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He has not been on since 24th February and is obviously dead. RIP YNWA

Can't believe he's expected to answer for this, thought it was fucking funny myself. PA

Fucking wankers. Short dicks to go with your short memories. Go and support a different club.

I could brush my teeth with this shit.

A 47-year-old man broke a ban on him approaching young men and touching their muscles, a court has heard. Akinwale Arobieke, of Toxteth, Liverpool - known as "Purple Aki" - was jailed in 2003 for harassment. Liverpool Crown Court heard Mr Arobieke asked a 17-year-old to show him his biceps - after a Sexual Offences Prevention Order (Sopo) was imposed. Mr Arobieke denies approaching the boy and breaching the Sopo in June last year, two months after it was made. The court heard Mr Arobieke had a "predilection" for approaching young men and touching or feeling their muscles. His reputation had spread across north-west England and was considered by many to be an urban myth, the jury heard. 'Very frightened' The prosecution said the Sopo was imposed in April last year and banned him from approaching males under the age of 18, touching their muscles and asking them to squat. Trevor Parry Jones, prosecuting, said two months later Mr Arobieke approached a 17-year-old in the street in Birkenhead and asked to see his biceps. When the teenager realised it was "Purple Aki", he ran away "very frightened and very shaken", Mr Parry Jones said. Speaking from behind a curtain, the teenager said: "As I turned a corner I heard a sound behind me so I turned around and he was there. "He said he had noticed me around the area and asked me had I been working out. "He asked me how much I could bench (press)." Allegation 'false' The boy told the court that Mr Arobieke then pointed to his arms and asked to see the youngster's biceps. The boy said: "As soon as I heard that I realised who it was. I backed away and told him I had to go. "I felt sick and walked away as fast as I could. I went to a friend's house and looked back but he had gone." The following month the youngster picked out Mr Arobieke in a video identity parade organised by police. Mark Barlow, defending, told the jury that Mr Arobieke had once been convicted of the manslaughter of Gary Kelly, a distant relative of the victim, but the conviction was later quashed by the Court of Appeal. Cross-examining the teenager, Mr Barlow said: "Your allegation is a false one, borne out of connection between Gary Kelly and your family and an opportunity to get back at Mr Arobieke." The trial continues.

Who would you choose? Simon Adebisi because he's a fucking animal. Ivan Drago, Soviet impaler. Johnny from the karate kid, purely from the imperious leg sweep.

