Gerschenkron

To paraphrase Bill Hicks... and God wept I believe was the next verse, as did the Kop as two knobhead cowboys escaped the blame again... Hodgson was never good enough to be our manager - Rafa over-achieved because he is a great football man who the press (and certain red men who should know better) turned against. BUT - the "debate" about Rafa masked the ownership problem which is all that matters. Sacking Hodgson would merely distract from the bigger picture which the protests today attempted to highlight. Whatever the result on the pitch right now - we have to get rid of the cowboys, we have to resove the ownership issue. Having said that, and I know that ownership is all that matters, it is still unbelievably depressing to be a Liverpool fan today - and here's me stuck in Dundee!

Look, let's not forget that it's been a tough start to the season - Arsenal, Man City and Birmingham in our first four games and the Mancs next. Whilst I agree that we've looked dire during large parts of the season thus far, we'll get better (bit of a D:Ream situation in prospect) and most importantly - those cowboy chumps will be history in October. YNWA.

He's good enough as a caretaker manager for sure, and at least he's got some class about him in terms of his attitude and demeanour (unlike the translator now in Madrid). Another positive is that the press seem to love him (though we'll see how long that lasts - if Fulham had been treated like LFC in the press last year, does anyone think ANDY Johnson's name would ever have been reported without being preceded by a vastly inflated estimate of his transfer fee a la Aquilani?) which may be an improvement on Rafa who was terrible at media management. Speaking of Rafa, it's impossible to replace him with anyone who's as good as he was as history will show. No manager of his standing would touch Liverpool until the Cancer has been removed. The only exception to this would have been a former Liverpool player, but you look at what's on offer with that qualification with some trepidation these days. He's done a decent job at Fulham, but he inherited them in a falsley low position (the press seem to forget just how much of other people's money the phoney pharaoh has chucked Fulham's way) with exceedingly low expectations. If he's the manager, then we're behind him, but this is not an exciting development - could be on a par with replacing Edward Smith when we really need to think about the iceberg on the horizon.

Stevie was lucky not to be sent off - but the correct decision would have been to send off both players. The ref was right there and gave the foul so I don't see how they can do anything about it now. Having said that, Taggart is bound to kick up a fuss (though we've done them without Stevie lately) and it depends whether his involvement outweighs Stevie's position as England VC in the internal politics. Overall though - it was a truly enjoyable forearm smash and the subject line of this debate just sums it all up perfectly.

Don't want to add too much this close to such a distressing result but if Mourinho ever becomes Liverpool manager, then that's it for me as far as LFC are concerned. He is scum: I'd rather lose a game than win it by complaining that St. John's Ambulance are to blame for an unwanted outcome or crying about ghost goals or whatever. We are Liverpool. We don't employ people like Mourinho.

LiveFooty TV | Free Live Sports Streaming always believe in his goals

LiveFooty TV | Free Live Sports Streaming

Fair play - I missed that. How about a Fat XI: Paddy Kenny Sam Allardyce Neil Ruddock Ivan Campo Richar Dunne Francis Lee Sammy Lee Jan Molby Diego Maradona Mick Quinn Mike Summerbee Manager: Vicente Del Bosque Chairman: Robert Maxwell

Bellamy? Cannot behave. Can. Not. Behave. Agree on Bowyer - sub him in for who though?

The beginnings of a series - a team made up entirely of c*unts: Andy Goram Andy Todd Kevin Muscat Frank Leboeuf Julian Dicks Paul Ince Andreas Moeller Robbie Savage Diouf Craig Bellamy Duncan Ferguson Manager: Neil (Colin) Warnock Chairman: Rupert Lowe Subs: Bentley, Kahn, Jones (Vinnie), Bowyer, Kluivert suggestions?

I no longer live in the area but this idea is good and I'm with you in spirit. Didn't Labour promise an enquiry before they got in in 1997 and then Jack Straw went back on it? I think the difference now is that the general public at large is more favourable towards the campaign than it was in the 90's - and that's got to be down to the great work done by and on behalf of the families.

If there was a comedy sketch show - a la The Fast Show - purely about football there would be loads of material around. This interview and the whole Steve Bruce debacle could simply be shown in its entirety - no need to add anything. It's like the fashion industry - beyond satire. As someone else said earlier: 1995 - Liverpool 2 Blackburn 1. There's winning and there's winning. We'll win it with some class.

We can't be havin' a black kit. We're not the bloody Taliban. Or worse, the scum.

Did you vote for Ryan effing Giggs as well?

