El Jefe (I love you, you crazy get)

[WaltonRed]

Richard Williams: Javier Mascherano is Rafael Benítez's true masterstroke at Liverpool | Football | The Guardian

[TheHitman]

The chief is never happier than when he has players to chase down and tackle and harangue its why his performances appear better against the teams who push on.....

 

I was in the Villa end for the game early on in the season with a Villa S/T holder and this idiot next to me shouted you argie bastard and said something about the Falklands the seats we were in were right next to the touchline by the halfway line, Masch just looked up and gave him a stare all of a sudden the bloke lost his tongue and looked quite scared ....

[Major Tom]

I think Masch is a very intelligent footballer. He reads the game beautifully and it's no wonder he is captain of Argentina.

 

He is one of my favourite Liverpool players. Even if he is a little barmy.

[Liverpool lad]

I like to think he could handle his ale as well

[Xherdan]

I would agree that the game breaker is a very undervalued player in the modern squad. Even more at the very top level when you have two teams who want the ball.

 

Its in those games that Masch really comes into his own. However, I dont think he adds enough to our pass and move game when we playing Stoke, Hulle etc. We will have the ball for vast periods during those games which negates the strongest point of masch's game.

[Unrighteous]

The chief is never happier than when he has players to chase down and tackle and harangue its why his performances appear better against the teams who push on.....

 

I was in the Villa end for the game early on in the season with a Villa S/T holder and this idiot next to me shouted you argie bastard and said something about the Falklands the seats we were in were right next to the touchline by the halfway line, Masch just looked up and gave him a stare all of a sudden the bloke lost his tongue and looked quite scared ....

 

That's ace.

[OmarVizquel]

He looks like a homeless man.

[Rex Banner]

He's going to be with us for a long time I thinks.

[Glen C]

He's going to be with us for a long time I thinks.

 

Especially if rafa stays. He's definitely in rafa's corner.

[Royal Family]

An awesome player, and we are privileged to have him. He hasn't been at his dynamic best this season, but he is much much better on the ball that many give him credit for. He's also a fearless leader.

 

I still can't help but think that Alonso and Masch are both awesome players in their own right but they don't quite work as a combination, largely because where they are positioned on the pitch.

[Lucky Pierre]

I like to think he could handle his ale as well

I can just imagine him sitting in the corner of his local with a bit of card on his table saying "Outdrink this man and win your weight in alcohol." He has 7 challengers per night.

 

Nobody has been successful yet.

[Tom R]

post the article you lazy cunt before I got atomic neg on your bone idle ass.

[RedinSweden]

post the article you lazy cunt before I got atomic neg on your bone idle ass.

 

Neg him anyway. i got there first

 

Why Mascherano, not Torres, is the real Benítez masterstroke

The Argentine rivals Claude Makelele as the best exponent of an art to which too little importance is attached

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Javier Mascherano was superb in Liverpool's defeat of Manchester United at the weekend. Photograph: Tom Purslow/Man Utd via Getty Images

 

Not often does the person sitting at home see more than the spectator in the stadium, but it happened on Saturday when Liverpool beat Manchester United at Old Trafford. A couple of minutes before the kick-off, while the television camera was lingering on the teams lining up in the tunnel, something happened that gave a fascinating portent of the upset to come.

 

We had just learnt that Alvaro Arbeloa, the Liverpool right-back, had tweaked a hamstring during the warm-up and would not be playing. Rafael Benítez had reconfigured his defence, moving Jamie Carragher from centre-back to fill Arbeloa's position and bringing in Sami Hyypia alongside Martin Skrtel. In the light of the lengthy preparations that would have gone into a fixture of this magnitude – not the match of the season, perhaps, but a very important one to both sides – this represented a serious adjustment.

 

What the roving camera in the Old Trafford tunnel showed was a little huddle at the rear of the Liverpool line. At the centre of a group of defenders Javier Mascherano was delivering an impassioned speech, complete with heated gesticulations. It was the sort of thing one might have expected to see from Steven Gerrard, the team captain, or from the vastly experienced Hyypia, his predecessor. Two hours later, however, Mascherano had given a display confirming my belief that he rivals Claude Makelele as the best exponent in modern British football of an art to which, even now, too little importance is attached.