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Germaine Greer on the making of Margaret Thatcher | Politics | The Guardian The making of Maggie She found it easy to charm men ... women simply didn't count She was the grocer's daughter with a stong moral conscience who ruled with an iron fist - or so the story goes. In fact, she was a millionaire's wife, who lacked scruples and did what her male colleagues told her, argues Germaine Greer on the eve of the 30th anniversary of Mrs Thatcher's election * Germaine Greer Blog * o Germaine Greer o The Guardian, Saturday 11 April 2009 o Article history Margaret Thatcher and the Union Jack flag Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex The year was 1972. We were all in our places and sitting comfortably, waiting for Lord Annan to answer the question "What are universities for anyway?" for the inaugural Richard Dimbleby lecture. The BBC TV cameras were ready to roll. At the last possible minute, a group of men in dark suits ushered in a blonde woman wearing floor-length scarlet chiffon, with ice-blue stones winking at earlobes and throat. As they handed her officiously to her place and ranged themselves around her, the whisper ran around the lecture hall: "Thatcher Milksnatcher!" This glamourpuss was the secretary of state for education in Edward Heath's government, the person caricatured by journalists as the "Mrs Scrooge with a painted face ... a reactionary cavewoman ... a desiccated calculating machine with a head full of figures", "the most mean and vicious member of a mean and vicious government" who put an end to free school milk for primary schoolchildren. A few months later, the TV producer Gordon Reece began the long process by which the millionaire's decorative wife with the fake, cut-glass accent was made over into the no-nonsense grocer's daughter who in 1975 would become leader of the Conservative party. On Reece's advice, Thatcher changed her hairstyle, gave up low necklines, eschewed hats, wore pastel shades, kept her hands out of sight, and struggled to lower her voice. In return she was more than happy to keep him primed with expensive champagne and cigars at the party's expense. Never before had a British party leader been so packaged. The British electorate bought the package. Margaret Thatcher, housewife superstar, became prime minister on 4 May 1979. Reece would be there whenever she needed him, which in those early days was often. The notion that Thatcherism is 30 years old may be beguiling, but it is essentially misleading. Thatcher's job was to present strategies that had been tried before in a way that would make them acceptable to a new generation of voters. She was not herself an economist, and her understanding of the how of what she wanted to do lagged way behind her understanding of the what, but even that was never more than superficial. She urged Britain to be great again, lamented the very thought that Britain was in decline, spoke of herself as following in "Winston's" footsteps - all nonsense that, recycled through the tabloid press, made her look and sound heroic. She was fond of saying that she knew her own mind, but that was really all she knew. Certainly she mastered her every brief in astonishing detail, but she used the data as ammunition, pelting her adversaries with assertions they couldn't counter. She used the same technique to discomfit her civil servants, ambushing them with searching challenges of her own devising. She never defined an overall strategy, developed no theory of the state, had scant regard for democracy, and no scruples whatsoever. Thatcher's Thatcherism was whatever worked. Thatcherism is now being vilified throughout the English-speaking world as an evil ideology that exalted greed and selfishness to the point of unstringing the sinews of the body politic. It was never anything so systematic. A story is often told of how, when she was leader of the opposition, Thatcher turned up at a seminar at the Centre for Policy Studies with a copy of Friedrich Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty, banged it down on the table and declared "This is what we believe". She claimed to have first read Hayek when she was at Oxford, but her version of his arguments is one he might not have recognised. Her commitment to a free market, wealth creation and lower taxation was absolute. She had no time for Hayek's misgivings and probably never knew that he believed that "probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all of the principle of laissez-faire capitalism". "Wooden insistence" describes Thatcher's style exactly. Capitalism needs strong and stable government. Free trade depends on the power of governments to order markets, by establishing and policing systems of uniform weights and measures, stabilising the currency, enforcing the law to protect the rights of traders and clients, and managing labour relations. The machinery of bank regulation proliferated under Thatcher, but what developed even faster was the culture of circumvention and bamboozlement, of which she herself was mistress. Success and profit were identical. Her career shows a bland disregard of the principles of honest dealing that ought to underpin the free market in which she had such blind faith. One of the enduring mysteries of the 20th century will be how on earth she got away with it. From her first days in power Thatcher developed and refined ways of circumventing political protocol and procedure, partly because hers was usually a minority opinion. She liked to forestall opposition by making statements to the media that had not been agreed in cabinet, and she would sidestep cabinet altogether when she could. She didn't scruple to undermine her cabinet colleagues by criticising them in the house and beyond, breaking all the rules of masculine collegiality. She didn't always give credit where credit was due and sometimes claimed credit for the ideas and initiatives of others, as in the case of privatisation, to which she was a late convert. Her high-handedness became more obvious after the Falklands war, which she elevated into a moral crusade to defend