He's awful - we all knew that before the 4-4 but his behaviour was pathetic. Why didn't one of our lads lash the ball at him when he stood in front of free kicks (at least 6 times) - even Howard Webb would have had to book him. He's also hugely over-rated because he's at Arsenal. The annoying thing is that they'll get a load of cash for him in the summer and they won't miss him. Also, what's all this about Arshevin? He scored four against us and that mean's he'll be amazing? Is there a precedent? Oh yeah, wait... ..."Julio Baptista scored four as Arsenal routed Liverpool to seal a Carling Cup semi-final clash with rivals Tottenham" BBC Sport, 9th Jan 2007 And of course, "The Beast" is now the best player in the Premier League isn't he? Oh wait, he's turing out on occassion for Roma...

I'm not saying that we never get the rub of the green, but by my own anecdotal evidence we tend to do less well than the other top sides at home - who tend to benefit from relaxed refereeing. Last night - alright there were six and a half minutes, but there were a pile of substitutions (30 seconds each), there were goals in injury time (at least a minute probably two) and there was Fabregas who should have been booked (cock). The disallowed goal? Hardly controversial - even Ekoku (or whoever it was) agreed. Kuyt was hammered by Silvestre on the edge of their box (everyone heard the boos) and we got nothing. Torres was continually fouled and the ref assumed it was his own fault much of the time. Every 50/50 seemed to go against us. I don't mean to carp - we should have won the game despite this. Figures showing points per game by referee would be illuminating - surely Steve Bennett "officiated" games result in something like 2.95 points per game for the scum? The next thing is to examine why this happens - perhaps it's because Benitez doesn't use the tricks that Red Nose does? (Certainly I'm glad he doesn't). Perhaps it's because we're not league champions and it's easier to give against us than the scum or Chelsea?

The first half against Arsenal last night left me wondering why we seem to rarely get the home advantage enjoyed by the scum and Chelsea in recent years. Perhaps because we've not won the league for a while? Perhaps because we don't strategically set out to influence the ref as part of the managers game plan? Is there a set of statistics which looks at "wins by ref" - i.e. how much more likely are we (or any other team) to win a match depending on the referee. All I could find was: FootStats - Complete UK Football Statistics Analysis - Referees But it's be interested to see how many points per game we get from each of the Prem refs. Good luck Crouch for tonight!

LiveFooty TV | Free Live Sports Streaming is anyone else watching on this? Who's that knobhead co-commentator? Come on red men - red or dead!

Shouldn't be behind - pure bad luck not helped by bad refereeing. Silvestre is getting away with murder. Might be being hot headed but I can't remember us ever getting the better of any referees at home in the league this season? Maybe we should man mark them off the pitch like the scum do.

coverage seemed okay on the BBC, though they lost sound at one point and I flicked to Sky who had that awful Kay Burley covering it for some reason. Only saw the last hour I'm afraid.

