everyone has seen into something different. Those of us who work in the game and have been working in the game a long time know that magic wand doesn’t exist”. And when he says “let’s be fair about these things, that is all I am asking,” I think of the Goodison derby in October 2010: “That was as good as we have played all season, and I have no qualms with the performance whatsoever. I only hope fair-minded people will see it the same way”. Not only that but, judging by his aforementioned comments comparing Sterling, Jones and Wilshere to Beckham, Terry and Robson, it’s only a matter of time before we start hearing things like “these players have to accept responsibility” and “if they are not playing well and not helping the team to win, I will be advising them to look into the mirror rather than look for excuses elsewhere”.

None of that will come as any surprise to us, of course, having been forced to endure six months of the man’s stewardship of Liverpool back in 2010. We could have predicted this and, indeed, many of us did. Roy Hodgson, even leaving aside a consideration of the infamous methods which “have translated from Halmstad to Malmo to Orebo to Neuchatel Xamax to the Swiss national team,” is a manager who has almost pathologically avoided pressure for his entire career. By my reckoning, in 36 years of management prior to accepting the England post, Hodgson had spent just 28 months (or 2 years and 4 months) in jobs with anything approaching a high level of scrutiny and expectation: a cumulative 22 months across two spells with Inter (90 games) and 6 months at Liverpool (31 games), a total of 121 games in the pressurised environments of the San Siro and Anfield. Aside from that, he preferred to ply his trade in countries like Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark and Finland. Even Blackburn Rovers, just a couple of years removed from a League Championship, were a provincial club in a small town, and Fulham were looking less for a Europa League run than they were simple Premier League survival. In other words, Roy has spent a good 90% of his career avoiding the bright lights and when the pressure has come on, he hasn’t handled it very well. I can’t speak for his time at Inter but his other job in Serie A, at Udinese, ended after 6 months with Hodgson calling them “an extremely strange club”. And we’re all aware of the invective he spewed at Anfield, such as childishly responding to a fair but critical question from a Norwegian journalist by saying that he never wanted to work in his country again (or Denmark, for that matter).

He doesn’t like or handle pressure, and the interesting question now is how long this kind of behaviour (e.g. “that is absolute fucking bollocks”) will be tolerated by the very people who championed him for this job, who once beseeched Liverpool supporters to give him time and were happy to place the blame for his abject failure at Anfield on the shoulders of predecessor Rafael Benitez while cheerfully ignoring the worst of his ramblings (e.g. labelling wins at Trabzonspor and Bolton as “famous” and the possibility of winning at Goodison “utopia”). Now they can’t ignore it because they’re England fans and he’s managing their team. So what’s it going to be? Will they admit that they were wrong, that they touted the wrong man for the job? Or will ego and professional pride preclude them from doing that? Will they instead continue to flog the flagging horse, expertly shifting the blame elsewhere until it collapses head-first into the ground, convincing themselves that this is as good as England can do anyway?

To be fair, the penny may finally be dropping with one or two of them (excepting those with connections to Liverpool who have already seen this process unfold first-hand once before). For them, a turgid 1-0 win over a country that hasn’t qualified for a major international tournament since 2000 in a half-empty stadium may have been the straw that finally broke the camel’s back in a way that one point from three games at the World Cup (and that against a team that hadn’t qualified from the group stages since 1990 and had only one player, Joel Campbell, playing in the Champions League last season) didn’t. And maybe his prickly responses afterwards, including the “don’t hit me with statistics” gem which called to mind the best intelligence-insulting material used during his time at Liverpool, has also given a few of them cause for concern in a way that his recent attempts to lower expectations into the dirt by comparing England to Denmark in 1992 and Greece in 2004 didn’t (populations 5.6m and 10.8m respectively versus England’s 53m, by the way), even though he inadvertently advertised his own shortcomings as a manager in the process by reminding us all that a Greek team seriously short on talent but high on belief, organisation and leadership (all of which were instilled into a group of seriously average players by their manager, Otto Rehhagel) was able to beat a Portuguese side comprising Ronaldo, Figo, Rui Costa and a number of Porto’s Champions League-winning side (twice), the France of Zidane and Henry, and a Czech Republic team boasting the current Ballon d’Or holder Pavel Nedved amongst their ranks in winning Euro 2004. It may not have been pretty (neither is England under Hodgson, to be fair) but it was damn sure effective.

The question arises accordingly, as it did for many observers before, during and after a World Cup where Costa Rica went desperately close to a semi-final berth and where Cardiff City’s Gary Medel and Nottingham Forest’s Gonzalo Jara helped Chile knock out reigning champions Spain, why England couldn’t achieve more with a squad of players boasting (per the excellent blog of RAWK’s own Grobbelrevell) 21 players from the top 8 clubs in the Premier League last season and 11 from the top 4, quite a few of whom were also Champions League veterans (and that’s even with the omission, by choice, of John Terry and Ashley Cole). The grobbelramble also points out that Hodgson’s record at major tournaments, including his appearance at World Cup ’94 with Switzerland, comes to a “win percentage of 33.33%, which, ironically, is precisely the same ratio that he managed during his time at the helm of both Fulham and Liverpool and only marginally lower than the 35.05% achieved over the course of 214 matches in English club football overall”. Furthermore, in his time at Fulham (which is what largely earned him the Liverpool job), he guided them to the safety of 17th in his first season, then 7th and 12th respectively, an average final league position of 12th – Liverpool’s exact position upon his departure in January 2011. He then finished 11th and 10th at West Brom. All of which is to say that Roy Hodgson is a career mid-table manager at the highest level and the obvious danger of hiring him for the England job, that he would merely maintain a kind of parity with what his “methods” had achieved at Blackburn, Fulham, Liverpool and West Brom, is exactly what has come to pass.

And yet even considering all of this and the slight shift in attitude which may or may not have taken place amongst sections of the press in the aftermath of Norway on Wednesday (described by Hodgson as “a good opponent” despite being currently ranked 53rd in the world – then again, he did once call Northampton Town “formidable”), I’m not so sure that his chief apologists and cheerleaders in the media are ready to call time on Roy just yet, even if one or two might be starting to get a bit restless. After all, if you can bring yourself to ignore and even justify England’s World Cup 2014 campaign, sparing the manager most if not all of the blame where, in the past, the likes of Bobby Robson, Sven Goran Eriksson and Fabio Capello took it with both barrels while achieving similar or (excepting Euro ’84 and Euro ‘88) better performances (a quarter-final and semi-final respectively for Robson in 1986 and 1990, three quarter-finals in a row for Eriksson between 2002 and 2006, and a second-round with Capello in 2010), then there’s clearly some other factor at play that precludes a straightforward appraisal of the job being done. This was alluded to in recent articles by two of Hodgson’s most loyal acolytes who are also, incidentally, two of English football’s highest-profile writers, the Telegraph’s Henry Winter (who suggested yesterday that “some context is required to understand properly what will be depicted in certain quarters as Roy’s foul-mouthed rant,” something which I don’t recall Benitez being afforded in 2009) and the Chief Sports Writer of the same newspaper, Paul Hayward (who described Hodgson on his appointment at Liverpool in 2010 as the “sage” needed by the Kop “to restore spirit” and suggested that he would rid the club of the “mechanical pragmatism designed to destroy the opposition’s plans rather than impose their own).

In his customary post-mortem of England’s exit in Brazil this summer, Winter launched an impassioned defence of Hodgson who, he suggested, “is playing poker with a limited hand against veteran card-sharks” (Jorge Luis Pinto and Per-Mathias Høgmo are surely unlikely card-sharks) and “doing his best”. He argued that Roy still “believed unequivocally that he had shaped the team right tactically, choosing a system that suited them best” in Brazil, as if the manager’s belief in the same tried and trusted “methods” we had to hear about during his seven long months at Anfield automatically trumps hard evidence and common sense. He went on to speak of Hodgson “slowly developing a more enlightened style” which is, I would wager, greatly at odds with what any of us are seeing, and highlighted “lapses by individual players” as being the ultimate determinant of England’s failure against Uruguay rather than anything the manager did or didn’t do, kind of like 1998 when David Beckham was recklessly offered up as the villain for getting himself sent off against Argentina as opposed to Glenn Hoddle who left Michael Owen on the bench for the crucial group game lost to Romania (Owen came on and scored but it wasn’t enough). If Leighton Baines or Phil Jagielka were tactically at fault for the Luis Suárez double against Uruguay, then maybe the manager should have picked Champions League and England veterans Terry and Cole instead. Just a thought.

All of this was, of course, in stark contrast to Winter’s verdict on Hodgon’s predecessor following England’s exit four years earlier when he suggested that it was time for Capello to fall on his sword. Why? He argued that “if Gerrard had played in his Liverpool position and Rooney in his Manchester United role up top, England would have had their two potential match-winners in tandem.” In addition, he maintained that “if England had played 4-2-3-1, they may still have lost to the vibrant Germans but it would have been worth utilising a system that coaxed the best from Gerrard and Rooney” and that “the flaws inherent in 4-4-2 were brutally exposed here as the Germans flooded through.” He also praised the 4-2-3-1 system as “a formation that gives width and central numbers.” In fairness, Winter was correct that a pure 4-4-2 formation has severe limitations in the modern game, especially against opposition utilising more sophisticated systems (and the vast majority of successful teams in World Cup 2010, including the top three Spain, Germany and Holland, used a variation of 4-2-3-1). Yet what formation exactly has Roy Hodgson used for more than 30 years and, with the exception of the first-half against Italy, used again at the World Cup? 4-4-2 with Rooney forced in somewhere behind the front man does not a 4-2-3-1 make, and it was a damn shame to see Gerrard and Henderson exposed as badly as they were at times against Italy and Uruguay, especially given how effectively their manager at club level had utilised them in the season just gone.

Which isn’t the point anyway. The point is that Capello, a born winner with a treasure trove of trophies and medals at the top level with AC Milan, Real Madrid, Roma and Juventus, not to mention an impressive winning percentage with England, was afforded none of the understanding given to Hodgson by Winter and others this summer. Instead of pointing to individual mistakes and going on about some phantom enlightenment, he could have wondered, for example, whether Raheem Sterling should have remained in a central position against Italy (where he was tormenting the Italians) instead of being forced wide to make way for Rooney in the second half and giving their ageing opponents a far less mobile threat to deal with as a result. But he didn’t. Why is that?