civilisation as we know it. She treated the victory in the Falklands as confirmation of her own fitness to rule, to take the tough decisions and see them through, whether her colleagues in government agreed with her or not. (Her triumphalism remains undented, though it has been estimated that more of the British men who fought in the Falklands have taken their own lives since the war than were killed during it.) Thatcher's rather patchy ideology became the new consensus by default. In November 1984 the Financial Times pointed out that "Thatcherite economic policies are not very different from or better or worse than those to which other European governments, whether called conservative as in Germany or socialist as in France, have found their way." Only where dealing in arms was concerned did she display the kind of recklessness and lack of scruple that is now being blamed for the global financial crisis, and that she did from the beginning of her first term of office. On 29 January 1981 a meeting of the overseas and defence committee of the cabinet, chaired by Thatcher, agreed to interpret the Anglo-American ban on exporting arms to either side in the Iran-Iraq war more flexibly than was honest. Within months the arms-trade subsidiary of the Ministry of Defence was building an integrated weapons complex in Basra, and over the following years the "defence allocation" to Iraq continued to multiply. Iraq did not pay up; the extent of the defaulting is not known, but this particular toxic debt had probably grown close to £3bn by the time the Iraqis invaded Kuwait and all bets were off. The deals Thatcher made later, and apparently off her own bat, were impenetrably secret, the amounts of money vast. She sold armaments to King Hussein of Jordan, President Suharto of Indonesia and President Pinochet of Chile, offering them massive amounts of easy credit and the full support of the export credit system. In April 1985, after a series of meetings with the Saudi defence minister's son, one of them when she was away from Westminster on holiday in Salzburg, she set up the Al-Yamamah contract worth £40bn, to be paid partly in oil. It is has been reported that her son, Mark Thatcher, was paid commission of between £12m and £20m, although he has denied it. The results of an investigation into the Al-Yamamah contract by the National Audit Office have never been made public. Other people must have been involved in putting together a deal of such complexity, but they were not Thatcher's cabinet colleagues. In 1988, there was another hush-hush meeting in Bermuda when Thatcher was on her way to Australia. It is this behaviour that connects Thatcher in the most direct way with the gung-ho hedge fund managers of today. Thatcher's peculiar handling of the Westland affair, which resulted in the resignation of her defence secretary, Michael Heseltine, is best explained as a by-product of the Al-Yamamah negotiations, of which Heseltine obviously knew nothing. After Heseltine's resignation, the attorney general demanded an investigation into the leak of the letter from the law officer that discredited him, a leak that was almost certainly engineered by Thatcher herself. She managed to evade responsibility, but some who saw her performance in the house were convinced she was lying. For the first time talk of a leadership challenge could be heard. For Thatcher to take such a risk in a relatively minor matter, which on the face of it could have been sorted by direct confrontation, only makes sense if she was desperate to hide a game being played for much higher stakes. Just what that game was, and who stood to gain by it, is still unclear . Similar opacity and unaccountability characterise Thatcher's use of the aid budget to finance projects such as the Pergau dam in Malaysia, in return for an agreement to buy British military hardware. In the case of the Pergau dam, the deal turned out to be illegal and £65m had to be refunded to the Treasury, but by then Thatcher was long gone. Otherwise she liked to use the aid budget to finance lucrative contracts for British firms, Amec, Balfour Beatty, BICC and GEC, most of them major donors to the Conservative party. Margaret Thatcher would have said herself that in cooking up these massive deals she was batting for Britain, as she did when she went to Oman to secure a large construction deal for Cementation Ltd, who were employing Mark Thatcher as a consultant. It is hard to imagine Margaret's husband Denis Thatcher or her daughter Carol being privy to her billion-pound wheeling and dealing, but Mark is a different matter. It is odd that the housewife superstar who never tired of telling the rest of us how to live, and how to mind the pennies, should have reared a son who is a chancer, and an inept one at that. Even so he is reported to have a fortune of £60m, much of it, according to "City sources", held in offshore accounts. In 1998 he was investigated on suspicion of loan-sharking. He has settled a court case in the US where he was accused of racketeering, and has pleaded guilty to a reduced charge in connection with his involvement in a failed coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea in which it has been suggested Jeffrey Archer was also involved. Mark lived with his widowed mother in Belgravia while the case was proceeding, but now lives in Spain with his second wife. If his mother sacrificed her own integrity to put her son in the way of easy money, it was not enough to keep him close to her. Her grandchildren by his first wife are being raised in America. Except for her faithful female staff, Lady Thatcher is now alone. When I caught up with her last year, at the Archers' midsummer luncheon party at the Old Vicarage in Grantchester, she had abandoned any pretence of housewifeliness. She was resplendent in electric blue brocade and pearls, stiff champagne-tinted hair framing her face like a translucent diadem. The bloom on her fair skin was peach-like, the pink of her lipstick vivid, the blue of her eyes only slightly faded. Of all the people dutifully milling around her it was Jeffrey Archer who drew the most vivacious