Mick Hume HILLSBOROUGH: only half-remembered The deaths of 96 Liverpool fans were not only a tragic accident; they were also the unintended consequence of a deliberate policy. It was 20 years ago today that a crush at Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield before an FA Cup semi-final left 96 Liverpool supporters dead. The images of that day remain haunting for those of us who only watched it unfold live on television, never mind for those who were trapped inside that suffocating cage at the Leppings Lane end. Yet the history of Hillsborough has been somewhat rewritten, so that it is only half-remembered in the media. To judge by much of the anniversary coverage, you might think that those who died were victims of just another natural disaster or accident, killed by an earthquake or some other unavoidable calamity that somehow occurred in south Yorkshire. It seems that few want to apportion responsibility for the terrible events of April 1989, events that are described in almost neutral-sounding language as the Hillsborough Disaster or the Hillsborough Tragedy. If anything is blamed for Hillsborough, it tends to be the ‘sheer incompetence’ of the police who failed to prevent the fatal crush, or the rickety state of the outdated football stadium. This follows the line of Lord Taylor’s official report into Hillsborough. These criticisms are often followed by self-congratulation at how much crowd safety and control have improved in our post-Taylor Report age of all-seater stadiums and CCTV. This rewriting of history removes Hillsborough from the political context that contributed to those deaths – and in so doing, it largely lets the authorities off the hook. There was certainly official incompetence in evidence, and Sheffield Wednesday’s ground was indeed, like most football stadiums of the time, an unsafe dump. But there was something else more dangerous at work there. Hillsborough can be better understood as the grim culmination of a crusade against football fans led by Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government and prosecuted by the police and media. Looking back at what I wrote at the time in the next step, newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Party, I note that an angry twentysomething journalist/propagandist called Hume told a London protest meeting that week: ‘The government has branded young football fans as hooligans, an enemy within that must be contained and cut out like a cancer. So when the police herded Liverpool fans into that suffocating pen, they were carrying out Tory orders.’ Of course nobody wanted 96 fans to die. But their deaths, while an accident, were also the logical outcome of a deliberate policy of treating football crowds as animals to be caged and corralled. There is a long history of conflict between the British state and working-class football crowds, viewed in many quarters as the unruliest wing of the great unwashed. In the 1980s, while pursuing its political war against the organised working class of the labour movement, the Tory government also sought to criminalise and control the disorganised ‘mob’ of football supporters. They launched a national crusade against the evils of football hooliganism, treating the sporadic outbreak of trouble at matches as if it were a mortal threat to the fabric of civilised society. It is worth reminding ourselves of the atmosphere in which that fateful match at Hillsborough took place. Just the month before, Tory Lord Onslow boasted that the government was determined to deal with the ‘members of the yob class’ who attended football matches. Lord Hill-Naugton, admiral of the fleet, argued that football was not fit to be called the national game, since it was ‘a slum game played by louts in front of hooligans’. Meanwhile, Tory sports minister Colin Moynihan, who seemed to appear on television almost weekly to denounce football hooliganism as if it was all-out war, was busy singling out football fans to carry compulsory identity cards at matches, years before anybody dared suggest a national ID card scheme for the rest of us. The police put these policies into practice, treating big matches as military operations where riot vans lined the streets and away supporters were frogmarched to and from the ground. Inside, they would be crammed into wire mesh cages around the terraces, to stop them getting near opposition supporters or the pitch. We are told today that there remain unanswered questions about Hillsborough. Why were Liverpool fans crammed into those central pens; why did nobody intervene to try to stop the carnage until the match was well underway; why were the 40 ambulances at the ground not allowed access to the injured and dying? The answer to all these questions and more is that Hillsborough happened the way it did because it was state policy to treat football supporters not as people, but as a public order problem. So fans of Liverpool, with an average home crowd of more than 40,000, were allocated the cramped Leppings Lane end at Hillsborough while their opponents Nottingham Forest, with an average gate less than half as big, were given the more spacious end of the ground – because it suited the police strategists that way. Everything the police commanders did on the day, from holding a huge crowd of fans outside to opening the gate and cramming them into the central pen, stemmed from the policy of acting as if a football ground was a battlefield. The reactions of the police when the horror started to unfold were even more telling. This week’s coverage has highlighted the efforts of some individual officers to help fans. But the official response was to treat it as a riot rather than a rescue operation. As the first young Liverpool fans tried to save themselves from the death pen by climbing out of the cage towards the pitch, the immediate reaction of the police was to try to push them back in there. As supporters struggled to break free, the police were lined up across the pitch in defensive formation, presumably in case any of the gasping and dying Scousers attempted to charge the Forest end. And as Liverpool supporters fighting to save their mates broke up advertising hoardings for makeshift stretchers, police dog teams moved in to make sure they did not get out of hand, while officers prevented supporters checking for loved ones among the bodies that were brought outside the ground. Official priorities were well illustrated by the dilapidated or non-existent state of medical equipment available to the rescuers, compared to the well-stocked arsenal of paramilitary gear available to the police. Meanwhile only one of the 40 ambulances parked at the opposite end of the ground was allowed to cross the pitch to assist the wounded. Well, they might have been hijacked by hooligans, you know? After years of being told that more policemen and police powers were necessary to maintain public safety, we saw at Hillsborough how the safety of the public was