Well the reason is made explicitly clear in Winter’s article: “the England manager should be English” at all costs, despite the fact that “the reservoir of high-class, experienced, home-grown managerial talent is painfully shallow.” So the solution is to stick with the best of a bad lot and defend him to the death rather than go out and headhunt the best manager that money can buy (regardless of nationality) to do what Guus Hiddink did with Korea or Rehhagel did with Greece, not simply mould a bunch of limited players into contenders by any means necessary (because England have a level of quality and experience in that squad which dwarfs what Korea and Greece had) but approach the job with ambition, with a concrete vision, with a plan towards implementing that vision and a level of organisation that gives his players the best possible chance they have of winning. So it’s ok to keep a manager clearly out of his depth and even champion him because this is an “impossible job” anyway (called such by Winter in two articles on 20 June and 4 September)? It’s ok to accept mediocrity from your manager because “the flaws of English football run deeper than Hodgson’s limitations” and because “it is the fault of the development system that England have no natural holding midfielder…the fault of the avaricious Premier League, and those club managers thinking only short-term, that English prospects are not trusted…the fault of certain young players and their agents that they focus more on money than trophies and self-improvement”? It’s all the system’s fault? By that logic the Greek Superleague must have been churning out a golden generation in the early 2000’s, I must have just imagined former Leicester stalwart Theo Zagorakis lifting the trophy and being named Euro 2004 player of the tournament…

Even if simple common sense doesn’t tell you that the English game is deeply flawed, a quick comparison with Germany (who have gone from losing 1-5 at home to England in 2001 to beating Brazil on their home patch 7-1 in a World Cup semi-final not 13 years later) will highlight the problems to which Winter is referring. Those are accepted; the point is that even if the FA had a plan to rival that of Germany in the early 2000’s which ultimately led to 3rd, 2nd, 3rd and 1st place finishes since 2006 and the likes of Jens Jeremies, Fredi Bobic, Kevin Kurányi and Carsten Jancker giving way to Mario Götze, Thomas Müller, Toni Kroos and Mesut Özil (and the evidence says they don’t), even if said theoretical plan eventually bore fruit to the same extent and a new wave of young English footballers began to emulate in the next decade what the Germans have done in this one, the very simple proposition is that Roy Hodgson should still be doing better than he is with the raw talent at his disposal. To blithely pass off the England job as “impossible” does a massive disservice to players like Sturridge, Sterling, Henderson, Lallana, Hart, Wilshere, Shaw, Chambers, Barkley, Walcott, Welbeck and Stones, all talented footballers in their early to mid-twenties who deserve better than to be lumbered with a tactical dinosaur who once stood on the sideline at St. James’ Park furiously rubbing his face because he simply didn’t know how to stop Liverpool being beaten 3-1 by Newcastle. Even if there was a plan in place to change the system to which Winter refers, instead of sticking with Hodgson until that plan bears fruit or a new generation of English coaches appear, why not “stick with” your players instead and get the right man in to get the best out of them? The rigid idea that “the England manager should be English” is a cop-out, pure and simple.

Winter isn’t the only member of the media to whom it appears far more palatable to blame the players and the system that has produced them than to blame the manager or the organisation which hired him. On Tuesday, the day after the transfer window closed (or “slammed shut” in Sky’s lexicon) in a piece largely previewing England’s friendly with Norway at Wembley, Paul Hayward bemoaned the list of “downwardly mobile English talent” over the summer, specifically naming Danny Welbeck, Tom Cleverley, Nick Powell, Jack Rodwell, Micah Richards, Aaron Lennon, Andros Townsend, James Milner and Glen Johnson who were “either culled by top-six clubs or told they might be available at the right price”. Indeed, Hayward described the English footballer as being “left outside with the empty bottles” during “another cork-popping transfer window of sometimes grotesque extravagance” while inferring that the arrivals of “three household names” from abroad, Falcao, Ángel di María and Mario Balotelli, were a symptom of the same malaise referred to by Winter which is gripping English football generally and, more specifically, the national team. Those bloody foreigners again #smh

I surely cannot be the only one who sees this as a case of moaning for the sake of moaning, or moaning for the sake of excusing the manager of all responsibility. To consider just a few of the names mentioned by Hayward, it was Jack Rodwell’s decision (like Scott Sinclair before him) to leave a top-half club (which is now back in Europe, incidentally) where he was first-choice to go to Manchester City and try his luck dislodging the likes of Yaya Touré. His choice, and a move away would surely be better for him and the England team. Danny Welbeck’s position is actually better now given that he’s playing Champions League football at another big club and no longer finds himself behind the undroppable Van Persie and Rooney in the pecking order. What, would it have been better for him to warm the bench behind those two and Falcao? Micah Richards, who has barely played for City in two years, is going to a foreign league with a decent club (Fiorentina) where he can hopefully get his career back on track, and that’s somehow bad? If Glen Johnson has been told he can leave Anfield, it’s because his performances have deteriorated in a manner not commensurate with his salary. James Milner took one of the worst corners I’ve ever seen against Norway, sending a teammate scurrying back towards the halfway line to retrieve it, so not great timing mentioning him, yet he would undoubtedly have some high-profile suitors if he decided to leave City. Is it preferable that he stay on the bench there when those ahead of him are clearly performing better?

Let’s not consider the development of Daniel Sturridge, Raheem Sterling, Jordan Henderson and Jon Flanagan at Anfield or the arrival of Adam Lallana this summer, all of whom will be playing Champions League football from next week, or the all-English central defensive partnership at Chelsea (one of them still not picked by choice), or the fact that Welbeck will be first-choice for Arsenal over the next few months along with Jack Wilshere and (potentially) Callum Chambers, or that England’s number one ‘keeper plays for the Premier League champions. Most of all, let’s forget that Antonios Nikopolidis, Giourkas Seitaridis, Traianos Dellas, Michalis Kapsis, Takis Fyssas, Stelios Giannakopoulos, Angelos Basinas, Theodoros Zagorakis, Kostas Katsouranis, Angelos Charisteas and Zisis Vryzas won an international tournament ten years ago because that would lead to questions as to why a squad with the talent of England’s cannot make it out of the group stages of the World Cup, and that buck would eventually have to stop with the manager. I don’t know what the likes of Winter and Hayward like about Hodgson, it’s probably just a case of their jobs being easier with him around, but the amount of excuses they’ve thrown out to take the spotlight away from him over the past few months would certainly indicate that they’re not ready to give up on him, and so regardless of what he does or says, I expect the media support for him to continue for another while yet.

Offline Latenight Surfer

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #821 on: September 7, 2014, 08:51:46 pm »
That is so fresh and different from the usual articles we read about England. A new style and it's brilliant.
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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #822 on: October 26, 2014, 05:52:36 pm »
This by 24/7.. Laughed myself silly at it

Quote
Christ you really are a joyless, miserable fucking twat aren't you. Locked. Bugger off somewhere else and spread your misery. I would take a thousand phaseofplays over you any day of the week.
« Last Edit: October 26, 2014, 06:00:27 pm by Tepid Hubwis »
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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #823 on: October 26, 2014, 05:58:21 pm »
This by SP... Laughed myself silly at it


24/7 but yes :P

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #824 on: October 26, 2014, 06:00:45 pm »
24/7 but yes :P
cheers, edited... Always always get them mixed up!!
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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #825 on: October 26, 2014, 06:09:37 pm »
cheers, edited... Always always get them mixed up!!
Ta! No higher praise for me, no higher insult for him :wave

Offline The 5th Benitle

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #826 on: November 11, 2014, 07:53:10 pm »
Outstanding



It was around this time last year that I wrote at length about our skipper.


The general gist was that of expectation. That his body was slowly in decline. That although his anaerobic fitness (the ability to perform multiple sprints with short recovery time) would gradually fall off a cliff,  he still had something significant to offer the squad and his technical qualities would find their place in our system. I was quite harsh on Gerrard (bar the romanticism in his exploits and miracles he had pulled off for the club in the past) but my point was a fairly clear one; Stevie was becoming very much a luxury player in regards to what he could offer and produce in any given game. His playing time had to be managed over the next 12 months; that was an expectancy on my part and Gerrard continued into the second half of the season expressing his superb vision and ability to be a key player at the highest level with several swashbuckling performances in his new quarterback role.


Twelve months later (maybe a tad more) this expectation hasn’t been met. Gerrard has still played a significantly numerous amount of minutes for club and country, being used heavily, and where once the way we played suited Gerrard with space being created for him by two forwards always looking to get in behind the defence with superb 1v1 qualities, pushing defenders back, giving Stevie the time and space receive the pass, get his head up, with multiple targets to aim for long and short, things have evolved (or devolved) since then.


But I’m not really here to discuss the tactical issues Gerrard has had with the loss of Suarez (and Sturridge thus far) as this is already something which is being discussed and covered pretty coherently by others and seems fairly obvious. Without a significant goal and pace threat to push teams back, teams are pinning us in more, we’re stuck deeper, Gerrard isn’t being given the time and space he needs as his nervous system slows down and he needs that extra split second to adjust his body shape and the ball to pull off each pass. The quicker he is pressed, the more trouble he is in, rendering his game almost inoperable when man marked (and this has always been a weakness of his no matter what year or position he is in).


It’s a pretty fundamental flaw in Gerrard’s inclusion at the moment. We simply cannot get the best out of him with the systems current set up. Without those runners, without that time and space on the ball, and Gerrard’s weaknesses – his positional sense, his inability to turn quickly and his lack of acceleration, are being ruthlessly exploited with little to nothing gained. A lob sided back four does him no favours, and the way they drop off after he has been beaten often hinders his ability to recover a situation as nobody is slowing the opposition up substantially.


But as I aforementioned, this is not really my gripe, for want of a better word, for Gerrard’s constant inclusion. I have always enjoyed writing and discussing at length systems, spaces, shape etc, and as a whole I think Brendan is making a major error in persisting with players he ‘trusts’ rather than players who would suit how we are playing at the moment and have done since Suarez’ departure. It’s arguable that Mignolet, Johnson, Skrtel, Gerrard and all our strikers bar Sturridge are not in tandem with how Brendan sold us his vision and how we played last year. Yet they are ‘trusted’ and played pretty religiously. It’s baffling, and I expect a lot more from Brendan given his obvious eye and knowledge for the game. He’s almost breaking his own rules.


But as is so often the case I digress. There is so much more to football than a functional or dysfunctional system. It could be conceived as unfair to criticise Gerrard in particularly given the issues we have revolve around with how Brendan is setting us up to play at the moment, we have to look at our long standing captain as a focal point. He plays even when he isn’t playing well, he plays most competitions, he usually plays the full 90, he doesn’t suit the way we should be playing, and he is playing badly.


But it’s challenging, in fact impossible, to get irritated at Gerrard for his misgivings currently. He is a notorious slow starter, even in his pomp when he was one of the best in Europe, it always took Gerrard a couple of months to get out of the blocks. Couple this with Brendan’s philosophy to condition players to peak physically around New Year, and I think even if we were playing well, people would be once again questioning Gerrard’s inclusion. Hell, even if we were playing like this but picking up points regularly, it would be over looked until Stevie comes good again and ‘defies the doubters’, proving the haters wrong. This is true, but not necessarily right.