response. He was at her side for most of the afternoon, soothing and flattering her until she glowed. If she knew that he had been banished from the Conservative party for five years, if she remembered that he had served time in prison for perjury and perverting the course of justice, she didn't care. Margaret Thatcher, the grocer's daughter, keeper of the moral high ground, was basking in the attentions of a convicted criminal. Even as Thatcher was putting a good deal of energy into projecting herself as a dutiful housewife, who made her husband's breakfast every morning before coming to the Commons, and rushed home to put his tea on the table every evening, she spent a surprising amount of time entertaining faintly and not so faintly disreputable men. For 10 years her closest confidant was the Murdoch journalist Woodrow Wyatt, turncoat, snob and flamboyant lecher, a man whom her father would probably have kicked out of doors. She was fascinated by the sexual transgressions of her heterosexual male colleagues. She found it easy to charm such men, by giving them her full attention and treating their every word as profound. Men who were immune to her blandishments were relegated to the second division. She snubbed her predecessor, Edward Heath, never offered him any job that he could accept and never invited him to social occasions at Downing Street. Women simply didn't count. The two women who appeared at her side in 1979 did not last long. Janet Young, who accompanied her on the battlebus in the election campaign of April-May 1979, and served briefly as a member of her first cabinet before being packed off in 1981 to be leader of the Lords, is now chiefly remembered for her intransigent opposition to gay rights. Sally Oppenheim served as minister of state for consumer affairs in the Department of Trade from 1979 to 1982, before being bumped up to the Lords in her turn. Thatcher was exclusively a man's woman, beginning with her performance of the role of her father's daughter. Though questioned repeatedly, she had nothing to say about her relationship with her mother, except that she taught her to iron a shirt, but she regularly invoked the figure of her hard-working, god-fearing father. Useful as she found the idea of him, she didn't spend much time with the man himself. Once she left Grantham to go to Oxford, she seldom returned. As soon as ever she could she ditched her Lincolnshire accent, together with her family's Methodist faith. What Thatcher did, as distinct from what she said, ran completely counter to her father's morality, which dictated that you didn't buy anything you couldn't pay for, that debts were to be discharged promptly, and that the better-heeled accepted responsibility for the weak and disadvantaged. She told the journalist and broadcaster Brian Walden in 1981 that her father regarded the stock market as a form of gambling, and yet she presided over the expansion of the debtor economy and the liberalisation of banking, beginning the process that all her successors, whether Tory or New Labour, were to continue. The father dedicated himself to the welfare of his community; the daughter disabled local government. As prime minister, Thatcher worked hard to give the impression that she was close in fact and in spirit to her father, dragging him into discussions of all kinds of issues, but the facts of her rise to wealth and power suggest that she was actually in flight from him. When she prated of how she herself was witness to the fact that anyone could rise to the highest eminence, she omitted to mention that you had first to catch your millionaire, or that it helped greatly if he happened to play golf with the editor of the Daily Telegraph. Alfred Roberts is credited with endowing his daughter with an exceptionally powerful moral sense. She certainly claimed that she had such a thing, and denounced every kind of behaviour or policy she was not prepared to endorse as morally wrong. But where her favourites were concerned, she was prepared to countenance truly reprehensible behaviour. When she appointed Jeffrey Archer deputy chairman of the Conservative party in 1984, she knew full well that he had a mistress. Archer promised to give her up, but the break was anything but clean, and very painful for the woman involved. A year later, a business colleague informed the News of the World that Archer had been involved with a prostitute called Monica Coghlan, who was persuaded by the paper to take part in a sting operation. On 24 October 1986, she was filmed and audiotaped at Victoria station, receiving £2,000 in £50 notes from Michael Stacpoole, acting for Archer, apparently as a bribe to get her to disappear. Archer admitted giving Coghlan travel funds, but successfully sued the Daily Star for printing that he had paid Coghlan for sex. The judge's summing up was bizarre, but even stranger was the failure by any of the newspapers involved to challenge the verdict. The Daily Star ended up £1.2m out of pocket in fines and costs. It wasn't until Archer was running for mayor of London in 1999 that his witnesses began recanting. In September 2000, he was charged with perjury, tried, found guilty and sentenced to four years in jail. Throughout all these vicissitudes, he was still Thatcher's white-haired boy. Thatcher showed a similar lack of conscience in dealing with her protégé Cecil Parkinson. She knew when she chose him to head the Department of Trade and Industry in June 1983 that he was involved with his private secretary, Sara Keays, and had ordered him to give her up and return to his wife if he wanted the job. Parkinson had asked Keays, a loyal Conservative and hard worker for the party, to marry him as long before as 1979; in May 1983, when she told him that she was pregnant, he apparently changed his mind, only to change it back again in June. Once again he asked her to marry him. Then Thatcher got to him, and in September he informed Keays that he had gone back to his wife. Keays remains convinced that Thatcher had organised the press campaign in which she was consistently belittled, accused of seeking to entrap Parkinson and even told to