Monday Feb 28:
Soaking up the content from yesterday. That’s the great thing about when we have a big win. You get to enjoy the moment but then you know the day after there’s so much more to come. Fans videos on social media and the brilliant stuff the club puts out too. Just so much to digest and savour.
There’s loads of stuff I didn’t see yesterday, mainly because we did the podcast soon after the game so I didn’t get the chance to watch the post match two or three times like I normally would. You miss so much at the time because you’re still so caught up in the moment, but I’ve watched loads of it today.
Klopp’s dancing is great. It’s completely natural for him to act like that but I don’t think there’s another manager in the league who could pull that off without looking like a knobhead. He’s so unique in that regard. He’s a figure of immense authority and he commands total respect, yet he can bounce around like a fool without losing any of that respect. Normally figures of authority distance themselves from those they have authority over and conduct themselves in a certain way. That does not include throwing shapes to Dua Lipa.
Yet Klopp can act like a big soft kid and somehow no-one takes the piss and the aura of authority and respect he has is unaffected. He’s a special human being. Not as special as Alisson though. That man is a saint. Him bringing that kid up for the trophy lift was just an incredible gesture. There’s an interview with the kid today where he explained how it all came about and it really highlights what a lovely fella Alisson is. If he’s not consoling upset team-mates he’s giving fans an experience they’ll remember for the rest of their lives.
Other things I noticed from the post match was that some lads who weren’t involved were a little subdued in the celebrations. Nothing wrong with that, everyone reacts in different ways and if Ox and Curtis don’t feel like dancing around like crazy fools because they didn’t play then I get that. Ox was sat on his own reading his phone while Ljinders was leading the dressing room dancing. Div wasn’t involved in that either although he was sat there, cool as fuck, smiling and tapping his feet. He got on the pitch though didn’t he, so it’s different for him.
The big exception to all that was Kostas, who was front and centre in that Ljinders dancing video. He didn’t get on but if you didn’t know that you’d never guess based on the celebrations. He was everywhere, and never left the skipper’s side when it came to getting the trophy. He was like a Greek Josemi. Except I didn’t resent Kostas being there front and centre. In fact, I loved how enthusiastic he was about it all. No wonder he seems to be everyone’s best mate, he’s the life and soul of the party isn’t he?
That clip of him teasing the fans by pretending to walk away only to then turn and run towards them with the trophy was hilarious. He did it about three or four times too. He’s mad him.
Other notables. Harvey with his pyro was hilarious and has made for some amazing photos that I’m sure he’ll have on his wall soon. He might get in trouble for that but it’s worth it. I also loved seeing the lads make sure Taki got his moment in front of the fans with the trophy. Completely deserved that was. I love Taki, any time you see him he’s smiling.
Tuesday Mar 1:
Abramovich has reportedly but Chelsea up for sale and wants rid quickly. This is so fucking transparent what’s happening here. The Tories have tipped him off that they’re going to have to sanction him and seize his assets but they’re giving him enough time to stash away as much cash as he can before the sanctions hit. It stinks. I saw an article today discussing how it will impact Chelsea if they aren’t sold, because he won’t be allowed to invest any money into the club. Didn’t he stop doing that years ago anyway? Pretty sure Chelsea have been self sustaining for some time now, they aren’t Man City.
Usmanov is also being looked into and may have his assets seized even before Abramovich. Whether that includes Everton or not fuck knows. Would they even be classed as an asset? He should probably be forced to keep hold of them as punishment.
Meanwhile, Kelleher gets his picture on the goalkeepers mural of champions. I love this, it’s such a cool idea. I love even more than when Alisson was told he wouldn’t play at Wembley his first thought was that it was a chance for Kelleher to get on that wall. What a man. He’s a fucking saint isn’t he?
City beat Peterborough and had the added bonus of a Championship club beating Spurs, ensuring easy passage for Flat Track Pep’s men in the next round too. If we get through tomorrow we’ll play Chelsea. No, you haven’t missed anything and the draw didn’t take place tonight, I’m just predicting the inevitable.
Wednesday Mar 2:
L 2 Norwich 1. Job done. Good performance for about 70 minutes and then the intensity dropped and it got slightly edgy when they scored. It never felt like they’d get a second though as when they scored it just refocused us and if anyone was going to score again it was going to be us, as Diaz was looking like the tits again.
