cotter

no good fretting now. always a chance this would happen when we treated his mentor like some two-bob fool. look on the bright side, at least carragher's happy.

legs are going, may have gone. just the big heart left. not the best combination. particularly when most of his passion is being misdirected at this point in time. too much of this 'he's shit, him' attitude in and around the club. look in the mirror. would be easier to accept his increasingly regular outbursts at team mates if he himself was showing any sort of decent form. don't remember him having a pop so often when he was doing his job really well, 4 or 5 years ago. although he was always cajoling and geeing people up in a positive sense. we've never been about cutting people down to size, it's always been about building players up. solidarity. one face. even great players' careers come to an end, unfortunately. bigger legends than him have been fucked off by some great managers at earlier opportunities. it happens. hopefully he accepts that what's best for liverpool football club isn't always the same thing as what's best for jamie carragher.

good goal. worra cunt ronaldo is.

is that the best you can do?

the continued response to rafa from those who wanted him gone (and got their wish), strikes me as pretty mean, desperate and slightly deranged.

Very different types of centre half though, which is why they complemented each other so well. Sami never relied on pace as he read it so well, he was also supreme in the air. While Carragher could sweep up anything loose, make the last ditch tackles etc. He's always been more about an ability to compete and put his body on the line. Inevitably takes its toll that. Hyypia wasn't a regular starter for the last 3 years of his career anyhow.

This isn't true. The trend, as the recent World Cup and Champions League competitions have shown, is towards 3 man midfields in which specialists of one kind or another are very much in evidence. The Premier League is languishing behind everybody else in that regard, but that's the way the game is going. And anyway, Chelsea last season employed a defensive midfielder in Mikel at the bottom of a diamond with the express purpose of winning the ball in a majority of games. How many of the last Premiership winners were playing with a player like Alonso? He certainly wasn't complete either, there were weaknesses in his game too, many of which were complemented by Mascherano. A lack of mobility being one. Exactly the reason Del Bosque felt the need to protect the Spain back four by playing Busquets beside him. There are no box to box midfielders any more because the game moves too fast, but there are a lot of teams relying on between the lines players breaking from midfield to score them goals, which is where a good ball winner becomes useful and often essential. Mascherano isn't a pure ball player, but he does enough to be regarded as something more than an alehouse footballer. In a 3 man midfield the onus should be on the players ahead of him to make the play. In fact the whole point of him is to allow a team to commit more men forward because he is so good at recovering the ball or nipping counters in the bud.

carragher got raped by jozy altidore. problem with all of england's central defenders, bar ledley king, is that they struggle to defend high up the pitch against decent opposition, even more so without a decent holding player in front of them, and they're all extremely average on the ball. both made mistakes for first goal yesterday. both in absolutely no position to deal with a straightforward long ball.

players like dani alves who recently said: "In truth, it took me quite a long time to leave Sevilla. Liverpool happened early on and I didn't push to go because I had not been at Sevilla for long but later on there was interest from Chelsea, and they asked me to stay because we had a first ever Champions League campaign coming up. They promised I could go at the end of the season. Then they tried to get me to stay the following year too but I decided enough was enough. When Barcelona came in I didn't even want to listen to other clubs." basically confirming what we all know, that we rely, and have relied on top players 'to push' to leave their clubs while making cheeky offers.

might have been better off without him after he scored an own goal and ducked out of a header for the second goal against sevilla at the weekend, just saying like.

harsh on the keepers that.

if benitez goes then mourinho would obviously be a top candidate, but the attempts to talk our current manager down in comparison are frankly embarrassing and often hypocritical. yes he's won the league, but he did it with a £100 million of new players added to a team that had already finished 2nd and got to a champions league semi final. hardly water into wine.

why do they call you the sausage?

haha. i think he's probably allowed to lie down. there's a specific issue with air travel and bad backs. i'm a similar build to him and have had the same problems. it could just be a case of them worrying about cramps and spasms after a flight rather than anything more serious. i think he trained yesterday.