 

Gerrard and Fernando Torres, who ran the United defence ragged and scored a goal apiece, won the battle of the headlines. But it was Mascherano who carved out the space and time in which they could play, as he had done the previous Tuesday night when Liverpool produced the second of their great performances of the season in routing Real Madrid. The first of those great performances came at Stamford Bridge in October, when Liverpool's midfield squeezed the life out of Chelsea and ended the west London club's run of 86 home league matches without defeat. The third came, of course, on Saturday – when, significantly, United took the field without an equivalent player. Mascherano's excellence was a thread running through all three games.

 

I first saw him in 2004, when he was 20 years old and winning an Olympic gold medal with an Argentina squad including Carlos Tevez and Gabriel Heinze. No one in Britain pays much attention to the Olympic football tournament, for the simple and patently inadequate reason that there are no British representatives. Other nations, however, take it extremely seriously, making it a good opportunity to see young talent on the way up. In Athens, Mascherano, who had made his senior debut for River Plate less than a year earlier, sat in front of the defence and controlled the traffic with a calmness and technical excellence reminiscent of Barcelona's Pep Guardiola.

 

Four years later in Beijing he was doing much the same thing, this time as an over-age player in a squad including Lionel Messi and Sergio Agüero. The impression was the same, and so was the result: another gold medal for a man who by this time had moved from River Plate to Corinthians in Brazil and thence to England, first to West Ham – where Alan Pardew saw fit to give him only seven appearances in half a season – before finding a home at Anfield.

 

Most people would probably claim that Torres is the best of Benítez's many expensive acquisitions, and the coltish striker is undoubtedly a wonderfully compelling performer who adds a sense of possibility to any match in which he takes part. But my choice would be Mascherano, a player who rose above a set of tangled transfer dealings and above the inability of his first English club to understand exactly what it is that he adds to a team. Benítez could see what Pardew failed to spot, and spent £18m on a player whose contribution is proving to be priceless.

 

In the absence of Xabi Alonso, his usual partner at the base of midfield, Mascherano's tackles, his interceptions and his distribution laid the solid foundation for Saturday's tumultuous victory. His competitiveness and his footballing intelligence were on full view as he fetched and harried with marvellous humility and unfailing relevance. Nobody writes poems about such players, but they should.

[WaltonRed]

Fuck off Tom, click the link you lazy spaz

[Tom R]

I don't make the rules you lazy ninkenpoop.

[WaltonRed]

I break them though so dont hold it against me

[jon lad]

By saying that masch "sits" in front of the defence is to not understand his stupendous quality. The man is a pest and I love him for it.

Lazy fuckers like makalele, hargreaves, and all those other so called world class defensive midfielders sit and wait (also known as readin the game) for the action to get near them, our man masch goes looking for trouble, time after time, after time, after time, after time, after time, after time, after time, after time, after time, after time, after time, after time, after time, after time, after time, after time, after time, after time.

[RedinSweden]

I break them though so dont hold it against me

 

You should be grateful if Tom R holds anything against you. People pay good money for that.

[gkmacca]

I still wonder what went on at West Ham while he was there. I know Pardew is a twit, but he did well enough getting to the cup final against us, so it still seems downright weird he didn't even seem to try to use Mascher. He represented everything, in terms of attitude as well as technique, the team was needing at the time.

[aws]

I still wonder what went on at West Ham while he was there. I know Pardew is a twit, but he did well enough getting to the cup final against us, so it still seems downright weird he didn't even seem to try to use Mascher. He represented everything, in terms of attitude as well as technique, the team was needing at the time.

 

He was pissed off that tevez and mascherano were brought in without his involvement. Tevez had to play as he was proving it every game. Mascherano couldn't quite overcome the Mullins challenge.

[hamstrung]

He's good but he ain't that good.

 

He's only human after all.

[WaltonRed]

He's the best in the world at what he does.

 

Lucky to have him.

[Red Phoenix]

Just found a great pic from getty's site. Shame it has their logo plastered over it, but still cool :

 

[Liquid football]

Just found a great pic from getty's site. Shame it has their logo plastered over it, but still cool :

 

 

HA!

 

 

He's got 4 modes:

 

1. Destroy

2. Unexpected mazey run.

3. Celebrate (a strange variant of 1)

4. Edge of area shot - power mater set to 11.

[philyhamann]

I love Mascherano, one of the things you don't see watching the game on tele is how much he cares. Some players misplace a pass, apologetic hand, if Mascherano misplaces a pass he goes fucking nuts on himself.