Leaderboard

Monday Jun 6: New deal for Milner. He’s taken a pay cut and agreed a one year deal. He says the parade influenced his decision to stay and you know that’s not bullshit either. There’s that clip on Hendo’s insta where Milner says to him “mate, what am I fucking seeing? Wow!”. Just a shame Sadio and Mo weren’t suitably moved. Milner is the last of a dying breed though. Well, maybe Hendo too. He’s like Milner-Lite. On the subject of our Egyptian King though, not great developments this past weekend regarding him. Apparently he played for Egypt despite being injured and having refused LFC’s request for him to have a scan. Now he’s missing their next game because of it. Lots of Reds are unhappy about it and I get that. I’m not particularly arsed because Mo’s international situation isn’t the same as, say, Virgil’s or Fabinho’s. He carries the weight of an entire nation and there’s huge pressure on him to play. If the injury wasn’t that bad and he though he could play through it, whatever. He’s done it enough times for us over the years. This is only really an issue because of the contract. I agree it isn’t a good look and it appears that his relationship with the club is becoming strained, but I don’t think this is a big deal and I’ve got more important things to be mad at him for than this. Meanwhile, Trent is getting ‘slammed’ (© every click bait website in the land) for not singing the National Anthem. This is a bit unfair because when you watch the video his lips are moving a little. He’s not giving it the full chest out Captain Brexit Stuart Pearce routine, but there is movement of the lips. Granted, he’s probably booing or singing YNWA, but they can’t prove that so this criticism seems harsh. Funny thing is, someone on Twitter dug out an old clip from years ago of Gary Neville standing there, lips firmly closed, defiantly not singing. There have been loads of players down the years that haven’t sung, but flag shagging has become a national obsession in recent years (taken to whole new levels this past weekend with the jubilee and people waving at a fucking hologram of the queen). I hope Trent sticks to his guns and doesn’t sing next time too. The highlight of the last few days though was an Everton fan site running a news piece on Sigurdsson being allowed to leave on a free and somehow managing to completely avoid the David Unsworth sized elephant in the room…. I mean that’s some serious North Korean style shit right there. Staying with the Blues though and that despicable piece of shit Richarlison got in a bit of a disagreement with Vinicius Jr in training with Brazil. This shocked me to be honest. The biggest Liverpool hater in football not seeing eye to eye with the lad who just scored the goal to beat us in a European Cup Final? What the hell could have brought that on? Maybe Vinicius Jr didn’t appreciate him trying to suck him off for an instagram post to impress the Blues. Tuesday Jun 7: Somehow missed this yesterday, but Bayern offered £21m for Sadio. I’m sure they knew that wouldn’t be accepted and this is just a bargaining position, but fuck me that’s low. I don’t see us selling for anything less than double that so this could drag on a long time. Keita is said to be close to agreeing a new deal. Not gonna lie, I’m on a downer about this. It’s not so much that I really want him out as I’m fairly indifferent towards him really. It’s more that him being here probably restricts what we will do when it comes to restructuring the midfield. Here’s the thing. We have three midfielders over 30, and Fabinho who isn’t far behind. Then we have the talented kids; Jones, Elliott and Carvalho. You can include Tyler Morton too if you like, he looked promising. The problem is the ones in between. Ox and Keita. We need them to be really pushing the first choice three and giving Klopp a tough decision to make, but they aren’t. We all know who the three starters are when all things are equal. Klopp has occasionally chosen Keita over Henderson but he has NEVER delivered a “wow” performance that makes you think ‘this lad needs to play all the time’. I want someone that will do that, but we won’t buy that player if we have Keita here on his 120k a week salary or whatever it is. Ox will leave, but Keita should too. That way we can go out and sign one absolute fucking star who will give Klopp a headache as to who he leaves out. We got that up front with Diaz, we now need it midfield. But if Keita signs a new deal then that becomes less likely. I felt the same way about Origi last summer actually. I didn’t want him to stay because while he was here I knew we wouldn’t sign the top drawer forward we needed to shake things up and give us real competition