ratcatcher

Given the shambles of the last two months that sort of team bonding exercise would have been better weeks ago rather than at the end of the season. They've played like a bunch of strangers with zero spirit.

Its a gerrard farewell not a team bonding.

Just like all people in a position of power, blatter is never going to give it up lightly especially when he can have women nearly 30 years younger than him hanging on his arm.

Like Ive said, he's been very, very clever to make sure none of the shit splashes him.

But this prince from jordan was never a credible challenger was he? I mean where in the fuck in world football are jordan? No-fucking-where.

But, even a heavyweight would have struggled to topple blatter. His power base of African, Asian and South America FA's do not see him the way the rest of the world do.

UEFA could hurt him though. UEFA is the richest and most powerful in the FIFA confederations. Money and a boycott of FIFA competitions may have the desired effect of weakinging FIFA but the big question is, does UEFA have the balls and wherewithall to do anything rather than just talk the talk? myself I doubt it because platini still harbours ambitions to one day head FIFA.

Maybe unseating him would be a start?

Well deserved by Coutinho.

The new home kit is absolutely turd. It looks cheap and nasty, like something a really shit Sunday League footy team might wear.

Get the retro stuff tony. They look good, better quality and cheaper too.

Haha! That's very good.

Surprised this hasn't been mentioned. Apologies if so.

 

So after one of the worst results in the club's history, and a pathetic season to boot. Our lads have jetted out to Dubai and are quite happy to be filmed doing a stupid dance/song about Toure as he's signed a new contract for some strange reason. What the fuck.

Its not taking the piss. Its Gerrard's goodbye and was arranged before sunday. Honestly some folk.

Yes, it is weird.

Obssessions usually are.

Haha.

 

I'm referring to the thread you started about Suarez/Evra, which you decided not to contribute to. Very odd behaviour.

As I said, yet more evidence of your manc obssession.

My position on that is very clear. Suarez was fitted up \ dropped in it by the club's poor handling.

You seem to think one has to comment on a thread because you start it? Weird.

It's a brutal truth but we're a club obsessed with our history because we know we're never going to be consistently at that level again.  I went to the Istanbul reunion night on Monday and while I had a good time I couldn't help but think that was a different era to now and we need to leave it and move on.

 

We've traveled from being the top club in the 70s and 80s to at least aspiring to be a top club again for a couple of decades (without the nous to achieve it) to this sorry mess now when 4th place is something to be celebrated and all that matters about anything is its monetary value.  It's only 11 years since we sacked Houllier for finishing 4th and now it's seen as the target and an achievement better than winning trophies in the minds of many.  

 

I was 8 years old when we last won the league.  In my adult life I have only seen 5 seasons where we have won silverware and two of those were just the league cup.   We mock clubs like Chelsea for having no history but as classless and shadily funded as they are they're making their own history and have won as much in the last 10 years as we have in the last 30.  Still at least we can remind them that they were as irrelevant in my dad's youth as we we were in my grandad's younger days. That's what really matters.

 

Until recent years I always felt there was a possibility of us turning the tide again but as a club we're not even interested in doing that any more so there's absolutely no chance unless we miraculously gain an owner whose not in it for the money.  All I can see is a very bleak future ahead.

I still consider us a 'top' club or a 'big club' whatever people want to call it but, there's no doubt in my mind we're going backwards this year.

Some clown was trying to suggest Ive stopped backing the manager. How so? Of course Im gutted about the result on Sunday and the performances this season. The manager has to look at himself but I dont think he's the sole creator of the mess.

Owners, players, committees, scouts, manager all take the blame. That doesnt mean you stop supporting the manager. Some want him gone. But even if we got klopp they'd be whinging sooner or later.

I agree the future does look bleak.

Indeed you did.

And I used it as a springboard to talk about our ability to replace departures in those days.

No probs, I just wanted to clarify because a couple of people are desparately trying to read hidden means.

You mean like with the Suarez/Evra incident?

Speaking of which, just WTF are you babbling on about now? If anyone appears to be obssessed with 'united' or manchester or that lot down the east lancs as I've called them previously, its you.

Going back to this point, Gary Neville (who you said was right) was arguing exactly the same thing as Section was in that other thread you posted.  So was Gary Neville wrong about that part but the rest of the article was spot on?

 

Here's what Gary Neville said:-

 

Just look back over the past 10-15 years and count the number of players who have left Anfield to pursue bigger and better things elsewhere.

Steve McManaman, Michael Owen, Javier Mascherano, Xabi Alonso, Fernando Torres and Luis Suarez have all gone.

Do try and keep up.

I said 'he's right, isnt he?' That's a question, not a statement. But, I do think we tend to look backwards a little too much.

Keegan did not leave on Liverpool's terms. 

We didn't want him to leave.