Klopp made 10 changes and we won the game, so that’s a perfect night really. It’s a cup so getting through is all that matters and if you can do it while giving almost the entire starting eleven the night off (Ali and Hendo being the exceptions) then that stands us in great stead. Winning a quadruple is almost impossible, no matter how good you are. The reason being that to win a cup you need a significant amount of luck. We had luck at Wembley last week and if we’re to win the FA Cup there will be a game in which luck plays a part.
Look at every team that has ever won a treble and you’ll see moments along the way where if things had gone slightly different it would never have happened. Us in 2001 for example. Needed pens to win the League Cup. Needed Henchoz’s goalkeeping to win the FA Cup and the Alaves game was just so wild that anything could have happened. But the luck went our way in all of those. We’ll need similar if we’re to win a treble or quadruple this year too.
But it could happen. It probably won’t, but it definitely could. Because not only do we have an incredible team but we’ve seen this season that the team behind the team can get a job done too when needed. Players like Kostas, Taki, Divock, Milner, Gomez, Jones and the rest are just slotting in and doing what we need them to do.
I’ve got a huge soft spot for Minamino. He’s such a good little player but to get a starting place in this team (especially up front) you need to be one of the best in the world. Taki is never going to be first choice for us and he’s an intelligent lad so he’ll be aware of that. The great thing about him is he’s embracing the role he has and is making the most of every second he gets on the pitch. His goals per minute numbers this season must be off the charts. I think he’s scored seven goals now but it feels like he’s only started half a dozen games. I’d let him stay here for as long as he likes. If he wants to leave for more football then fair enough, but if he’s happy to fill this role then let him. Players like that are worth their weight in gold. Same with Origi. I hope they’re both still here next season.
How great was Curtis tonight though? Made up for him as he’s responded brilliantly to his cup final disappointment. Excellent in the game before, left out of the final and then sensational in the next game. That’s what you want. No sulking from him. Hopefully that knock is nothing too serious and he can build on this.
There was a funny moment in the coverage tonight when Wright was talking about the ‘This is Anfield’ sign and how cool he’s always thought it was. He said when he played here he always used to touch it but had to do it on the sly when he was going out to warm up because he didn’t want to seem disrespectful. Keane is looking on, unimpressed, and when he was asked if he touched it he scoffed “No, because it’s childish”. Wrighty was arguing that is isn’t and Keane says “what did you get out of touching it?”. It was classic Keane. Wrighty loves the Reds though, you can tell.
Meanwhile, the u19s progressed in the kids Champions League after a penalty shoot out win over Genk. Wasn’t a great performance but they were without Bradley, Morton, Beck and Gordon so they were never going to be at their best. Harvey could play in this too if they wanted. He might feature in the latter stages, who knows.
I was wrong about the FA Cup draw by the way. We got either Forest or Huddersfield and City got a trip to Southampton, which is a most refreshing change.
Thursday Mar 3:
So am I missing something here, or is this Chelsea sale a blatant breach of FFP? They owe him 1.5 billion quid and he’s writing it off, therefore he’s essentially just injecting that amount into the club. He won’t be doing that out of the goodness of his heart, and compared to what he spent buying them, he’s not going to be out of pocket. Not unless you believe that guff about all of the proceeds of the sale going to charity.
Of course John Terry had to post a pic of him and his pal Roman on Instagram. That’s about as on brand for ‘JT’ as it gets. And yet it wasn’t even the least surprising thing of the day. That was that Amamda Staveley twat coming out and expressing sympathy for Abramovich and saying “it’s unfair” that he has to sell Chelsea. Fucking hell.
“I’m really sad today that somebody is going to have a football club taken away because of a relationship they may have with someone. I don’t think that’s particularly fair, actually, to be honest”.
Of course she thinks that. Some people are so blinded by money they see nothing else, and this cunt would have joined up with Hitler to buy a club if there was a few quid in it for her. There are some proper fucking lowlifes who own football clubs these days, yet none of them get the same grief from their fans as our owners do. I mean this evil fucking witch has a mural dedicated to her in Newcastle. No, I’m not kidding. They painted a fucking mural of her and her name is regularly chanted because she’s seen as their saviour. Fucking sports washing. It works.