for places. I love Div and I’m glad he stayed, but I wasn’t wrong about that. We signed Diaz only because our hand was forced by Spurs. Origi’s presence (and salary) meant that we wouldn’t go out and sign another forward, and Keita staying is the same thing. We might still get someone because Ox will go, but ideally we let them both leave and one boss player in. Wednesday Jun 8: Just having a read back of what I said about Darwin Nunez after the Benfica games. Not overly flattering like. After the first leg I wrote: He’s really highly rated but I wasn’t overly impressed. He took the goal well but I think my judgement of him is clouded by the constant diving and the dreadful fucking haircut. His record is impressive and we’ve apparently been scouting him, so watch this space I suppose. I do love a good Uruguayan striker so if he sorts the hair out then maybe I could get on board with it, but as of now it’s a hard pass from me. I’d softened my stance a little after the return leg, but not by much. “Benfica had another goal disallowed late on when Nunez finished well again but was clearly offside. Good player him, despite the appalling haircut.” He was annoying as fuck over those two legs but he was a constant threat and his finishing was great, even if most of them were offside. As for the haircut, that’s only a minor issue that could easily be fixed. His hair game is actually really impressive on the whole, but the look he was sporting against us was appalling as it looked like he was wearing a hairnet. A pony tail or - preferably - an Alice band sorts that problem out in a heartbeat. He’ll be great for us because every forward we’ve signed under Klopp has been. To be spending this much on Nunez tells me that Klopp and the scouting team must be absolutely convinced he’s what we need and that’s good enough for me. I see nothing to suggest that he won’t be amazing for us, because other than Keita who hasn’t been great? Ox I suppose, but he looked like he would be until he was derailed by one of the worst injuries a player could get. Even Keita hasn’t been terrible, just a massive let down based on the hype prior to his arrival. We just get signings right these days though, it’s almost a 100% hit rate. I saw a headline today about how the England U21 coach wants Jones to not play within himself and be the best player in every game and every training session. He’s been listening to me and Paul on the TLW pod, I thought. Then I realised the U21 coach is Lee Carsley so that’s pretty unlikely. He’s spot on about Curtis though. ''It's important to me that Curtis doesn't play within himself. He's got to be the best player every day, every game. I think he can score more, I think he can assist more. When he gets in front of goal, he's got that quality. He needs to show it on a regular basis, consistently, for us. You'd like to have this conversation at the end of the camp where you're swooning about him, saying "what a player". I still think he's building his reputation with the Under 21s in that respect.' Couldn’t agree more. Curtis doesn’t even have a ceiling, he’s got so much talent he could (and I still think will) be a superstar. He needs to start showing it more consistently though. If Keita gets a new deal that’s good for Curtis (and Harvey) because it wouldn’t take much for him to leapfrog Naby in the pecking order. If Keita left and we signed someone boss to replace him, that makes it more difficult for Jones and Elliott. Thursday Jun 9: The Nunez deal is edging ever closer despite “last ditch” attempts by Man United to “hijack” the deal. This was over as soon as we made contact with Nunez and told him we wanted him. There’s only one reason anyone would spurn us for United and that’s money, and if a player is motivated mainly by that he isn’t someone we’d be going for anyway. We wouldn’t be this far down the line if he was asking for crazy money so United are not a factor here. You’d have to be mental to turn down Klopp’s Reds to sign for them. How good is that by the way? Remember when we could never land anyone we really wanted if United or Chelsea or Arsenal were in for them. Shit, we were losing players to Spurs not so long ago. Now look, we’re the number one destination for any player not just looking for a massive wage. Off topic this but worth mentioning as it’s so fucking depressing and mirrors what is happening in footy. The Saudis are basically trying to fucking ruin golf, the sportswashing twats. Similar to what PSG and (to a slightly lesser extent) City are doing by completely distorting the market by paying stupid fees and wages to raise the bar to a level that non-oil states can’t compete with. In football, they’re trying to fuck over the