He was on the verge of becoming the undisputed best player in Europe, if you believe the two immediately subsequent Euro Footballer of the Year awards.

 

The difference is, we replaced him with Dalglish.

We had the confidence, determination, acumen and swagger to lose our best player, replace him, and become ever better. (Although, our '77 side was arguably our best ever)

Mind you, we did that from a platform of being League and European Champions.

Which is why I said 'tended to leave.'

No, I'm just keen to learn about why you enjoy starting threads contrasting Man Utd with Liverpool.  

Because the threads arent contrasting them with us. Obviously.

And the two different threads are for example different from the 4 or 5 on whether rodgers should be sacked.

You dont have to read these threads which is the reason Im trying to jibb the endless rodgers out crap.

Anyway, Id love to debate some more with yer but Im up at 5am to drive to fucking chester.

I love how that little ratcatcher has gone from defending Rodgers by calling others ignorant to just stop defending him.

Glad you've got some 'love' in your life because you sound like apart from that, you've fuck all really.

Oh and not to mention gross inaccuracies. And clueless.

Yes, the general theme of both articles is that Liverpool are fucked whereas "United", as you call them, are not.  Do you see the parallel between the threads you've started?  Is it just coincidence, or one of your favourite topics?

Haha. You suggesting Im a manc? Kinell.

Business as usual from you.

Ditto.

I'm not confusing anything.

Clearly you are.

The theme of the threads is the same.  Man Utd are the here and now whereas Liverpool are yesterday's news.

 

Personally I'd rather read about Rodgers than dwell on not winning the title for 25 years but each to their own.  

Come on. Chelsea have just won the title. City arsenal and spurs finished above us yet united are the here and now?

You sure as hell was as preaching the Rodgers theme recently.

You're confusing backing the manager with where I see us right now. But Id expect nothing more from you.

I don't know.  I just noticed the connection between this thread and the Gary Neville one.  They're quite similar.

I dont think they are apart from a couple of sentences. But people can make their own judgement.

It seems people would rather have god knows how many threads and polls on rodgers, sterling and the rest.

Neither do I think the article is saying we're in terminal decline. Its saying can we expect to compete for the holy grail especially as UEFA look to relax FFP while the owners appear to have a committment to supporting its principles.

It's not a not bothered attitude. I just don't subscribe to the notion that we're in some kind of terminal decline or that Suarez and Sterling are somehow 'telling' developments. Wankers are piling shit on and not telling us anything we don't already know.

I dont think we're in terminal decline either. But we're certainly not in any ascendency are we? Id hate to say we're in decline but that where I think we're at especially when you factor in where we've got to since 1990.

It's funny that with these threads there's an interesting mini-theme of mancs sneering down on Liverpool FC.  There's this one and the Gary Neville one.  Thought provoking, indeed.

Dunno. Is wallace a manc? Are only Liverpool fan writers like maddock and boardman only allowed to write articles on us now?

Ian Rush, McManaman, Owen, Gerrard very nearly. We've never been a top draw for the cream of world football, Michael Laoudrup was probably the closest we've ever come. There's also a long list of British household names that knocked us back even when we were in our prime. We built our squads on grafters and solid pros, not cunts who easily have their heads turned.

OK, fair enough. But look closer. Gerrard didnt leave. Rush returned within 12 months. McManaman and Owen were cut from the same cloth.

But that's not the point really is it? I mean we could play  player tennis all night but the facts are the club is in a hell of a worse position now than at any time when the players you mention left.

I really dont get this not bothered dont care attitude but each to their own.

Great players have always left liverpool dating back to Keegan's era, this is nothing new nor symptomatic of some greater demise, it's just a load of tedious bloggers and scribblers jumping on the bandwagon. 

 

Suarez left because he was one of the three greatest players in the world just coming into his prime. Ronaldo left the mancs for the same reason. 

 

Sterling is just a gobshite. That's it. 

Er those players tended to leave on Liverpool's terms. Prior to Keegan and up to El Sulk, which greats have left at the peak of their career for better thing?

No doubt some will mention mascherano but he was generally played out of position when he went to barcelona and took ages to establish himself.

I agree sterling's a little shite. But what if Coutinho follows. Then Ibe. Then Wilson etc?

1200 words saying nothing.  

Maybes. But I think the question of whether we can think about when the next title will be won is pertinent. Id be surprised if we win 19 in the next 10 years now unless a mega rich owner comes along and spends shitloads to win it.

Hmmmm. Thought provoking.

Sam Wallace

 

Monday 25 May 2015

If and when the club pass a 26th anniversary without another league title, as looks likely barring a miraculous turnaround next season, then they will have gone longer than Manchester United did in their 26-year wait to win a league championship between 1967 and 1993. That 26-year wait for United felt epic, including, as it did, relegation, near misses, expensive transfer flops and a lurking suspicion that, as the pressure built in the 1980s, something was just fundamentally wrong with the club.

