After going the game for nearly 30 years, I walked away not long after the Klinsmann debacle. I knew then how this was going to end. At that point I thought to myself, I’m not giving these Yanky carpet-baggers another fucking penny. After a few hesitant returns, mainly to allow my son to taste the Anfield atmosphere, I’ve only been twice over the course of the last two seasons. Now other factors make it impossible for me to return regularly any time soon. Although it is difficult (impossible indeed) not to watch or listen if the Reds are on TV or the radio. I'm still a Liverpool fan after all.
My first misgivings about the two leeches was on the eve of the Champions’ League final in Athens and the vulgar way they started to get notes from their pockets and wave them around exclaiming: “If Rafa wants money, we’ll give him plenty of money,” or something to that affect, all the while grinning inanely. I thought at the time, any respectable owners, with the true interest of the club at heart, would never have acted in such an insulting and undignified manner. I saw it at the time as a personal attack on Rafa, and the day after the game he called their bluff and demanded they invest in the club if they truly wanted the club to build on his early success.
Of course the rest is history. Rafa has been proven correct. He saw this empty gesture of waving cash around as part of a PR campaign which a complaint media seemed to swallow whole at the time.
Now it seems that football is infected with the same sort of short-termism and greed which brought many huge financial institutions to their knees over the course of the past few years. Portsmouth’s plight should be a warning to all clubs. In the end, a really big football club will go the same way as Lehman Brothers.
I hope it is not us. And remember too, unlike some banks, football clubs are not too big too fail.