I feel for Steven. My heart aches for the man right now. History repeats itself but it gets all the crueller. Those of us with any sense will never look at Gerrard and think ‘you lost the title’. There were plenty of other opportunities to pick up points that we missed long before Chelsea closed ranks at Anfield. But you can bet your bottomest of dollars, that every time Stevie glimpses himself in a mirror, he will think that very quote. It’s human nature. Alex, Brendan, Stevie’s parents and everybody else involved significantly in his life will tell him this is not the case lad, but he will think it is. He never shirks responsibility, and he will feel responsible.


But this is only one of the latest tales of woe. Of course we have had this before where Gerrard has given everything and been left with nothing. After United pipped us to the title in 2009, Gerrard looked exhausted, the player the team was built around as Gerrard had adapted to playing with, left the club for the bright white shirts of Real. The season after two of the other key players jumped ship in Mascherano and Torres for the Spanish sun and London; Gerrard was left again, as the one world class player in a rebuilding operation starting pretty much from scratch after the club went through its most horrendous financial crisis in decades.


The previous rebuild had occurred after the departure of another star forward who allowed Gerrard to play his game, when his boyhood pal Michael Owen left for a measly fee back in 2004. It had been a couple of seasons since we were last in with a shot and narrowly missed out, and there was a Rafalution on the horizon to be embarked upon, but this was the first sign for Gerrard that the team mates he built a game and relationship with would eventually flee for foreign lands and leave Gerrard every single time as the juggernaut surrounded by foot soldiers.  Gerrard has had this time and time again and having lost out on the title by a whisker in part due to a monumental error on his part, and arguably the best player he has ever played with flying the nest, again. He enters his 35th year still devoid of a league winner’s medal, and can surely feel the walls closing in.


There’s no reason either why he would forget the world cup in too much of a hurry, as much as he’d like to. He led a squad to footballs heart in Brazil with young, exciting talents around him, some of whom he had played with at International level for years, and several who had been part of an epic title challenge with him over the last 9 months. He must have felt there was a chance of competing. Even with Roy in charge I would argue with all the pundits and Roy and say that is one of the most exciting England squads to ever fly off shore. The nation may not have expected, but I suspect Gerrard might have.


You’d think that lightening couldn’t strike twice. Any England collapse that may have occurred couldn’t be pinned on Gerrard as simply as the title crumble had. However it did, and as Gerrard mis-timed his jump, the ball flicking off his head into the path of his soon to depart deadly striker at club level, Gerrard watched helplessly as Luis did exactly what Gerrard had seen so many times previously and fired accurately into the net, dashing any hopes England had of climbing out the group stage. Again, Gerrard will be playing that phase of play over and over again in his head. If only he had jumped a split second early, if only he hadn’t jumped at all, the timeline and events that ensued may have deviated massively. It’s crucifying, psychologically.


He needs a break. It’s been his most testing 6 months in football that he’s ever had emotionally. To be so close and to lose it all on the tred of the turf will be tearing him up inside as he sees any chance of a title medal slowly dissipate further and further away to a land he hasn’t got the legs left to make. The man is human, as we sometimes seem to forget, and we can all relate to huge pressures, build ups, and disappointments in all walks of life that significantly halt us from moving forward. Our brains do not let us just ‘forget’ traumatic events. There is not a day that will pass where Gerrard does not revisit his slip and he is likely petrified he will never have a day without a memory of it if he fails to clasp his hands round the Premier League trophy before he hangs ‘em up. He will torment himself, as so many of us do.


He needs a rest. Not just physically but mentally. The pressure he is under at the moment is ridiculous and now his long lasting supporters of such a truly great, legendary footballer are beginning to turn on him as he grasps onto a hope that he can make things right. It’s probably too late for him to make things right by being on the pitch regularly. Liverpool need to move forward and so does Stevie. He needs to realise that he still has a wealth of quality to offer this team if he is managed in the right way, played at the appropriate times, and that the team is now to be built around the likes of Raheem, Phil and Sturridge to move forward. Gerrard must pass the responsibility on to these lads and play a more supportive role. His experience around the dressing room, knowledge of the game and games where his technical ability can shine without his physical ability causing us more problems should now be his focus. It might be difficult for him, like accepting your spouse leaving you, but you have to do it for everybody to move on.


The responsibility truly lies with Rodgers. Brendan must have seen the change in Gerrard’s perspective, the damage last season and summer have done to a man who has suffered this fate so many times before and now finds himself in a position where he can’t wrestle things back as his legs slow. Its clear Gerrard is massively distracted as well as suffering from the natural hindrances age brings to a previously such explosive player. His contract being up in the air is something else that will be drawing Gerrard’s attention away from the pitch and that needs to be tied up as soon as possible. Give him an extension, but reduce his expectancy on playing time. I don’t think money has too much to do with it.


Rodgers needs to allow some space for Gerrard to pull his head back together, some time away from the limelight. He needs to be brave and take the flack he may get from the media manager and prove that he knows best. Gerrard is having a really tough time physically and emotionally and it is costing the team, it is costing Gerrard his longevity, and it’s costing Rodgers his reputation. It would best for all parties to give Gerrard a bit of a rest, let the experienced pro that is Lucas Levia come in and add some stability with his positional sense and knowledge of the position. His qualities suit us more than Gerrard’s right now and he hasn’t got his head in a mess over a title slip and disastrous world cup. Let him go and play, let Gerrard g and rest his mind.


It’s vital that Rodgers does this soon, in my opinion. Gerrard is of course a symbolic figure and leader at the club, but if he had any other name and had put in these performances he has this season he’d have been dropped a long time ago. Good performances need rewards, and poor ones need punishing. Right now the lack of faith Rodgers is showing other players and the lack of meritocracy in the team selections is a poor example to young players and potential recruits. Rodgers needs to be brave for him, Gerrard, and most importantly Liverpool Football Club, if they make the right decisions, neither Gerrard nor Rodgers will ever have to walk alone.



Offline Saul Goodman

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #827 on: November 11, 2014, 08:25:14 pm »
Excellent post.

Quote from: The Repeated Meme
In isolation, the game was as expected. We were beaten by the best side in the league at present. I think it more useful to reflect on the season to date, for which this game represents a useful measure.

I’m strongly of the opinion that the concerns about our transfers and by extension, trying to apportion blame elsewhere than our manager is simply an expression of the current disappointments. We don’t like to blame our manager for failures and so seek some other target. I see no evidence that Brendan is not largely or entirely responsible for the players we have chosen. He has not indicated otherwise at any stage despite the immense pressure now on him, nor does anyone seriously doubt that core transfer targets such as Lallana and Lovren were his first choices (or at least, when the transfer window was open, few doubted this, whatever the current revisionism).

My view is that I am entirely supportive of the manager’s choices. I would argue that most are showing promise or actively doing well - individually, at least, and when played. Only Lovren and Balotelli can be considered suspect of the additions (in my view) and one can make an argument that both have their potential upsides. Lovren I will address later, and I must disclose that I have a personal bias against Mario and his way of behaving, but one can see he is not comfortable in the lone striker role and should surely only be judged once he has a consistent partner up front.

Moreno has been good and will certainly improve the weaknesses he occasionally shows. Can has been good and improves each match. Manquillo too. Markovic has been patchy but showed some of his possibilities against Madrid and is young yet. Lambert I can honestly offer little opinion on, as he has played so little. He has made a difference however, when coming on late in a number of matches.

No, for me the problem is not the personnel brought in, but the players we already have and more so: the way Brendan is setting up the team and his apparently inexplicable choices - including the apparent refusal to play certain players. No transfer committee, nor FSG, or any other scapegoats de jour choose the way we play and the players we chose to execute that plan. This is the manager’s choice.

So, I have spent some time to reflect on what Brendan is trying to do. It is a sadness of the game (as with politics) that a manager cannot spend some time talking reasonably to the fans about what his vision is, how he is trying to implement that plan and why he makes the choices he does. This invites the vacuum to be filled with speculation, blame-mongering and general panic. Or more usefully, support and faith. Football shares much with religion in this regard.

In regard to last season, it is widely accepted that we lost the title because of our defence. What is less often referenced is that we significantly over-achieved and this has created unprecedented pressures for what was probably a five year plan. I consider that the expected milestone was for us to improve in the second half of that season and have a strong run into fifth place. No-one could have foreseen United having quite that level of catastrophe. Additionally, no-one could have foreseen the victorious run we had and its shape. If we had lost or drawn a couple of the games in January or February (i.e. Chelsea and Palace had happened then) we would have had a fabulous, uplifting drive to fifth or fourth even, an accomplishment with which our fans would have been very satisfied. Getting second was always going to be a millstone, because we were and are a long way from being experienced enough to fulfil the expectations of doing it again or one better.

Getting back into the UEFA Cup would have given us European experience (both players and manager) and we would have built a squad to gain from that experience of playing several times a week. Since I believe that scouting is a long term investment of time and analysis rather than a swift punt decided the night before over a fag and a beer, I think that our targets over the summer reflected exactly this preparation. Most balanced commentators could see what we were trying to do in building the squad and enhancing depth and positions.

Getting the Champions League so soon put a lot of pressure on our decision making. We reacted well by trying to sign Sanchez but most of the manager’s targets were/are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Fans also seem to think (at least from what I read here and elsewhere) that CL automatically brings vast wealth and a queue of world class talent demanding to be signed. The reality is that unless a club  is perceived as being a permanent presence, few players will be tempted. (United rather demonstrates this, as most players and their agents will have viewed last year as a blip, just as they viewed our success as the same. That’s why United has massively over-paid on wages - to ensure it was a blip, otherwise they are screwed). People get disgruntled that we are not buying ‘world class’ even though that is simply not going to happen with just the one season qualification.

So, Brendan rightly chooses to continue with the plan and develop the experience needed whilst in the Champions League. Unfortunately, the expectation of LFC fans in that competition is so massively higher than even the Premier League. Look at the reaction to an eminently sensible and pragmatic decision for the  game at the Bernabeu.

Back to the defence. I think Brendan has reacted to the poor defending we saw last season by going back to his beliefs and original plan - owning the ball as the best defence. From my observations, he strongly believes that competent possession of the ball and strong pressure, allied to a fluid and dangerous attack (which by its nature, keeps opposition teams honest and nervous) is a surer plan that also provides an attacking platform.  He also believes in playing from the back so as to control the game.

With the SAS, this game plan went by the board by and large, although we tried to implement it a fair number of games. We got away with a lot last season because during our run, teams got mesmerised and then terrified of our pace. However, it actually only took three months for the better managers to get wise to what we were doing and where our weaknesses lay. By the end, we were being found out (we all remember Chelsea and Palace, but do you remember the squeaky bum-fest that was the Norwich game?)

Without Suarez, we were not going to replicate last season, and it was not going to be sustainable to play that way even with him. That meant that Brendan has had to try and coach a more measured approach to try and develop a defensive capability commensurate with a league campaign - let alone the Champions League, where away goals are so crucial and teams so much more lethal - as well as preserving the fluid attack. Playing like last season in the CL would have seen us badly mauled, in my opinion. We might have scored, but in that competition, opponents would have scored more and we would have scored less.