likes of us, Bayern, the Spanish giants, United etc In golf, they just need to sabotage the PGA Tour and they’ll have the whole sport to themselves. The money the PGA makes is mainly given back to players in prize money and filtered down to grass roots golf. It has its faults for sure, but the key element here is that they have to operate within a structure that ensures they don’t lose money. The Saudis have no such restraints. So they have set up this utter shitfest of a ‘league’ where everything they do is just pure cringe. Golfers are selected to teams each week, those teams have the lamest names and logos, and the whole thing is just dogshit. No-one is buying tickets but that doesn't matter because they just give them away for free and then lie about how many people have turned up (bit like City). But it doesn’t matter if nobody watches it or cares about it, because eventually they’ll throw so much money at players that the PGA Tour will be ruined and they’ll be the only show in town. They gave 52 year old Phil Mickelson $200m just to join. That doesn’t include any potential winnings. That’s just money in his pocket for him to leave the PGA Tour and sign with them. Dustin Johnson got $150m, apparently. Bryson DeChambeau got $100m to jump ship. They have a bottomless pit of cash and unlike in footy there is no pretence of FFP so they can just lash eye watering sums at players to attract them, and the more who join, the easier (and cheaper) it gets to get the rest because the PGA Tour will take a hit from sponsors, meaning less prize money. Plus, the best golfers will play where the competition is the most challenging. It fucking stinks, these oil cunts are just ruining sports. They've got their hooks into F1 too I believe, but I don't know anything about that as other than horse racing it's the most boring thing in the world. Of course some of you will say the same about golf, but that's ok. Some of you don't think that Livin' on a Prayer is the greatest song of all time. People are wrong about lots of things. Seriously though, some of you won’t have a clue about this and won’t know most of the golfers involved, so allow me to sum it up quickly. Basically, all of the golfers who people already knew were absolute fucking wankers, well all those are on board. In fact, I can’t think of any of the established knobheads who haven’t joined. The whole thing is fronted by the biggest knobhead of all - Greg Norman - who I’ve known was an arrogant cunt since I saw in person how he acted at Birkdale in 1999. Actually Tom Watson was worse, but that's another story. None of the names who took the cash are a surprise to anyone. It's mostly washed up 40 somethings looking for one last payday before driving their golf carts off into the sun. Any time one of them was announced my reaction was “yeah, I knew he was a dick, not surprised at all”. As I say, there isn’t one of the established dicks that hasn’t taken the cash. The journalists are giving them a hard time about it and some of the press conferences this week have been horrific. Graeme McDowell saying he’s “proud” to help the Saudis get to where they want to get was a particular low point. Westwood and Poulter (two badknob heads except other than when its a Ryder Cup) were given a proper grilling today and just refused to answer the questions, which included “If Vladimir Putin held a tournament would you play in it?” and “would you have played in an event in South Africa during apartheid?”. The obvious answer to both of those questions is “fuck yeah, they would”. Loads of people say “you can’t expect them to turn down that kind of money” and I do understand that viewpoint. They are entitled to take the cash, but we’re entitled to call them cunts for doing it. The real villains here are the Saudis but that doesn’t mean those taking the blood money should get a free pass. Fuck that. Multi millionaires selling out the Tour that provided them with the lifestyles they have just so they can line their pockets further do not get a free pass. They’re greedy cunts with no moral compass. Speaking of greedy cunts, Mo was named PFA Player of the Year tonight. That's right, I went there. Congrats to him. We had six players in the team of the season too, which sounds about right. Could have been even more because Matip and Robbo were overlooked, although the players chosen ahead of them were both outstanding so it’s fair enough. Ronaldo getting in ahead of Son was funny, but his inclusion is not as outrageous as a lot seem to think. He scored a load of goals in a fucking awful, dysfunctional team, and without his input they’d have been in the bottom half. Of course he is a part of the problem there too because his lack