At least it does if you target the right fanbase. By that I mean the thickest ones. The thing that bothers me most about the sports washing is that for some reason these fans feel the need to defend their owners and fight their battles for them. If a City fan says “look, I don’t like what our owners do but I can’t do anything about it and just want to enjoy the footy” I can understand that. It’s when they feel compelled to defend them from valid criticism that we have a real problem.
We’ve seen it with Chelsea and Abramovich, City with their owners and I promise it will be far worse over the next few years with Newcastle. Give those thick fucks a bit of success and they’ll strap bombs to their fat bellies and go over to Yemen if their new owners asked them too. Then you have us. FSG only have to do something a little bit questionable and we’re ready to riot. They wanted to furlough staff and we fucking savaged them and forced them to back down. Are we the only fanbase with any kind of social conscience?
Friday Mar 4:
On that note, I’m no FSG apologist and never have been, but I’m not much of a critic of them either. I’m on the fence really. I don’t particularly like them but as far as potential owners go, I doubt we could do better. Not in terms of them being palatable as people anyway. Most user rich people are arseholes, it’s just varying degrees of how much of an arsehole they are. And ours are really at the mild end of the arsehole scale.
If they went what would happen? We might get some oil knob heads who would pump billions in and sign Mbappe, Haaland and whoever else, which would keep the twitter fam happy but would be off putting for most of us. So yeah, we could and almost certainly would do worse than FSG if they sold up.
And that was how I felt BEFORE I saw the accounts from the COVID hit year. After seeing that, the only conclusion I can draw is that we’re a seriously well run club. Only £5m losses in a year when no fans were in the stadium? Virtually everyone else was making massive losses, but we’ve come through that while still adding Thiago, Kostas, Jota, Konate and Diaz. We haven’t sold any of our important players to fund it either.
Looking at those accounting figures there are two things that jump out at me. How well run our club is and how close we now are to United in terms of finances and income. That gap has closed massively, yet get this, we’re £100m behind City!! Now here’s the thing, legitimate income is based on the size of club and the number of fans. Look at the rich list and its mostly the global superpower clubs. Why? Because they have the most fans, which means they’re more attractive to sponsors. So they get more sponsorship revenue, they also tend to have bigger stadiums that they can fill, which also increases revenue.
So you get Real, Barca, United, Bayern, us, Arsenal, Chelsea, PSG, even Spurs. The outlier is City. They can’t fill their stadium, do NOT have any significant worldwide fanbase to speak of, and yet here they are, with £100m a year more revenue than us because of bogus sponsorship deals set up (and paid for) by their owners. Yet somehow that isn’t being deemed as suspicious by the wider footballing world? Honestly, it’s a fucking disgrace. The numbers are there in black and white.
There is not a single reason why City would be wealthier than anyone else other than having super rich owners illegally funnelling money into the club. It can’t be explained in any other way than it’s just blatant cheating. Give it a couple of years and Newcastle will be there too. Possibly at the expense of Chelsea, although I refuse to believe that Abramovich and his oligarch pals like Usmanov will end up coming out of this any worse off. The world doesn’t work like that, evil rich cunts always win. If I had to bet on it, I’d say this time next year he’ll still own Chelsea and all this will have blown over for him.
In other news today, I see a number of Reds getting excited about the news that Ruben Dias is out for 6 weeks. I don’t think it means that much as he’s nowhere near as great as he’s made out to be and that player of the year award he got last season was a fucking farce. Probably the most undeserving winner since Giggs. Him being injured is good for us, not because he’s that great but because it leaves them with three centre halves instead of four. Plus they still have Fernandinho who can fill in there. If they lose another one though then that will get my attention.
Speaking of centre halves, LFCTV ran an interview with Konate today and it was great. He didn’t say anything earth shattering, but he just seems like such a fun lad who is having the time of his life here. They showed a lot of clips from the cup final celebrations I hadn’t seen before and it was noticeable how many of the lads went over to him to congratulate him on what I think is the first trophy of his career. He’s already become an important part of this team even if he doesn’t play every week.
….and that was the week that was.
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