I can therefore see why he would have bought Lovren and expected him to play alongside Sakho as our first choice defence. What scouting analysis cannot tell you is how the individual pieces, once combined, will react to the plan and the coaching in the real world. It is clear to me that one or other of those two has simply failed to adjust to Brendan’s coaching - in my view, more Lovren than Sakho. He seems to be suffering a serious crisis of confidence. In the light of this, Brendan has erred on the side of caution and kept Skrtel in the team. He has also stayed with using Gerrard as the defensive midfielder - perhaps through loyalty, more probably because after last season, virtually no manager could drop Gerrard. That time and decision is looming large however, as the centre backs are now so exposed, their confidence is plummeting or gone. I was struck by how Lucas brought not only composure against Madrid, but that his presence shored up Mignolet’s performance too - he came off his line, punched well and looked a different keeper. Toure too, brought the leadership needed and which Lovren was reputed to deliver. For this reason, I consider Lovren to be our only serious transfer mistake, and yet experience tells me that we should give a man a lot longer than 11 games to prove himself. In my view, Lovren’s confidence is shot and he would be best served being taken out of the firing line and coached to fulfil the partnership with Sakho that I believe was originally planned before returning.

The very poor and deeply frustrating playing of passes deep at the back is both symptomatic and diagnostic of our defence’s lack of belief. Brendan has to take responsibility for this - it is his plan. Yet Toure showed against Madrid that confident, forward driving play is possible. It is relatively high risk, but much less than the panicky messing around that pressure inevitably brings. Unfortunately, with Gerrard and Balotelli in the side we tend to give away possession too cheaply in the midfield - this just brings the ball straight back at us, which is not Brendan’s defensive plan at all. Most of our experienced players from last year are tending to lose possession easily. To compound this, they are also taking too long on the ball and not moving fluidly off the ball. This strikes me as both adjustment to new demands (i.e. less sure than they were that someone would be available and demanding the ball) and a conflict in the mind - high risk one touch pass or safety first possession? This takes time to coach and I see an improvement developing in both new and experienced players.

The one genuine omission from the transfer window was finding a player to add to our strike force. Sanchez was a good attempt, frustrated by the player’s desire to go to Arsenal. Remy showed good thinking, and Origi may well prove to be a good answer next year. As I noted earlier, Balotelli bemuses me as I don’t see how he fits anywhere, but I can see that as a partner to Sturridge, there may have been a strong argument. We’ll see shortly. Yet the interesting thing for me is that the self-professed experts have not suggested any names that we could have reasonable had a chance of signing. That probably means that there weren’t any, that Balotelli became a gamble worth taking and that we have may have some ideas in January when some teams are no longer in the CL and thus more willing to deal.

No, I’m generally comfortable with our signings and what I think Brendan is trying to do. What thoroughly baffled me was why he sticks with a clearly malfunctioning unit, despite clear evidence from games as to what will work and what will not. My reflection is that he may well believe (as many do) that stability is absolutely key to developing good habits and embedding his methods. There is some merit in that, as in trusting players to come good when they are being challenged by having to learn new methods. However, I think there has been enough time for players to step up, and some have been over-played in this attempt to preserve stability. Other members of the team have shown the ability to implement the plan and deserve a chance to keep their place.

I think Brendan is greatly in need of our support and understanding. His methods are not about instantaneous success, but embedded, long term thinking. Van Gaal’s United are showing that spending stupid money on transfers and wages is not a guarantee of anything. Pellegrini’s City are wobbling despite having spent a billion pounds and paying their players the GDP of several countries each week. Wenger’s Arsenal are inconsistent and missing key pieces despite strong revenues and 16 years continuous Champion’s League. None of them are that far ahead of us. Yet Koeman’s Southampton are showing excellence whilst their players are paid in shiny beads and conch shells so it’s clearly not about money alone as some maintain.

Brendan looked really dispirited in his post match interview after Chelsea. Hearing boos at Anfield may well have hit him hard. I believe he is working really hard to address the concerns we all feel - it’s just not quite coming together and he knows he has hugely difficult decisions to make. I am absolutely sure the players and him are not taking this lightly as some here like to suggest. This is when he truly becomes a Liverpool manager, forged in the fire of expectation and history. He’s got all the tools, all the self-belief needed. he needs, as we do, this time of hard knocks. Nothing of worth is gained easily or without pain. We sometimes forget how little experience he has of the very highest level. It will come, but can only do so through trial.

I used to have this quote by Thomas Paine in my signature and I think it still provides wisdom for this season:

“These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.”

The real test for Brendan comes this next couple of weeks as he ponders the challenges ahead. Will players be chosen on merit? Will he address Gerrard’s decline? Will he adapt his formation and approach to the strengths we show with Daniel in the team?

I’m looking forward to finding out.

Offline kavah

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #828 on: November 27, 2014, 04:54:13 pm »
not a bad 2p worth from our resident philosopher

I think last season's success may have come too soon for Rodgers. It raised expectations and a lot of the original problems were masked by the brilliance of Suarez, in hindsight you were always due a bit of a dip with his departure.
Although grossly overrated on here last season I do think he is a talented manager still learning his trade, he does a lot of things very well and although he could have bought better I think he has it in him to coach the new arrivals to a good standard.
It's obvious he needs help with the defensive side of coaching, maybe a stronger number 2 is required at a club with the ambitions of Liverpool, somebody defence oriented and not afraid to speak his mind on where Rodgers is getting it wrong.
I think he deserves and will get the time to turn it around, he's shown he is capable of producing great football. Unless an exceptional manager like Klopp (who is also having difficulties) becomes available you would be daft to let him go and straight back to square one again.
Just my 2ps worth.

Offline The 5th Benitle

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #829 on: November 27, 2014, 10:51:19 pm »
Outstanding

The question "what is Liverpool's best midfield combination?" cannot be answered by writing a few names next to each other on a piece of paper or a screen. The engine, the control room, the brain of the team. However you describe it, midfield is integral to how a team plays and performs. Its construction is dependent on how the manager wants his team to play but also in a chicken and egg kind of way, it is optimized based on the team (and players) performance at any given moment. Midfield is a crucial part of a functional team and it can't be selected without assessing the team as a whole. To select a midfield is to select a team.

The club's philosophy, the manager's tactical tendencies and preferred system of play are all factored in as well as the league and competition down to the opposition faced, in-game situations and the results needed.

Some managers concentrate almost exclusively on their team. Others think that the only way to consistently deliver is by studying how their opposition play and set their team up to counter their strengths and exploit their weaknesses. To put it simply, some are idealist, others pragmatist. Yet one doesn't exclude the other and the end of the spectrum a manager leans towards can often change depending on their current predicament.

Formations are the platform to a tactical setup / system of play. The implementation though, starts by defining the roles of the players inside it. Players attributes and ability determine the scope available to define them. Through the team, roles can be more or less specialized. Some concepts such as midfield rotation require players who are all-rounded and this can be applied through the whole team with players in every position being comfortable in all facets of the game to achieve optimum interchangeability (total football) or all very strong in specific attributes (tiki-taka). Alternatively, roles can be strictly defined and players with specific strengths targeted to fulfill them.

How Rodgers wants the team to play is an interesting (and difficult) question to answer because while the way he talks about football portrays him as an idealist in his vision of the game, he has at times shown himself to be a pragmatist in his in-game approach. He doesn't really set his teams up with a focus on the opposition but he adapts it to maximize the players at his disposal and the combinations that have brought success.

He did not stick with the pure possession based, high line 4-3-3 (DM-Link-Creator) he used at the beginning (and at Swansea prior to his arrival) when it did not work. He tried the more solid (in theory) 4-2-3-1 for a while and mid-way through last year switched to a higher tempo 4-3-3 (deep lying playmaker + two box-to-box) as well as the 4-4-2 diamond in a similar midfield set up. The beginning of this season as again seen him tinker in search of a winning combination.

The main of the discussion in this thread revolves around who should play the "controller" role. Whether the team should go back to a double pivot to offer a fragile defense more protection. Why Lucas over Gerrard could offer more balance. If Rogers even sees a need for a defensive minded player in that position.

This interview from January 2014 is one where he reiterates his idea of how he sees the team play: http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/liverpool-fc-brendan-rodgers-plan-6525151.

Rodgers highlights how the change from 2-1 to 1-2 in midfield with a single pivot was the way forward as far as he was concern. He talks about how Gerrard's qualities fit the role of "controller" perfectly. It is also important to notice that he mentions the need for Gerrard to adapt to the intricacies the required to play the position. There is also a fair appraisal of Lucas effectiveness as a single pivot when the switch was initially made.

He clearly states that in his preferred approach, the "controller" does not need to do a lot of leg work. Short quick movement is what is required defensively and the two more advanced players are the one doing the pressing. The emphasis being on the distribution of the ball. Gerrard's comparison with Pirlo exemplifying why he thinks he is the perfect candidate for that role.

We all have ideas about how football should be played, about how Liverpool should play. Obviously, so does Brendan Rodgers. Any discussion we have about our team involves a bit of both. How we think it should be from our perspective as well as Rodgers'. This means that any argumentation about which player should play in what position also requires us to contextualize it for the role this player must accomplish in Rogers' system or explain the requirement we expect from it.

In addition to the prior which could be describe as the theoretical side of the the team selection, there is the actual execution of a system and the game plan designed for it. Nothing is fixed in football. What works one day may not the other. What should work in theory may not transpire on the pitch as despite the necessity/usefulness of tactical preparation, a football team is merely composed of individuals, human beings who bring an unpredictable variable to the equation.

We often describe a good team as one who possess balance. A good mix. One that is in tune with the way its manager wants it to play. We all know the best team is not necessarily the one with the best players but one that functions the best collectively. The sum can be greater than its parts. In the quest to achieve this, a key element is to find players who combine well together, form partnerships, have a good understanding. They should have complimentary football qualities but also possess the intangible affinity that make them work in collaboration with each other. Sometimes it happens naturally but most of the time it must be cultivated over time. The players need time to gel, adapt to new surrounding, to new football ideas.

I believe this is where LFC is failing at the moment. The tactics implemented last year, the combinations used, the confidence, belief and trust throughout the team. All seem to have suffered. Can it all be attributed to the loss of Suarez and subsequent injury to Sturridge? Certainly not. Has it been compounded by it? Off course it has. New players arrivals (good or bad recruitment aside) and their integration into the team have had an impact. Was the recruitment drive lacking in certain areas and qualities? In hindsight, it definitely looks like it. Have some of Rodgers decisions in regards to team selection and tactics also been detrimental? They must have (I'm sure he would admit it in confidence too). Finally, there can't be any doubt that rival teams have studied the way we played and adapted accordingly.