of work rate hampers what they can do without the ball, but he’s always been the same and you know what you’re getting with him. He’s there to score goals and he did it. Take away the name, reputation and the fact most of us think he’s a twat, and you have a 37 year old who scored 24 goals this season, including two hat-tricks. That’s impressive whether people want to admit it or not. That being said, I hope he stays at United because they’ll never get better while he’s playing every week. Also today, the club announced the list of players who will be leaving at the end of their contracts. Divock is the most notable, but Karius was on there too. I have mixed feelings towards him. I have sympathy for what happened to him in Kyiv because he WAS concussed and that did cause the fuck ups that gifted them two goals and cost us the game. The real villain of that night isn't Karius, it's Ramos. That said, he didn't help himself by how he acted that summer, and he also chose to sit out his contract and collect the money instead of going to play somewhere else. So I don't wish him well, but I don't not wish him well either. I'm just glad he's finally gone. Friday June 10: Speaking of United, they have apparently dropped their interest in Nunez because they don’t want to get into a bidding war. This is like back when I decided not to pursue Jennifer Aniston when Brad Pitt started sniffing around her. The about face from United fans on this has been hilarious though. Last week I saw Darwin Nunez trending on twitter so I clicked on it in case it was about us bidding for him. We’d been linked with him for ages so it would have made sense. It wasn’t us though, it was United and their fans were going big on it. The virgins were posting their little team graphics with him playing just off Ronaldo, with De Jong bossing the midfield with Bruno, and the general consensus was that Ten Hag means business and United will be buying whoever they want this summer. Fast forward to the last couple of days and suddenly Nunez isn’t that good, he’s not worth the money and United are right to walk away. Yep, just like I was right to walk away from Jennifer all those years back. Newsflash knobheads, you were never getting him from the second Klopp made a move. I had more chance with Jen. I'm really having to fight hard not to respond to the dickheads but sometimes I just can't help myself. Look at this from today... I know I shouldn't get involved, but sometimes it's just so hard not to. The amount of shit I’ve seen from knobheads on twitter though regarding our spending is just weird though. They clearly aren’t teaching maths well enough in this country as people have no grasp of it. Apparently we can’t complain about City because we broke the record for most expensive defender and goalkeeper and now we’re spending big on striker. I mean, we just made £100m by reaching the CL Final and we’ll have also picked up a shitload of money for 2nd place in the league. Are we not allowed to spend the fruit of those labours? Not to mention we’ll more than cover the Nunez fee with the sale of Phillips, Williams, Sadio, Taki and Ox. It’s the very definition of how to successfully run a football club, yet somehow it’s being labelled the same as vastly inflating the value of our sponsorship and having our owners pay it. I mean fucking hell, stupidity on the internet knows no bounds, especially in football and particularly when it’s Manchester City and Everton fans involved. In fairness, half of them are bots paid for by Abu Dhabi. I’m not even saying that as a joke, it’s absolutely true. You can spot them a mile off too. They usually have about 3 followers and a username with more digits than one of those “clubcall” lines back in the day. The other thing they’re pushing is that Nunez is more expensive than Haaland apparently. Sure, Benfica are receiving more than Dortmund did, but then we aren’t paying €40m to a dead agent and another €30m to the player’s dad are we? We’re also paying a quarter of the wages that Haaland is getting, and that’s only if we count what he’s getting through the books. Fuck knows how much they’re paying him off the books. Because they will be. They’re paying Guardiola a shitload off the books too (just like they did Mancini before him), and probably half the team. You only have to look at the money the Saudis are throwing at greedy cunt golfers to know that the only thing stopping Abu Dhabi paying £1m a week is the pretence of FFP. They will be paying it, just not through the books. It will all come out in years to come, but by then it will be too late for anyone to do anything about it and we’ll have several fewer titles than we should have. The sense of entitlement