deiseach

You don't have to watch your team to watch your team.

Maybe he should have hit the ball against the post with such force that it would spin back into the net. So much better than just bundling the ball in at close range like Gakpo did. In fairness, the teeing up of Mo for the first goal earned Darwin a lot of credit for me. I'd like to see him take penalties while Mo is away, the one he scored against LASK was far more accomplished than anything Mo has ever tried.

Anthony Taylor's solicitors are involved.

in 2014, they were the worst. It was only 11 years since they'd won the title and the thought of Liverpool supplanting them as The Big Club That Couldn't drove them insane. Wind forward to 2020 and while the Blues of the Toffee and Moon variety were leading the charge to abolish football, Arsenal fans were notable in their absence, as were Man Utd fans. Yes, this is all anecdotal, I'm sure you can find legions of Gooners being Gooners over the last decade. Overall though, time has taken the edge off them.

Recycled post from last night.

Fixed that for you.

Top of the league on New Year's. The bantz merchants will bank that for May.

Her: "should we put all his presents in the Father Christmas sack?" Me: "yes, fine with me." Her: "the rustling might wake him." Me: "he's a heavy sleeper, and we'll make sure we're quiet." Her: "but what if he wakes?" Me: "look, I don't mind. Do what you think is best." Her: "what do you think we should do?"

The handball yesterday was the final nail in the VAR coffin for me. I don't say that out of anger, it didn't cost Liverpool the game - had the penalty been awarded and converted, Mo doesn't score a few minutes later. No, what it encapsulates is the impossibility of VAR giving us better decisions. If that incident had happened before VAR, I'd have said that we needed some kind of review system to help referees. Yet now we have one and not only is it not giving us better decisions, we're being gaslit by the authorities with self-evidently untrue rationalisations (AKA lies) of shitty decisions*. As Browny said in a recent podcast it's not only failing to correct injustice - see that Bony debacle at the Forest-Bournemouth game yesterday - it's creating injustice. We've tried it. It doesn't work. Time to acknowledge the sunk-cost fallacy and get rid. *Please all of this is seperate from the issue of the lack of accountability of PGMOL. That they are marking their own homework would be a problem whether we had VAR or not.

If I felt awkward about physical greetings with other men, I wouldn't move to France.

It's something that's been bubbling under for a while, and a couple of things have happened recently to crystalise the thought. My old neighbour called around with her two boys, the elder of whom has just turned 10 so is of an age with my son. She said that he was only interested in Liverpool in so far as it humours his parents. Left to this own devices, he wouldn't even know they were playing. She could have been talking about our boy. Then there was the test event on Monday night. I got tickets for me and my wife, and when she was unable to go I briefly thought about bringing my son in her stead. The main thing that stopped me was it would be his second-last night at Cubs before he goes up to Scouts so I preferred he didn't miss that, but a secondary consideration was that I didn't think he'd find it interesting. Sitting in the Uppey Anny Road, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed myself. The kids football match, Jurgen doing his thing, all the chanting that came with it, simply mucking about in the ground - it was great. And I knew my son would have been bored out of his mind. If he had gone, you'd have seen the middle-aged man smiling and laughing at everything while the 10-year-old grumpily wondered when this tedium would be over. It's not an age thing. Had I been taken by my father back when I was 10 I'd have been starry-eyed beyond words. Neither of my parents had any interest in football in general or Liverpool in particular, but by the time I was 10 I was seriously invested in the Reds. One of the teachers in my school is Jim Beglin's brother. He got a clutch of derby matchday programmes and did a quiz in our class where everyone was asked to name the Liverpool team that weekend. I just guessed - and got 10 out of 11! Yet my son, whose entire maternal family are die-hard Reds and whose father and uncles talk about little else when in each other's company, is indifferent. It doesn't bother me per se. It might be healthier if he skips this particular neurosis generator. I'm just wondering if it's common among kids today.

They wouldn't be like that with Howard Webb. "Another ref demoted to the Championship, which you love to do."

Just as well Dave's not the kind of guy to say 'I told you so,' eh?

I was all set to blame everything on @Chris. Winning was a nice consolation prize.

With respect to Everton's vote, the philosophy of the oil barons will be: why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free?

As someone once said about the Anfield effect:

The thing is, for something to end it first has to start. Outside of my wife and my blood relatives, there is one adult in this world who would give a shit if I died. One. And if I narrowed it down to this island, that leaves my wife., I bumped into an old work colleague recently on Walton Breck Road for some random reason that will not be mentioned on the GF and it was pathetic how gratified I was that he remembered me after nearly 20 years. I'm not miserable or anything, but I read stories of corpses lying undiscovered for years and think that my son doesn't know how much leverage he has with me.

"With my reputation? What were they thinking of?"

Repped for 'runners'.

An Aldi version of Harrods sounds about right.