At the end of the day, results are king and if the team is winning, few questions about the quality of the football played or the suitability of certain players to step on the pitch are asked. In difficult times, we need to question ourselves as we search for solutions. It is time for our manager to do the same.

What now then? Back to basics is the natural reaction when things are not working. Make ourselves difficult to beat. Shore up the defense by adding extra protection in front of it. It makes sense. The reality though is that changing the philosophy of the team is counter-productive. Persisting with it and making it work is actually the way forward. That doesn't mean not changing anything. The manager has to accept that what worked so well in the past isn't at the moment.

From that perspective, there is legitimate questions to be asked about the persistence with Gerrard in the deeper midfield position(s). It's difficult to understand why in the league, Rodgers has tried every combination of midfield including Gerrard as a single or double pivot but will not try any combination without him - West Ham first half being the only exception. He did it before, why not try it again? Maybe last year second half of the season run with Gerrard as a single pivot convinced him he is by far the best choice for the position.

In general though, it is quite frankly baffling that we are in the situation where at 34, Gerrard is still playing every minute of every game in the league and sometimes has even been used from the start three times a week this season. It is not about dropping the captain altogether from the team but instead making a more economical use of an ageing player.

The idea of the summer was to build a squad with strength in depth and competition for places. Rodgers has to look at the options at his disposal and entertain the idea that other combinations may be more suited to once again form a team that performs better then (or at least as well as) the sum of its parts and not the other way around.

He has to analyse his selections pattern and find the link between them, the performances and the results. Look at the strength and weaknesses of the players, the roles they are asked to play and the performances they have offered then make an assessment as to where it can be improved and whether it is the personnel or the tactics that need to change.

The best midfield combination is the one that enables the team to play better as a whole. It is not only about what each player contributes individually but also the platform a balance and cohesive partnership (trio) provides. If the team is struggling to find form with the current setup, it stands to reason to try a different approach, in particular one which has proved to be effective in the past.

That's why there is a strong argument to try any combination that includes Lucas at the base without Gerrard in the "2" in front of him or even a double pivot from two of Lucas/Henderson/Allen/Can. It won't magically fix everything but a fresh approach is often the best way to change things around. It is easy to understand the difficulty of making this decision as it will be portrayed as Rodgers effectively dropping Gerrard. The truth is, it is merely rotation and it is something that needs to be done at some point no matter what.

Offline kavah

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #830 on: March 5, 2015, 08:59:47 pm »
It seems like these kind of negative narratives have abounded about Liverpool managers for the past 25 years (excellent opening post, by the way). It comes with the territory unfortunately and, as manager of the club, it would probably be odd if Brendan Rodgers wasn’t subject to one or two himself (not saying it’s right, but that’s the way it is). It’s 25 years since Liverpool won a League title and that’s always going to be the elephant in the room or, to use another wildlife analogy, monkey on the back for any Liverpool manager until number nineteen is won. It’s also the reason why so many of these narratives in the past have ended up being self-fulfilling in a way because the proof is easy: they didn’t win the League, therefore the recurring reasons given for every bad result or poor performance were true. You can be sure that every time he fails (or appears to be failing) in this goal, the narrative about lack of experience or the David Brent comparisons (which seem designed to indicate a “spoofer” or a “fraud”) or the notion that Suárez carried him to 2nd place or perhaps some other one we haven’t even heard yet will be trotted out. Harsh as it is, winning a League title is probably the only way he’ll ever truly eliminate that.

Let’s take Roy Evans as an example. Aside from allegedly being “too nice” (which I can’t comment on since I wasn’t privy to what went on in that particular Liverpool dressing-room), the big narrative about him was that his team couldn’t defend, that they weren’t nasty enough. We needed steel. In actual fact, Roy’s best team (or the one that came closest to the League title, the 1996/97 iteration) were, statistically at least and with one or two exceptions, fairly defensively robust (for example, they conceded more than a single goal on only 7 occasions out of 38, compared to 16 last season). It wasn’t a leaky defence that cost Roy’s team the title by 7 points in 1996/97, it was actually a misfiring attack. Liverpool, who went into the new year on top of the table (4 points ahead of eventual champions Manchester United), scored a single goal or less in 14 of their last 20 games. Think about that for one second: only 6 times in 20 games did Liverpool score more than a single goal. Mental. And Robbie Fowler, at the peak of his pre-injury powers, only managed 8 in those 20. None of which readily comes to mind when we think of that team.

The primary reason why the title was still in the balance when Manchester United came to Anfield on 19 April 1997 was the defence which, while not keeping huge amounts of clean-sheets, was stingy enough to keep Liverpool in virtually every game. Results like 0-0 at home to West Ham and Blackburn, 1-1 at home to Leicester and away to Forest, Everton and Sheffield Wednesday, and defeats at Villa (0-1) and Wimbledon (1-2) and at home to Wednesday (0-1) and Coventry (1-2) weren’t primarily the defence’s fault. Nonetheless, the narrative persisted and the club sought to address it in the summer of 1997 with the arrival of Paul Ince and the move to 4-4-2. Liverpool arguably became less effective as a result (the attack got a little better the following season, mainly because of the arrival of Michael Owen, but the team shipped more goals and accrued less points) and never got as close to the title again under Roy, but that soft-centre narrative still exists to this day because he never won the League (same with the “too nice” argument – if he wins the League, who gives a shit?) But at the very least, the point can be argued.

Let’s take Rafael Benítez as another example. Even in the process of guiding a deeply-flawed team to a Champions League victory that was almost unimaginable even as it was happening and nearly repeating the feat two years later with a less-flawed one improved by some excellent signings in the meantime (Mascherano, Reina, Arbeloa, Crouch, Kuyt), Rafa, as you mention, was dismissed by many as a coach who simply didn’t understand the English game and never would. And while a lot of it was media-driven in nature, as these narratives so often tend to be, you’ll meet plenty of Liverpool fans to this day who will parrot the same stuff back at you. Two domestic cup finals in his first two seasons and 6 losses in 76 League games between 2007/08 and 2008/09 would tend to suggest that he had a fairly good handle on the English game, but Rafa never won the League so it must be true, right?

He was also subject to exactly the same kind of schizophrenic, knee-jerk reactions as Brendan Rodgers is today during his time at Anfield (Roy Evans probably would have too had the internet been as widespread back then). In fact, I’d wager that if you went back into the RAWK archives and looked at posts in the aftermath of his team’s 0-2 defeat to Middlesbrough on 28 February 2009 and compared them with those following the 4-0 win against Real Madrid on 10 March or the 4-1 win at Old Trafford on 14 March, you would see similarly erratic commentary on the relative merits of the manager over a period of just two weeks. That kind of thing comes with the territory, especially on an internet forum. The League title was so close after 19 years that we could all pretty much taste it, and a poor run of results (3 draws in January, the defeat at the Riverside) seemed to be snatching it away. Seemed. Then 10 wins out of 11 brought us back to the brink and all was forgiven.

Perspective is a wonderful thing if you can achieve it and it definitely helps steer you away from negative narratives, but it can be undeniably elusive. To me, perspective was knowing that Roy Evans and Rafael Benítez were starting from a position of weakness relative to their rivals, Roy having taken over a team which had finished 8th under Graeme Souness just as Manchester United were in the early stages of amassing 7 League titles in 9 years and Rafa having inherited a poor squad from Gérard Houllier with nothing coming through from the youth system (Stephen Warnock was the cream of the crop), a relative pittance to spend in relation to Chelsea and Manchester United, and charged with the task of overtaking the first team in a hundred years to go unbeaten through a League season. Those were rebuilding jobs, and they rebuilt, brilliantly. They came close, but eventually close didn’t cut it anymore.

This is a rebuilding job too, Brendan Rodgers having taken over a club that had finished 7th, 6th and 8th in the three seasons before his arrival. Inside two years in the job (two), he came within an untimely slip of kicking that elephant out of the room, of killing that aforementioned monkey once and for all, inside two years. The level of distrust for him by the end of November was shocking in a way, yet maybe shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise given that the narrative even last season was that his team were leaning solely on Luis Suárez, that he didn’t have a clue defensively, that he was too inexperienced (incidentally, Roy Hodgson was the very antithesis of this with his “methods which have stood me in good stead for 35 years”, blah, blah, but that experience didn’t guarantee a thing). That he was guiding a squad which, with Mignolet, Sakho, Allen, Coutinho and Sturridge the primary additions, had only been good enough for 8th in Kenny Dalglish’s last season in charge, got lost in the narrative. It was about what he couldn’t do rather than what he could, and that continued into this season as new signings like Can, Markovic, Balotelli, Lovren and Lallana failed to impress initially and the huge chasm left upfront by the departed Suárez and injured Sturridge became a black hole from which no goal could seemingly escape.

If you’d have asked me after the 1-3 loss at Crystal Palace on 23 November whether this team had it in them to go on a run of 3 losses in 27 games across all competitions and counting (2 if you count the League Cup defeat at Stamford Bridge as a draw, which it was after 90 minutes), I probably would have shaken my head with quiet resignation and said “no, I don’t see how”. But what the fuck do I know? Nothing, clearly. Working off an imperfect level of information as we are, with no access to what’s happening inside Melwood and largely depending on (*shudder*) the football media to present us with what little information there is to be had, we too often allow our collective reaction to be governed solely by results, by the bottom line, by the here and now. It’s a dangerous thing to do because that kind of thinking tends to be short-sighted and can end up robbing the future to pay for the present, as well as throwing past, proven performance under the bus. It can also serve to strip context and perspective entirely from the equation. What you often end up with then is answers that may not be accurate but are at least bite-size and easy to process. Not coincidentally, that’s exactly the kind of analysis in which most mainstream football media specialise.

Rafael Benítez, for example, got damned for rotation even as Alex Ferguson was doing the same thing; but Manchester United were winning League titles and Liverpool weren’t, so Rafa must be wrong, he doesn’t understand the English game. Or he’s too cold, he doesn’t “put his arm around” his players enough even though Fabio Capello, Arrigo Sacchi and Giovanni Trapattoni have won plenty in their careers with arguably an even colder approach. And Brendan Rodgers doesn’t have a clue how to set a team up defensively even though, suddenly, he’s done just that using, at various times over the last three League games (2-0 at Southampton, 2-1 at home to Manchester City, 2-0 at home to Burnley), a player most of us would have gladly seen shot out of a cannon into the sun before his recent return to the team (Lovren), a central midfielder by trade (Can), a player it has been regularly argued isn’t good enough (Skrtel), a goalkeeper who was dropped for Brad Jones as recently as December (Mignolet) and, in the wing-back positions, a collection of wingers and attackers (Sterling, Ibe, Lallana and Markovic have all played there over the past few weeks).