abort her pregnancy. In Keays's words, Thatcher "allowed the authority of her office to be used to propagate lies in the media in order to conceal the true facts from the public and to discredit [her]". In 1993, after disagreements about maintenance payments, Parkinson, who had never met his daughter, took out an injunction forbidding the British media from making any reference to her, which actually resulted in muzzling anyone from making any complaint about his callous behaviour. An operation when the child was four to remove a brain tumour has left her with learning difficulties; she also suffers from Asperger's syndrome. Despite his thoroughly contemptible behaviour, Thatcher's fondness for Parkinson, whom she was grooming to succeed her, continued unabated. "He thinks very much the same way as I do and is a great source of strength," she liked to say. "If Cecil says not to do it, we won't do it." Parkinson was one person who knew how to reassure her and how to keep her calm in a crisis. She would have brought him back to cabinet soon after he resigned, but wiser heads convinced her that he would have to stand for re-election first. She would have made him chancellor in 1987, but had to content herself with making him energy secretary. When she resigned as leader in 1990, Parkinson resigned with her. He is now in the House of Lords as Baron Parkinson of Carnforth. Meanwhile Sarah Keays struggles to give her daughter as good a life as she can. What is clear from any reading of the vast mass of documentation of the Thatcher years is that Thatcher herself is not the author of Thatcherism, which is a thing of shreds and patches. It was put together, as her public persona was, in response to a series of pressures originating in circumstances beyond government control. For years it had been clear that whoever ruled Britain was going to have to deal with the problem of failing industries, excessive public spending, and the power of the elite trade unions. Heath tried to do it and was defeated by the seven-week miners' strike in 1974, called an election and lost to Labour who pursued similar policies with a similar lack of success. By the time Thatcher was elected in 1979, the public was out of patience with the unions. She had a mandate to deal with them, but she had to proceed with caution. All observers note how timid she was in her first period in office. When the Russians dubbed her the Iron Lady in 1976, they did her a huge favour. The sobriquet enabled her to appear strong and confident, when all the while she was walking on eggshells. Even as she bulldozed and dragooned her cabinet colleagues, behind the scenes Thatcher was doing as she was told, by Reece, Parkinson and Tim Bell. Bell's charm is legendary; one eulogist claimed that dogs would cross the street to be stroked by him. Thatcher is supposed to have enjoyed sipping scotch on the sofa with her two "laughing boys" Reece and Bell after a hard day in the house. The words she uttered were written for her by Ronald Millar, and subsequently tinkered with by her. Millar, a playwright, used to say that he treated her like an actress before a performance. He did not say, as others might have, that she was a bad actress, which she certainly was. Whether she was intoning the prayer of St Francis on the steps of Downing Street or gushing about the capitalist system being divinely ordained, she was unconvincing. A particular problem was that she never understood any of the jokes that Millar and Bell wrote for her. Having succeeded in restyling the product, Reece and Bell set about building relationships with the media that would sell it for them. Thatcher was rolled out for meeting after meeting with newspaper editors, with whom she behaved as prettily as they could have desired. As owner of the News of the World and the Sun, Rupert Murdoch had the power to drive the manufactured image of Thatcher as lower-middle-class heroine deep into the national consciousness, but he was initially slow to come on board. In 1970, after the milk-snatching episode, the Sun had labelled Thatcher the most unpopular woman in Britain and voiced a doubt as to whether she was actually human. In 1975 Reece set about courting Larry Lamb, the editor of the Sun, assuring him that Thatcher's policies represented the real interests of working people. It was the Sun that dubbed Thatcher "Maggie" and created for her an entirely new persona, concentrating on good housekeeping values and the breathy rhetoric of making Britain great again. When she was elected in 1979, the Sun exulted: "At the exact moment when the grocer's daughter from Grantham became the most important woman in the world, spring sprung [sic]. It did. It really did." The alliance between the Maggie machine and the Murdoch media made possible the ultimate defeat of the print unions and the modernisation of the newspaper industry. And another brick was added to the rising edifice of Thatcherism. Thatcher's strength derived directly from her limitations. If she had been better read, if she had been afflicted with imagination, if she had had a sense of humour, if she had had anywhere near as much insight into the lives of ordinary people as she claimed to have, she would have been unable to pursue her headlong career, riding roughshod over the consensus towards the property-owning debtor economy in which we now struggle. If socialism had been in better shape, she would not have been able to turn it into a dirty word or confuse it with totalitarianism and state monopoly capitalism. If the trade unions had not betrayed their own class, if they had understood the importance of organising all workers, including women, including those in the service sector, if they had not institutionalised inequality, the people might have defended the cause of labour. Thatcher thought that she and Reagan overthrew the Soviet Union, but the fact is that, like old Labour, it simply fell apart. The Thatcher phenomenon was only made possible by the weakness and indecisiveness of the opposition. It is justice of the most poetic kind that Thatcher's is now the evil empire and Thatcherism a dirty word.