Yet this was football at a different time when, even under the yoke of Liverpool’s domestic dominance, there was always the possibility of change, which came eventually with Alex Ferguson. At Liverpool, that potential in United was always acknowledged by Peter Robinson, erstwhile secretary and chief executive at the club who, as Graeme Souness wrote in his autobiography, held the “fear that Manchester United might get it right one day and if that happened they could take off in a big way and leave everyone else behind”.

For the Liverpool of 2015 who have just hit 25 years without a title, having just United in front of them would be an extraordinary blessing. That group has swelled to include Chelsea, Manchester City, Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur and now the question is not when the next league championship at Anfield will come, but whether winning league titles is realistically the sort of thing this club can still expect to do – at least in this era of football.

You might say they are the same fundamental questions now facing Liverpool, at one of their lowest ebbs, as face the Labour Party at a crossroads in its history. At what level can they compete? And what can they realistically hope to achieve? The 6-1 defeat at Stoke City for Brendan Rodgers had an awkward parallel with Ed Miliband’s election night, in as much as every time one suspected that rock bottom had been reached, it turned out to be some leagues deeper than previously thought.

Ronnie Moran, Kenny Dalglish and Roy Evans celebrate in Liverpool’s glory years, when they last won the league trophy in 1990

As a club, Liverpool have, over the past 25 years, often failed to read the future of football: hardly improving or expanding Anfield while others have built new stadiums; being slow to exploit their commercial potential; selling out originally to the wrong kind of owner. Now elite European football is changing again, with the Uefa decision to relax financial fair play, and as natural supporters of those regulations the club’s owners Fenway Sports Group find themselves at odds with the mood of the times.

It comes at a moment when they have unequivocally supported their young manager to the tune of £240m over three years, and yet have finished second just once – and been unable to hold on to the player, Luis Suarez, chiefly responsible for having got them to that finish last season. FSG and John W Henry have a clear idea of what they want Liverpool to be: a self-sustaining entity in football’s mad world and a club that, as the old saying goes, exists to win trophies.

But what happens when Uefa’s president, Michel Platini, relaxes FFP and the floodgates open again? The mad world shows no sign of relenting. In fact, it might just be that the madness is elite European football’s natural state of existence: the fossil fuel billionaires in the Premier League and at Paris Saint-Germain; Real Madrid and Barcelona’s pillaging their own league’s television deal; Bayern Munich’s one-party state. Gary Neville warned Liverpool of succumbing to their own provincialism at the weekend but in many respects they overcame incredible odds to dominate Europe in the glory years of the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1980, when Liverpool were two European Cups into their run of four in seven years, the author James McClure spent a year embedded with Merseyside police. He described the inner-city area of Liverpool as “one of the most wretched in Western Europe, just as it was more than a century ago” in his book Spike Island about the challenges facing the city’s police force. Liverpool’s infant mortality rate in 1977 was at the average level of 1930, “its general living standards were judged to be those of the 1940s” and the city had Europe’s worst teenage unemployment problem.

All that and Liverpool produced arguably the greatest club team that Britain has ever known. For those of us of Neville’s generation, the temptation was to see Liverpool in the 1980s as an inviolable part of English football’s establishment. Yet they were very much outsiders, a provincial club defying the economic and political conditions of the time. As John Aldridge observed of the north-south divide in the Anfield Rap in 1988, “they’ve got the jobs but we’ve got the side”. Sustaining that success in a new global market for players, against the lure of London with its economic pre-eminence and the wealth of United and latterly Manchester City was always going to be a conjuring act.

There has been a long tail from the league titles of the past, as Liverpool have enjoyed the power to attract great players and managers on the back of their history, and there have been spikes along the way such as 2001 under Gérard Houllier and then 10 years ago in Istanbul with Rafa Benitez – an achievement that becomes more remarkable as the years go by. But the question facing Liverpool as they reach the 26-year mark is whether they can still afford to judge themselves by those standards.

There will be the purists who will never step back from the expectation that the club exist to win trophies. If there is a buyer willing to take Liverpool off FSG’s hands and pump them full of the money that Platini will permit in the post-FFP era then that existence could once again be viable. Otherwise Raheem Sterling’s attitude towards Liverpool as a stepping stone club is a foretaste of what is to come – he was born after the second of United’s first two Premier League titles, never mind Liverpool’s last championship in 1990.

In the next few years the connection between the new generation of footballers and the last league title for Liverpool in 1990 will be even more distant than the one the children who grew up in the 1980s felt to the era of George Best and Bobby Charlton.

As for the 19th league title, failure in that regard only matters if Liverpool still consider themselves to be a club seriously in contention to win it.