For the sake of perspective, it should be acknowledged that performances, especially at the start of this excellent run, were often as unimpressive as what went before. Liverpool have still only scored more than two goals 6 times in 45 games having managed the same amount in their last 10 games last season (and one of those came against the bottom side, one was against Bournemouth, and one included 2 own-goals). This team is still struggling to score goals for the chances being created, there are still mistakes in individual players (that’s natural) and in the system which has carried then to 11 wins in 16 League games and only 1 defeat since that Palace game, and certain developments in approach are likely to be (albeit very skilfully) papering over cracks that will need to be addressed properly down the line (e.g. despite Simon Mignolet’s admirable improvement of late, there’s a compelling argument here that we still need something else between the sticks). Accepting those realities will help to avoid expedient narratives when things go wrong again, as they no doubt will.

And yet with that said, Rodgers has shown over the past three months that there’s more than one way to skin a cat (sorry to keep coming with these animal analogies) and he’s proven a lot of people wrong in the process, including me. I found myself wondering during the dark days of September, October and November whether I had ever seen a Liverpool defence more shambolic than what we were seeing then. I couldn’t, and I genuinely didn’t see him turning it around. And sure, if he deserves credit now, by the same token he deserved any criticism that came his way at the time because it simply wasn’t good enough and left Liverpool in a tough spot: 12th in the table after that Palace defeat, having taken just 14 points from a possible 36 and with a -3 goal difference (Leicester City, 4 points back in 18th, boasted an identical defensive record; Everton, 3 points ahead, had scored 7 more goals).

The point is, had Brendan Rodgers been sacked at the end of November, a scenario that many were advocating for and one which the man himself seems to think was a very real possibility, this recent turnaround, one which doesn’t simply stand on its own but alongside two and a half years of real progress, never happens. Who would have been in the job now is anybody’s guess. Who’s available in November only the unemployable? Would Colin Pascoe have taken over in a caretaker capacity? Would Liverpool still be edging towards a trophy and Champions League football for next season in early March? Would the usual names be offered up for the summer, the likes of Klopp, a returning Rafa, Villas Boas, maybe Pellegrini if City opt for a change? Or would Brendan Rodgers have been replaced with the same level of “quality” that Benítez was replaced with? And should you ever sack a manager without having a better one lined up anyway?

Arséne Wenger once said, during the worst period of Rafa’s final season at Liverpool, that “we live in a world where democratic judgment is only in the present, and that’s why it’s very important to have directors who are strong enough to resist...as well to explain why they resist”. Perhaps an even better piece of advice was given by Al Pacino to Kevin Spacey in one of my favourite movies: “you never open your mouth unless you know what the shot is”, advice I took on board in not posting here very much during the past six months because, frankly, there was no opinion I could have offered worth a damn about what was happening. Maybe Brendan Rodgers was saying something similar the other week when he attributed Liverpool’s improvement to that defensive coach he was told he needed. Just when we thought we knew the answers, he changed the questions. Some will nonetheless hold onto old narratives until he wins a League title; others will look at the level of flexibility, adaptability and, yes, imagination that he’s exhibited in turning this around and make that the narrative.

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #831 on: March 7, 2015, 02:08:48 pm »
I understand what you’re saying but it’s really better for everyone concerned, Brendan himself most of all, that he doesn’t.

I loathe the football media, absolutely loathe them. There are many reasons for that which I won’t go into here because this post is already long enough (although you can probably go ahead and picture BBC’s entire line-up of pundits as a starting point), but the bias I saw perpetrated against Rafa Benítez during his time in charge is what will always stick with me the most. I was never a huge reader of newspapers or watcher of television punditry anyway, but even so, I started to notice quite early on in his reign that Rafa wasn’t getting anywhere near the level of credit, or at least objectivity, that he deserved, that other managers got. I mentioned the specific narratives earlier, but there were many: he’s too cold, he doesn’t understand the English game, zonal-marking is an abomination were the main, recurring ones, but what about calling Everton a small club (he didn’t, of course, it was more a dig at the negative approach of David Moyes which saw him leave Everton after over 10 years without an away win at Anfield, Old Trafford, Stamford Bridge or Arsenal), his supposed Keegan-like meltdown in January 2009, no good signings in the £3m-£10m range changed to £3m-£5m eight months later in order to omit Pepe Reina (hatchet-job courtesy of Alan Hansen, full details here)? In the midst of making Liverpool a European powerhouse and slowly building a challenger for the League title up against the financial juggernauts of Chelsea and Manchester United, he was treated with less respect than the likes of Roy Hodgson, Harry Redknapp and Sam Allardyce, despite a collective haul of one FA Cup and a few League titles in Sweden and Denmark against a man who had twice out-thought and out-played Real Madrid’s original Galacticos in Spain and won a Champions League with Djimi Traoré.

Something was off and the realisation only dawned on me slowly over the course of his six years in the job: they simply didn’t like him. Remember during his last season in charge, when he invited Paul Tomkins along to Melwood to do an interview? As I recall, the general reaction in the mainstream media was harsh, the overall impression given that Rafa had some nerve to grant access like that to someone who wasn’t even a journalist. It was largely unspoken, of course, but the dismissal of Tomkins as nothing but a “blogger” by one writer told you all you needed to know. A few months later, the level and nature of the cheerleading and celebration that took place as media-favourite Roy Hodgson was appointed as Rafa’s successor told you everything. This was no objective journalism; instead, what we got was selective judgements handed down by individuals who had left their collective integrity at the door, highlighted (or lowlighted), I thought, by a deeply personal salvo from Henry Winter who characterised the man who would later donate £96,000 to the Hillsborough Family Support Group and break down in tears at the Hillsborough memorial service as a “cold political animal”.

Now, if you think this doesn’t affect people’s views and perspectives, you’re wrong. We know there are people who let this seep in, the ones whose heads you see religiously stuck in some tabloid or other in the canteen on morning break, telling you with real conviction that Manchester United are signing Gareth Bale and bringing back Cristiano Ronaldo and Paul Pogba or, to use an old example, that Rafa Benítez has spent £500m and signed 150 players because that’s what it says here. In fact, this post from earlier in the tread sums the reality up nicely as far as I’m concerned:

My respect for Rafa Benítez and Kenny Dalglish is huge, for reasons that go beyond mere results on the pitch, and, with my feelings towards the majority of the mainstream football media being what they are, I enjoyed it immensely that they had no appreciation (or even tolerance, at times) for them. Rafa always remained polite with it, Kenny maybe less so, but as a supporter I loved it. Fuck them and their snide agendas, right? But a supporter can have that attitude. The problem is that when Rafa and Kenny needed breathing space, when results were poor during the 2009/10 and 2011/12 seasons respectively or when the alleged Luis Suárez racial abuse of Patrice Evra took place, followed later by the refused handshake at Old Trafford, or the alleged racial abuse of Tom Adeyemi around that same time, neither of them got it. Instead of the pressure being lifted a little bit, it was gleefully applied with increased force in the figurative equivalent of what happened to Phil Coutinho after his goal against Manchester City the other week (i.e. Lovren apparently trying to remove his jersey forcefully from his body before his teammates took it in turns to pile on top of him). It helped neither them nor the club that the media had so few friendly voices to give them some respite. And as little time as I have for the majority of these people, I’ve come to the conclusion that, as much as I love them, Rafa and Kenny didn’t help themselves, especially given the proliferation of mass media in the 21st century.

Which brings me to Brendan Rodgers. I can’t have been the only one who heard his riposte to Roberto Martinez’s view that “the derby comes at the perfect moment for us…it can kick-start our season after the good moment we are sharing” a few weeks back (“well I think they had their first win in 8 games, so I can only talk about our momentum”) and thought that the media would have eaten Rafa alive for that (innocuous as it was). But they didn’t. And I also got the distinct impression that, at his lowest ebb in October and November, Brendan wasn’t getting quite the same kind of negative treatment that previous Liverpool managers have experienced. For example:

In 2008/09, Liverpool came 2nd, having gathered 86 points (they also went to the quarter-finals of the Champions League). The following season, 2009/10, they started with 19 points from a possible 36. By game 28, they sat on 48 points.

In 2013/14, Liverpool came 2nd under Brendan Rodgers, having gathered 84 points. The following season, 2014/15, they started with 14 points from a possible 26. By game 28, they sat on 51 points.

Similar runs, but the respective media coverage (or narratives) regarding each manager could hardly have been more different. Now it could be argued that Rafa had been in the job for longer and that Brendan deserved the benefit of the doubt more as a result (five and a half years and two and a half years respectively), but it could similarly be argued that a man with Rafa's track record deserved far more respect than he got. Either way, that’s not the way the media works. Rafa bugged them; he was foreign; his tactics were different; his approach, to everyone from players to journalists, was more standoffish. Brendan includes them. Instead of inviting a “blogger” (Paul Tomkins is, of course, a writer, and a damn good one) to Melwood, Brendan invites Robbie Savage. Robbie Savage! Talk about inviting the fox into the henhouse. Savage is the worst kind of pundit, the one whose main attributes are that he’s a character, his mouth as loud as his hair and clothes, and he’s not afraid to speak his mind. These kinds of people, the likes of Steve Claridge, Craig Burley, I remember Tim Sherwood getting in on the act for a time as well, tormented Rafa. Robbie Savage is the latest of that breed of pundit, not thoughtful or insightful in the least, happy to get names and words wrong and butcher the very syntax of sentences without a care in the world. And Brendan invited him in. Just over a year later? Savage prefaces a column in which he butchers most of his signings by saying that “I am a fan of Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers and rate him highly as a coach”.

That’s called benefit of the doubt, and it helps. Savage was far less kind the other week about Manuel Pellegrini, unleashing simplistic arguments about 4-4-2. the same approach with which he won the League and League Cup last season. People listen to this shit. Now I’m not saying that Brendan should suddenly go inviting someone like Martin Samuel around for a cosy chat like Tim Sherwood has apparently done, a man whose writing style perfectly suits the rag that he writes for, but it does no harm to keep them happy. We’re talking about the expediency of negative narratives; I think we can all agree that the media have a big hand in conjuring up and reinforcing such narratives. I still recall with dread a comment made by Martin Broughton, temporary chairman of the club back in 2010, who stated in a communication with Jim Boardman on the subject of Rafa’s sacking (the original e-mail was succinctly titled “Thank you for killing my club”) that “I’m sorry you think like that but you are entitled to your opinion. I note your opinion doesn’t seem to be shared by the media”. Scary stuff and a real indication of how handy it can be to have these people, if not on your side, then at the very least not trying to have you fed to the wolves.
We have to change from doubter to believer. Now.