After becoming bored with the lack of games for the Wii & the fact I actually don't like or play my PS3, I've just bought a SNES with 6 games off eBay. I know I could have saved the Wii and got them on the VC but it was a impulse buy just now. The console comes with Mario All Stars, NBA Jam, Donkey Kong Country, Streete Fighter 2 Turbo & something else. What other games should I be looking to add to my old skool collection?

Richard Williams: Javier Mascherano is Rafael Benítez's true masterstroke at Liverpool | Football | The Guardian

Good to see that you and your buddies are doing your work. Anichebe demands apology after being detained by police The Everton forward Victor Anichebe is awaiting an apology following a police swoop as he was looking in a jeweller's window in Knutsford, Cheshire. Officers, directed by CCTV operators, rushed to the scene and began a "heated dialogue" with Anichebe and his friend. The 20-year-old striker's friend was put in handcuffs after police believed the duo were possibly part of a gang of raiders responsible for robberies on the exclusive King Street. The Nigerian-born Anichebe was wearing a leg cast following surgery when police detained them both. An Everton spokesman, Ian Ross, said: "Victor was deeply upset and very distressed by the incident. I believe he is still waiting for a full and unreserved apology from the police involved. Once he has received that both the club and the player will consider the matter closed." Cheshire Police would not answer alleged comments from the pair that white men would not have received the same treatment and a police source said no complaints had been received. "For some time Cheshire Constabulary have been responding to a series of violent robberies targeting jewellers in Knutsford and in the wider Cheshire area," a police spokesman said. "We have robust plans in place to respond swiftly to any report of any suspicious activity at or in the vicinity of jewellers' premises. "As part of that plan, local CCTV operators actively and routinely monitor shopping areas and jewellers' premises and on this occasion identified what appeared to be two men acting suspiciously outside a jeweller's store on King Street, Knutsford. Police attended the location within minutes and upon speaking with the two men, a heated dialogue developed in an attempt to ascertain exactly what the two persons were doing outside the jeweller's premises. "During the course of this exchange, an officer took the decision to restrain one of the two men concerned by applying handcuffs. It was subsequently ascertained that there was no criminal conduct whatsoever on behalf of the two men concerned and they were in no way involved in any criminal activity."