those cunts have is staggering though. It’s not enough that they win the league pretty much every year, they need to have people kissing their feet and telling them how great they are. They’re always complaining about a lack of recognition but that’s because their accomplishments are hollow as fuck because no-one cares about them as a club and everyone knows they’re ignoring the rules that everyone else (other than Everton) are following. Today you had Laporte crysarsing on social media because he wasn’t in the team of the year. A team that was voted for by HIS FUCKING PEERS remember. It’s not like it was picked by the “LFC loving media”. And he had no business being anywhere near it anyway. Van Dijk is a shoe in and although I’d have made Matip the next best, I’m clearly biased. Take Joel of the equation and Rudiger is the obvious next one. He’s top quality. Laporte isn’t even the best centre back at his own club, the arrogant, entitled little fucking tit. Meanwhile, in France. The government has done something of a walk back from their outrageous claims and now admit that they made mistakes. They’re still peddling the fake tickets bullshit though and using that as the root cause for everything else that went wrong. The police did the same thing the other day. “No we shouldn’t have tear gassed you, but there were too many fans there because of the fake tickets”. They’re no longer claiming 30-40 thousand fakes but even the number they have given is bollocks because it obviously includes load of real tickets that were incorrectly flagged as fakes. The CCTV footage from the stadium and metro has also been deleted. Footage which they claim showed fans being violent and causing problems. The explanation given is that it’s automatically wiped after seven days unless the authorities ask to see it. A few things here. Why would the authorities NOT have asked to see it? Why are UEFA and the police not using the footage to back up their claims about poor fan behaviour? Do they really expect us to believe that in 2022 there is no way of retrieving deleted footage? It’s scandalous really. All of the video evidence collected by fans, journalists, TV news reporters etc shows the fans behaving impeccably and the police and locals being bad fucking scumbags. All of it. There’s nothing out there backing up any of the false claims. Yet they claim they had footage backing up those claims but they didn’t use it and allowed it to be deleted? As if. UEFA finally took down the article they posted two weeks ago blaming the fans for the delay in kick off. Spirit of Shankly have been on to them about that, but why did it take so long to remove it? It should have been taken down immediately, but it was left up there. Why? Just to water the seed that had been planted in people’s minds. Those who know, know. But the casual football fan around Europe who can’t be arsed looking into what happened will just hear what UEFA and the French are saying and believe it. That’s why they leave shit like that on the website. That’s why there is no full climbdown by the French ministers, just a gradual walking back of what they’ve said just so there is still blame attached to the fans. Their plan here is to just try and ride out the storm until people get bored of asking questions. It will happen too. The British (and French) sporting press have been great but it’s only natural that other events will take over and this will become less “newsworthy”. What you’ll get is our fans, the club, the local press and MPs etc continuing to fight and then being subjected to a lot of shite from outsiders about being victims and that we should move on. Thing is, we’ve got experience of this kind of thing so we know how it works. Compared to the fight for Hillsborough justice this is a walk in the park. There’s no hiding place for UEFA and the French Authorities. The club have been great so far too and Billy Hogan (my new favourite Hogan, sorry Hulkster) has kept fans updated with video updates outlining what action they’ve been taking. They’ve met with the so-called “independent” inquirer and they’ve already let it be known they are concerned about just how “independent” this is going to be. They’re fighting our corner and while it’s easy to say that this is exactly what they should be doing and it requires no praise, I just think about what would be happening now if Parry and Moores were still in charge. Or Hicks, Gillett and Ayre. It makes me shudder. Werner and Hogan have stood up for us and I’m grateful. I hope they continue to fight for us in the way the likes of Spirit of Shankly will. If we all stand together we can make mincemeat of the French authorities and UEFA. ....and that was the week that was