the last thing on the mind of the authorities. This week senior police officers have been in the media claiming that modern methods of crowd surveillance and control, such as CCTV, would have prevented what happened at Hillsborough. But it was not a technical problem. It was a political and cultural issue of how the state viewed the crowd, and no gizmo would have made much difference. After Hillsborough, the tabloid newspaper the Sun published its infamous front page headlined ‘The Truth’, which claimed that drunken Liverpool fans had robbed the dead, urinated on corpses, attacked emergency service rescuers and all the rest of it. The paper is still understandably vilified for printing such lies. As one fan who was trapped at Hillsborough wrote to other papers at the time, he had indeed been pissed and vomited on in that cage – by crushed people in their death throes. But 20 years on, there seems too much of a tendency to single out the Sun as the villain of the piece. Its poisonous coverage really gave voice to the sort of ‘football fans = scum’ prejudices which, until a few minutes after 3pm on 15 April, had been commonplace across much of the British media. The Sun was caught out like the one idiot at a match who carries on with a chant after the rest of the crowd has temporarily stopped shouting it. But the paper was far from alone in its contempt for football crowds. The civilised Sunday Times, for example, tried to claim the high ground after Hillsborough by reminding us of its earlier complaint in 1985, after 38 Italian fans died following a charge by Liverpool supporters at the Heysel stadium, that football had become ‘a slum sport played in slum stadiums’. Strangely, it omitted the last part of that line from its 1985 editorial – ‘watched by slum people’ – which gave away the true feelings of the respectable media towards football fans pre-Hillsborough. Nor were such sentiments confined to the media. Middle-class fear of ‘the mob’ and the hooligan, a traditional British sentiment, was often focused on football crowds in the 1980s – and not only among Daily Mail readers. Just three days before Hillsborough, I saw a leading ‘alternative’ stand-up comedian, now a fixture on national television, on stage in London telling an alleged gag about how she didn’t want English football clubs to be allowed back into European competition (they had been banned following Heysel), she wanted them all to stay in England instead ‘and kill each other’. No doubt she stopped using that material afterwards, but it was a revealing insight at the time. Others, of course, saw things very differently. Hillsborough might now unite the nation in a show of official grief, at least publicly, but at the time it was more divisive. There were those who accepted the attempt to blame the crowd. And there were many others, especially among the working classes, who sided unreservedly with the Liverpool fans, putting aside the usual footballing animosities. For many match-going football supporters at that time, what happened at Hillsborough was a shock but not really a surprise. Anybody who had been trapped inside those omnipresent cages at the away end knew that every big match was effectively a Hillsborough waiting to happen. Many supporters of other clubs (such as me, a lifelong Manchester United fan) felt genuine solidarity with those Liverpool supporters and fury at the authorities. I thought the Scousers showed remarkable restraint in their immediate response to the deadly events. But so brutally were they abused that even if they had gone beyond the Sun’s claims, rioted and tried to string up some policemen from the goalposts, or burnt down the stadium, some of us could not have really blamed them. Much of this context has been forgotten or papered over now, as Hillsborough is remembered as just another disaster with victims to be mourned. I wrote at the time that, despite the outburst of popular anger over the Hillsborough deaths, the absence of a clear political response to the authorities’ crusade to criminalise football crowds meant that ‘the expressions of solidarity can take on an excessively maudlin character’, so that ‘an outburst of working-class anger is thus damped down into a mood of passive grief’. This has largely proved to be the case, as this week’s events illustrate. That has less to do with Liverpool’s reputation as ‘self-pity city’ than with the way that emotional correctness, public displays of grief and victim culture have grown into Britain’s national sport over the past 20 years. Before and since Hillsborough, British football crowds have been used as laboratory rats for experiments in policing and social control, from CCTV to riot tactics and ID cards. Even the much-vaunted improvements in football post-Hillsborough have proved a mixed blessing, making all-seater grounds more controlled as well as more comfortable. Anybody who complains about the sanitised nature of the modern football experience, such as those who want to see the return of terraces and ‘safe standing’, can expect to be accused of insulting the dead by those in authority who have exploited the Hillsborough victims and their families as human shields. That, too, is part of the political legacy of Hillsborough. Remembering the past is important, although sometimes it is just as important to forget and move on. But when we do remember, as this week, let us make sure it is the whole story in its proper historical context, so that we can apportion responsibility and see the consequences clearly. After all, despite the anti-crowd scaremongering over the past 20 years, it is very unlikely that there will be ‘another Hillsborough’. But the elite prejudices about ‘the mob’ and the ‘yob class’ which paved the way for those terrible events are never very far beneath the surface of society today. Mick Hume is spiked’s editor-at-large.

on the break. Come on Villains.

Thanks for posting this and hats off to Newsnight for the coverage - albeit right at the end of the programme. The Labour Party promised to open a new investigation into Hillsbrough before they were elected in 1997 and then once safely in power Jack Straw went back on their word. I'm sure he was present at an FA Cup final a few years later which just made me want to vomit when he was presented to the players before the match.

"Great artists have no country" as Alfred de Musset once said. It should be a badge of honour to care the least amount about the outcome of national teams - especially England whose fans tend toward the cretinous. I'd rather win a throw-in in a friendly whilst 1-4 down in the last minute than England win the world cup. Beat that!

My friend Alan would describe Aggar as being someone with an "attitudinal" problem. We've scored 13 in our last three games and conceded one. He needs to get his head focused on the team and stop moaning about not being in it. He's a very good player but we should sell him if he doesn't stop this nonsense.