Offline fredfrop

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #832 on: March 12, 2015, 07:08:09 pm »
On a lighter note:

She came from Bangor, had a taste for sausage
She studied drama down at Wrexham college.
That's where I caught her eye
She told me that her dad was loaded
I said in that case I'll have a rum and coke-cola.
She said fine and in thirty seconds time she said, I want to live like fewmin people
I want to do whatever fewmin people do, I want to sleep with fewmin people
I want to sleep with fewmin people all blue.
Well what else could I do - I said I'll see what I can do.
I took her  up to   Kenwright's office
I don't know why but I had to start it somewhere, so it started there.
I said pretend you've got no money, she just laughed and said oh you're so funny.
I said yeah? Well I can't see anyone else smiling in here.
Are you sure you want to live like fewmin people
You want to see whatever fewmin people see
You want to sleep with fewmin people,
you want to sleep with fewmin people angry.
But she didn't understand, she just smiled and held my hand.
Blame it all upon the Kop, stamp your feet and twist your gob.
Curse your dad the useless tool, because he didn't support Lib'pool.
But still you'll never get it right
'cos when you're laid in bed at night watching Liverpool sweep them all
It's been 20 years and still fuck all.
You'll never live like fewmin people
You'll never do what fewmin people do
You'll never fail like fewmin people
You'll never watch your life slide out of view, be bitter, twisted and blue
Because there's nothing else to do.
Sing along with the fewmin people, sing along and it might just get you thru'
Laugh along with the Kopite people
Laugh along even though they're laughing at you and the stupid things that you do.
Because you think that chosen is cool.
I want to live with fewmin people, I want to live with fewmin people [etc..]


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swWYEXLa_lI

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Offline kavah

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #833 on: April 27, 2015, 11:46:16 am »
If I may...

...No the essence of his argument is that our total dependency upon two young attacking players to provide the entirety of our attacking momentum across an entire season translates into the fact that anything above a bottom four place constitutes quite a remarkable achievement by the manager and the team.

Of course, there are many within the thread who believe that the reason why Rodgers had to end up relying upon the two young lads to provide his entire attacking armoury was down to Rodgers himself and as such he is to blame for everything and should be hung, drawn and quartered.

Thankfully, there are still enough Reds with a modicum of a brain and perspective to realise that the real reason Rodgers and the team - and us poor sods - were left in such a ridiculously barren and bereft position was actually down to the wanton stupidity and dereliction of duty towards the team, Rodgers and us poor sods by those controlling the purse strings of the club and the cronies they have put in charge of procurement.

In other words two decent attackers of the right calibre and we'd have probably carried on from where we finished last season and won the league. As it has transpired apart from a decent run just after Christmas when Sterling and Coutinho were playing out of their skins we have looked for almost the entire season what we actually are - a team without an attack.

I think that about covers it.

 :)

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #834 on: June 10, 2015, 12:52:41 pm »
The irony is that the Club became great precisely because what Rhi calls earthworms. We became great because we were basically never happy. A young Robbie Fowler walked of the pitch having scored five only to get a rollicking of Ronnie Moran for not getting six. Players medals were thrown at them and they were told they meant nothing as soon as the new season began they were last seasons medals and worthless.

Everyone was held to account, was expected to improve and the moment standards dropped they were history. That is how you become a great Club and how you win things. I think fans have this rose tinted view of the 70's and 80's that everyone at the Club went around patting each other on the back. It couldn't of been further from the truth and if anyone wasn't pulling their weight than us the supporters let them know.

When did that change and when did it become acceptable to basically give up. The owners haven't got the bottle or desire to push boundaries and compete, the manager made a selection surrender at Madrid and the players rolled over and got walked over by a 3rd rate Stoke side. What is the reaction oh it's par for the course. We don't have the right to compete at the top table anymore, then the owners pick on a couple of easy targets in Marsh and Pascoe and we look to sign free transfers.

When as a Club did it become okay to become soft, get walked all over and make excuses.

Something isn't right and instead of addressing it we talk ourselves down and make pathetic feeble lily livered excuses. As fans we get the Club we deserve and if we don't wake from this melancholic acceptance and let the people running the club know that surrendering against Madrid and rolling over against Stoke isn't acceptable then we will deserve everything we get.
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Offline macca888

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #835 on: June 23, 2015, 12:26:48 am »
One of the finest and most poignant posts you'll ever read on here. Fuck all about football but all about the socialism our club was founded on being eroded.


It occurs to me (after seeing Fats on that youtube video above, for some reason)  that at some future date, their will be an update on the 'Four Yorkshireman' sketch but it will probably cause more tears of sadness than tears of laughter. It will probably go something like this.........

1st Old Man:   When I were a lad, our dad worked a 42 and a half our week, every week mind, manufacturing cars that were sold all over t' world, and every summer we were off t' Marbella for two weeks in t' sun.

2nd Old Man:    Two weeks! My dad got four weeks annual leave, fully paid, and he got a Christmas hamper every year off t' boss.

3rd Old Man:    Christmas hamper, Ha! My mam and dad both had Christmas bonuses and at t' works Christmas do me dad got so drunk he fell over and broke leg. But ambulance were there within twenty minutes an' he were off to hospital fer free treatment and physiotherapy, while getting full sick pay an' 'elp wi' rent for t' council house.

4th Old Man:   Twenty minutes waiting for ambulance! Eight minutes I had to wait when I had crash on me way to pick kids up from school gymnasium.

1st Old Man:    Gym-bloody-nasium! Our school had massive sportsfield wi' athletics track, football and rugby pitch and school bus t' ferry t' kids about. Kids used t' play footy ev'ry spare moment they had, an ev'ry Saturday they'd go to watch local team at t' stadium.

2nd Old Man:   Aye team manager lived stone's throw from t' ground and younguns from t' first team lived in flat above t' shops. Well banks wouldn't lend money unless you could afford t' pay it back, so everyone lived within means an' no one were in debt.

3rd Old Man:   Banks! We didn't need banks. We got cash in t' 'and ev'ry Thursday, didn't 'ave bank charges, or fatcats living off the poor.

4th Old Man:   Right! My mam and dad both had full time (thirty-six hour a week) jobs with five weeks full paid annual leave, which paid enough money to put real food on t' table, and a couple of holidays abroad. The NHS gave full treatment free of charge to everyone with free prescriptions, and th'ambulances turned up on time ev'ry time. Ev'ry time you set foot outside o' door o' yer three bedroomed council house (wi' spare room) you saw Bobby on t' beat. Uncle Albert (him wi' one leg since t' war) had employment rights and expectations like ev'ryone else and got special 'elp wi' mobility  and such like. Kids all went to a good school with manageable class sizes and when they left school they all got real jobs manufacturing British goods that were exported all around t' world. Politicians took decisions that were f't' benefit of all not just them 'as voted for 'em, and public utilities was owned by us and used as employment sink so no-one had t' go wi'out work.

1st Old Man:    Aye but you try telling that t' younguns nowadays...........
 
 

Macca resplendent!
A colossus bestriding the
moral high ground as ever.

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #837 on: August 20, 2015, 10:48:25 am »
Want to see more of this please and less of the doom-mongering.

2 games in, 2 wins, 2 clean sheets. Only 3 shots on target faced meaning that we have the best defencive record in the league. The only thing you can possibly criticise is the fact that we've only scored 2 goals but even then that's moaning for the sake of moaning when we sit 3 points ahead of Arsenal and 5 ahead of Chelsea and Spurs

We went to Stoke and did the job. We got battered last season so we went there and changed that. We were tight, we had fight about us and in the end we won through a wonder goal. Overall we deserved to win

Bournemouth came to Anfield and did what every team that comes to Anfield does. They played out of their skin in what is probably the biggest league game in the history of the club. They had a goal correctly, yes correctly, ruled out early on and after the adrenaline wore off in the 1st 20 minutes we were massively on top. Yeah we scored and it should have been ruled out but then again Coutinho should have scored on his left and Henderson was very unlucky to hit the bar from the corner routine. Other than the disallowed goal did Bournemouth create anything in the 1st half? 2nd half comes around and they start brightly again but when they fail to create any clear chances they drop back and it allows us to take control again. We should have wrapped it up when Benteke saw his effort pushed onto the bar but we never and that meant that the last 10-15 minutes where cagey from us and we sat back happy with the 1-0 win and they got around our box a couple of times, once hitting the outside of the post

Overall, we defended very well again, Mignolet had nothing to worry him and dealt with crosses/corners well and we got the goal that won the game. Yeah we should be beating Bournemouth at home easily but then again Chelsea should be beating Swansea at home easily, Arsenal should be beating West Ham at home and Spurs the same with Stoke. It doesn't happen every time

So can we stop with all this shit about Arsenal twatting us on Monday and get behind the team and manager. 36 more 1-0 wins and we've won the league comfortably  8)

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #838 on: September 16, 2015, 02:07:43 pm »
Regarding 2008/09, since Steven Gerrard has brought it up: it’s disappointing, if undeniably predictable (given that the frosty relationship between player and manager which seems to be so faithfully outlined in the book was obvious for most of their time together) to read him make so much of something that meant so little, but let us be fair and even-handed here at least. He is of course entitled to his opinion without being insulted, but so are we. The quotes I’ve seen so far show clear evidence of tunnel vision. I wonder does he acknowledge in his book, for example, the fact that he and Fernando Torres were only able to line up together in 14 out of Liverpool’s 38 League games that season, or make the comparison to Manchester United who were able to call on Wayne Rooney (signed for £25m as a teenager four years earlier), Cristiano Ronaldo (on his way to obliterating the world transfer record in an £80m+ move to Real Madrid), Dimitar Berbatov (signed for £32m that season) and Carlos Tevez (a £30m+ player who, as I recall, eventually left Old Trafford primarily because he wasn’t guaranteed first-team football)? I doubt it, but it might reflect better on him if he did.

Rafa Benítez admittedly made some poor signings, as virtually every manager does, particularly towards the end of his time at Liverpool (but, I would argue, without sufficient finances to paper over those mistakes), and he had the option to keep £19m Robbie Keane that January as cover despite him clearly never really fitting into the team. But when you can’t pay Peter Crouch and Craig Bellamy enough to keep them happy sitting on the bench (both subsequently stated that the issue of first-team football is why they left Anfield) and you’re left with no choice but to find replacements in the same bargain bin populated by a blonde, ponytailed Ukrainian with a penchant for denim and a timid, ineffectual French youngster, the two signed for a combined fee of £1.5m, then losing the title by four points (and building a team that would ultimately be ranked number one in Europe around the same time) seems like a minor miracle in itself, especially when you’re only able to field the most lethal strikeforce in the League (arguably in Europe at the time), the fulcrum of your team, in less than 40 per cent of your games and you’re going up against a club with four of the best attacking talents in the world to choose between (it’s often called Ferguson’s second great team for a reason: because it was great).