Right arsecheeks. I have two choices tonight. Number 1 Cronos. More Del Toro madness, no orphans or civil wars this time I hope. Number 2. Akira. Japanese manga shit. Choices too many choices. Which shall I watch. Things to bear in mind. No wife, loads of drink.

wtf Moment the queue jump killer struck: CCTV images show how innocent Sainsbury's shopper lost his life | Mail Online

Pierluigi Collina says there has been talks in UEFA about a new card to be used in football, this new card is gonna be used if the yellow card is to easy but a red card is to harsh, like a card in the middle of yellow and red. its somewhere on La Gazzetta dello Sport: foto e video di calcio, formula 1, ciclismo, motomondiale

Now, wise GF. It has come to my attention that a certain forumite, who shall remain nameless [cough]Hatred[cough/] has negged someone for admissions made on the sanctuary of an amnesty thread, not once, but TWICE. I am not a revengenegger and generally accept neggage with good grace, but there is a line in the sand and this person has crossed it in my opinion. So i put it to the forum, forgiveness or retribution?

At what point do we really start to get worried? I'm hoping his form is all a reaction to the injuries, but then should he even be playing when he's desperately short of fitness and pace (he's looked knackered all season which is more to the Euros than hamstring?)? He's a shadow of the player he was last year: my underlying worry is whether his pace is going to come back, because he's nothing without that explosive first few steps. Or is it second season syndrome and have defenders have wised up to him?

F.A.O all the W****** who are Brainwashing everyone with Rafa should go etc go and have a watch of the premership years on liverpool tv channel. Then you will realise how shit we have been for the last 20 years bar 2 seasons under Houiler. The media our after Rafa. We need to support the guy who as made us THE NO 1 SEED in Europe. Rafa's taken us back to the top. He deserves is 16 Million new contract. Who would have thought 5 years ago we were going to go to 2 European finals and 3 semi finals in the next few years. For all who want Rafa out be careful what you wish for...Jewel?? Scholri?? No top manager's gonna come to a club with no money to spend especially when you got other clubs with unlimited money. You guys should be focusing on getting rid of the dicks runing the club.

Is it possible to buy a Setanta season ticket when viewing through a Sky box? I'm refusing to ever sign up for Setanta's monthly service after the hassle of trying to cancel last year and the shit customer service. However I'd be quite happy to pay upfront for 3/6 months viewing with no tie in. I think it's possible on normal Freeview boxes but can't see anything for Sky.

I got this recipe recently for 'chilli bean ranch pasties' and they are food of the gods. Have now resorted to making regular batches of these fucka's, but with chopped chilli for that extra kick! Makes 4 LARGE pasties. 1 tbsp sunflower oil 4 rashers rindless, smoked, streaky bacon, cut into strips 1 small onion, finely chopped 1 garlic clove, finely chopped 200g can baked beans 50g mature Cheddar cheese, finely diced a few drops Tabasco sauce 375g rolled puff pastry Milk, for brushing 1. Preheat the oven to 220C/gas 7. Heat the oil in a small pan and cook the bacon, onion and garlic for 4-5 minutes until golden. Remove from the heat and mix with the baked beans and diced cheese; add Tabasco to taste. 2. Open out the pastry and cut into quarters to give four 20 x 11cm rectangles. Spoon the filling into the centre of each,brush the dges with milk to seal and then bring up the edges to enclose the filling. Press the edges together to create a seam across the centre of each pasty. Transfer to a baking sheet, brush with a little milk and bake for 12-15 minutes until puffed and golden brown. Keeps me regular!

Hi All, As part of their coverage of the upcoming 20th anniversary of Hilsborough, LFC TV are trying to track down TV footage of the memorial match played between Celtic and Liverpool on 30th April 1989. Does anyone have a copy of the game or highlights on VHS or DVD? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Let me know either on this thread, via IM or by email communitymanager@liverpoolfc.tv Thanks, Matt

On C4 at the moment. I forgot what a massive, massive, massive disappointment this film was. With all the stars in it, didn't one of them pint out while they were making it that it was a bit rubbish. I hope Brett Ratner burns in hell. That useless cunt has never made a film better than below average.