These are factors that render connections between the infamous pre-Stoke press-conference in January 2009 and Liverpool not winning the title a few months later thoroughly moot. We have seen the statistics that Liverpool’s points per game and goals per game statistics actually improved afterwards, but even that doesn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that when Liverpool won 4-1 at Old Trafford in March 2009, Manchester United had Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs, Berbatov and Nani sitting on the bench. Liverpool, by contrast, had the relatively inexperienced Lucas Leiva deputising for the absent Xabi Alonso, 36 year-old Sami Hyypia filling in for Alvaro Arbeloa at short notice and Jamie Carragher moving to right-back where he hadn’t played regularly for five years or more. Manchester United had a marked advantage over Liverpool in terms of squad depth, and whether you blame the manager’s signings for that or the amount of money made available to him for transfers (and I personally would lean more towards the latter than the former, though both were undeniable influences), it was this factor that eventually saw Liverpool fall short, nothing else. As Rafa Benítez himself once said, “you cannot win mind games if you have a bad team…it’s easy to talk about mind games when he has a good team and he has won, and that was the case”.

Granted, I obviously wasn’t in the Liverpool dressing-room in the days and weeks following the press-conference, but common sense nonetheless makes it difficult for me to believe that Champions League winners like Alonso, Gerrard, Hyypia and Carragher, Argentina captain and double Olympic champion Javier Mascherano, and European Champions Pepe Reina and Torres (and Alonso again) would have been adversely affected to any great degree by their manager’s comments, especially when the Manchester United players had been listening to worse from their own boss for years (I wonder how Steven Gerrard would have reacted, for example, had Rafa ever said that he’s “from Liverpool and everyone from that city has a chip on their shoulder”?) Furthermore, Stoke was a ground where they themselves had only narrowly escaped with a 1-0 win a couple of weeks earlier in a game which might have seen both Rooney and Ronaldo sent off for violent conduct (the former for throwing an elbow, the latter for kicking out at an opponent) long before they managed to fashion a winner. Even then, Liverpool (without Torres for much of the game, who was returning from yet another injury, and Alonso for all of it) hit the woodwork twice and might have won with a little luck.

Steven Gerrard would appear to disagree, and that’s fine. I don’t believe that he or his ghost writer are sensationalising anything to sell books, I think it’s clear from the bits and pieces I’ve read that this is how he really feels. The quotes I’ve seen also lead me to wonder whether there is a connection between “I can pick up the phone and speak to all of my previous Liverpool managers” and Gérard Houllier’s comment in 2010 that “after Rafa Benítez left this summer, one of the players sent me a message. He said, ‘Boss, he hasn’t beaten you.’” They also pretty much confirm my long-held suspicion that when Henry Winter (who co-wrote his first biography) welcomed the Liverpool manager’s exit in June 2010 with a relish that appeared thoroughly at odds with his position as a supposedly objective writer and journalist, he was simply channelling the Liverpool captain’s own feelings. In fact, I would suggest that the following paragraph wouldn’t look at all out of place in this latest biography: “Now that this cold political animal has gone, Anfield requires a manager who can empathise with players, who understands they are human beings as well as professional footballers. Sometimes players need a boss who asks after their family or tells them ‘well done’”. And who doesn’t say anything out of line in press-conferences, of course.

“One time he did suffer a meltdown involving Manchester United and Mr. Ferguson…I was grabbing the couch, digging my fingers into the arms, feeling embarrassed for him. When I met up with England all the Manchester United players told me Fergie was just laughing at Rafa, saying: ‘I’ve got him. I’ve got him.’”

So what if they did? So what if he was? Any objective, clear-eyed analysis with the benefit of even two months’ hindsight would have concluded exactly the opposite once Ferguson rose to his opposite number’s bait after Liverpool’s 4-1 victory at Old Trafford in March and admitted putting his club’s sports technology department to work to disprove the claim that “the difference between us is maybe £100m spent on players and a big stadium”. Even Patrick Barclay, not noted for his love of either Liverpool or Benítez, acknowledged that “you don’t need a sports technology department to know how wrong the United manager is, just the back of a cigarette pack.” And the conclusion as to who truly “got” who would have only been underlined a few weeks later when Ferguson and Sam Allardyce bizarrely joined forces to fabricate charges of disrespect against Benítez based on the most innocuous of (self-deprecating) hand gestures during a 4-0 win over Blackburn in what had all the hallmarks of a coordinated attack.

“It seemed so unlike Rafa to talk in such an emotional way. You could see the anger in him”.

Er, no, no you couldn’t. This is just demonstrably false. You could tell he was nervous and outside of his comfort zone, but emotional? Angry? “Meltdown”? Absolutely not. This wasn’t, contrary to popular belief, a Kevin Keegan-style rant. Keegan, already broken under the pressure as he would be again a few years later in the Wembley tunnel as outgoing England manager, reacted to prompting from Richard “Did you smash it?” Keyes after the penultimate game of a season which was already basically over and let rip with a wide-eyed tirade, voice cracking, finger jabbing towards the camera. Benítez was led by nobody, made no physical gestures and never once raised his voice. There was nothing spontaneous about it; it couldn’t have been more deliberate had he been reading from a typed, bullet-pointed list…oh right, he was. One man had meticulously sketched out a plan of attack, the other just snapped. That’s the difference between an emotional response and a calculated one.

“He then railed against the fixture list and the timing of matches being skewed in United’s favour. Rafa was sounding muddled and bitter and paranoid. He was humiliating himself. It was a disaster.”

Hang on now, who was it that “railed” against the fixture list again? As recently as a week before the contentious press-conference, Ferguson, an arch-purveyor of the “siege mentality” approach, had stated the following: “I’ve been saying this for a few months, but our programme didn’t do us any favours and I think we have been handicapped by the Premier League in the fixture list. They tell me it’s not planned. I’ve got my doubts. I’m not saying what they do down there, but next year we will be sending somebody to see how it happens, I can assure you. I just don’t understand how you can get the fixtures like that.” The part in bold would appear to carry an implicit accusation of corruption, one that the Liverpool manager was, in part, responding to, so I would love to ask Steven Gerrard to expand on who was truly sounding “muddled and bitter and paranoid” at that time, or why it’s not ok or even embarrassing or humiliating for one manager to speak about Ferguson’s behaviour towards referees but it’s fine for others to do so (afterwards, incidentally, Graham Poll, a retired referee himself, stated that “Rafa Benítez has articulated what referees have been thinking for years – that Mr. Ferguson can say what he wants about them and the FA will allow him to get away with it”).

Back in 2005, in comments that evoked what the Liverpool manager would say of Manchester United some four years later (“they are always going man-to-man with the referees, especially at half-time when they walk close to the referees and they are talking and talking”), José Mourinho stated after the first-leg of a League Cup semi-final that “I know the referee didn’t walk to the dressing rooms alone at half-time…maybe when I turn 60 and have been managing in the same league for 20 years and have the respect of everybody I will have the power to speak to people and make them tremble a little bit”. Which was perhaps fair enough, unlike his baseless accusations of corruption which resulted in death threats to Anders Frisk and his family in 2005, or making more veiled charges of corruption involving Barcelona and UNICEF and gouging Tito Vilanova’s eye in 2011, or spending much of his second spell in charge of Chelsea shouting about conspiracies against his team. Sounds pretty muddled, bitter and paranoid to me. Steven Gerrard’s view? “For me, the ideal situation would obviously have been for Mourinho to have managed Liverpool”. Good grief.

“I couldn’t understand Rafa’s thinking in wanting to take on Ferguson, a master of mind games, when we were sitting so calmly on top of the table early into a new year”.

Well then Benítez, whenever he comes to write a biography himself, will no doubt be forgiven for expressing a similar failure to understand why his captain and most important player was out drinking and becoming involved in needless physical confrontations and landing himself on affray charges “when we were sitting so calmly on top of the table” (after a 5-1 away win). As for the “master of mind games” bit, there is no greater evidence of how large a grain of salt with which any reader of this book should take many of the opinions contained therein. He’ll make a fantastic English football pundit someday, Steven Gerrard, no doubt about it (assuming that Brendan Rodgers or a future successor doesn’t assign him that coveted coaching role at the club). He’s already drank the Ferguson Kool-Aid, which seems to afford automatic entry to the pundit club in and of itself. Never has the process of acting like a dickhead, sounding like a dickhead and, generally, just being a dickhead been given such a lofty title as Alex Ferguson’s “mind games”, and these people just queue up to regurgitate it.

Of course, a cursory glance through Ferguson’s “greatest hits” would tell you that Liverpool won the title handily in 1988 following his statement about Anfield that he could understand why teams “have to leave here choking on their own vomit, biting their tongue, afraid to tell the truth” (and Kenny Dalglish’s withering “you’ll get more sense out of her” response); Blackburn won the title in 1995 after he stated that they would have to do a “Devon Loch” to lose it; and Arséne Wenger won the double a season after he called him “a novice” who “should keep his opinions to Japanese football”, following up by clinching another title at Old Trafford in 2002 and going undefeated in 2004 as Ferguson protested that “they are scrappers who rely on belligerence – we are the better team”. Even Keegan in 1996, reacting to comments that Leeds and Notts. Forest wouldn’t try a leg against Newcastle, wasn’t a proper victim since the title was already gone by the time he snapped, due to his team’s utter inability to defend. And as for Rafa, well, he wasn’t putting members of his own staff to work refuting anything his opponent was saying or getting some other manager to fight his corner.

It’s an odd one. Ultimately the lesson from what I’ve read would appear to be that it doesn’t matter what you say or do as long as you end up winning in the end. “Fighting with the board, other managers and the press wasn’t the Liverpool way” he says (did Rafa ever really fight with the press, incidentally?), and yet calling a respected manager like Wenger “a novice” (or, perhaps, a “specialist in failure”), not speaking to the national broadcaster for years or poking a finger into another coach’s eye (literally fighting) all appears to be acceptable behaviour because there were trophies to show for it and because, as he says of Mourinho, “he created a special bond with each squad he managed…you heard it in the way his players spoke about him…I understood how they felt because they had shared such a big moment in their careers together…I never had that with Rafa Benítez. I would have had it with José Mourinho”. I wonder if that, then, is Rafa’s defining failure in Steven Gerrard’s eyes: that he wasn’t Mourinho? If so, it’s no surprise that so many of us are at odds with him on this one.

In truth, we can sit here and wonder all day, wonder why some behaviours are ok and some aren’t, wonder what Steven Gerrard must think of Pep Guardiola, for example, and whether it would have been more acceptable for Rafa Benítez, instead of reading out a list of “facts” in January 2009, to say of Ferguson that “in this room, he's the fucking chief, the fucking man, the person who knows everything about the world and I don’t want to compete with him at all. It’s a type of game I'm not going to play because I don't know how. Off the pitch, he has already won, as he has done all year. On the pitch, we'll see what happens”. On such matters we have but two options: (a) buy his book and find out, or (b) read his view of Mourinho that “the Liverpool fans would have loved him” and save our twenty quid.

E2K in the Gerrard thread.

Offline Crosby Nick

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Re: Some quality/important posts you may have missed
« Reply #839 on: September 16, 2015, 02:18:34 pm »
Just beat me to it

As if you would have said all that.