Liverpool and Everton Merseyside derby as spiteful as any game in England | Premier League - Times Online The Times January 19, 2009 Liverpool and Everton Merseyside derby as spiteful as any game in England Oliver Kay, Football Correspondent It is a global game these days. Some time today a member of the royal family of Abu Dhabi will give his envoy the signal to resume talks with AC Milan about a deal to sign Brazil’s finest player on behalf of Manchester City. At the same time Chelsea’s Russian owner claims that he will commence legal action against a newspaper that claimed that he wished to sell the club to the Saudi royal family. And, when the sun rises in Texas and Colorado, Liverpool’s American owners will ponder how to solve a problem like their Spanish manager. For better or, in some cases, for worse, the Premier League is now truly a league of nations, but there is just the odd occasion that calls to mind The League of Gentlemen. The Merseyside derby is a case in point. It is what Tubbs and Edward Tattsyrup, the fiercely insular shopkeepers in the BBC television series, would call “a local match for local people”. If you are an outsider, forget it. As Edward might say, there is nothing for you at Anfield this evening — or indeed on Sunday, when Liverpool and Everton meet again in the fourth round of the FA Cup. As football has gone global, Merseyside football has gone parochial, bitterly, bitterly so. Where once, in the 1980s, Everton and Liverpool supporters revelled in a unique friendly rivalry, these days they cannot stand each other. The atmosphere, once likened to a nauseating love-in, is now as poisonous and as spiteful as any in England. It is not as corrosive as those in Glasgow or in Istanbul or in certain South American cities — yesterday’s match in Montevideo between Nacional and Peñarol ended with 53 arrests and one supporter in intensive care after a shooting — but the friendly derby has given way to the kind of rancorous hostility to which this fixture once proved a welcome antidote. There is a certain revisionism about the “friendly derby”. Some say that it was merely an unfortunate accident that arose from the two clubs dominating English football, enjoying regular trips to Wembley, at a time in the mid-1980s when the Thatcher Government was doing its best to rip the soul out of the city. Revisionists on both sides of Stanley Park look back on the era of Scouse solidarity, the red-and-blue ski-hats and the chants of “Merseyside, Merseyside”, with a mixture of embarrassment and unease. They call it a myth. What changed? Society changed. Football terrace culture changed. There was also the Heysel Stadium disaster — with Everton supporters feeling that their history was changed irrevocably by the riot involving Liverpool fans before the 1985 European Cup final against Juventus, which resulted in 39 deaths and the exclusion of English clubs from European football — but the two clubs were brought closer than ever by the Hillsborough disaster in 1989, in which 96 Liverpool supporters died. While Heysel remains a highly complex issue, it alone does not explain the way that the rivalry has sunk so far into the gutter that even the ultimate taboo, Hillsborough, has been broken while Steven Gerrard and Phil Neville, two of the nicest footballers you could wish to meet, are subjected to vile, hurtful chants about their young offspring. The poisoning of the Merseyside rivalry is one of the most depressing developments of the modern era, but it is a microcosm of what is happening elsewhere. Supporters can sit in safety and comfort in all-seater, smoke-free stadiums without fear of being charged by hooligans, but in another sense the atmosphere is more rancorous than in the 1980s. Where once there were generic threats of violence, which might just occasionally be carried out, these days the idiots compose and belt out horrific and deeply personal chants at individuals. Sticks and stones? Try talking to Gerrard, Neville, Sol Campbell, Arsène Wenger and Mido. Merseyside Police will be out in force this evening, having made clear their intention to clamp down on and eject anyone they find guilty of what they call “criminal chanting”. If the threats from the police have their intended effect, it could be the best thing that has happened to Merseyside football since the 1980s. If they do not — and if the type of poisonous atmosphere, compounded by squabbles with the police, that some fear, is witnessed tonight — you might be advised to avert your gaze and indeed your ears. It is, after all, a local match for local people. And another thing United in skill and desire On a rare Saturday afternoon off, “watching” the Barclays Premier League action unfold on Sky Sports remains a strange experience, yet it did not need the manic wails and whoops in a studio in Isleworth to tell you that Manchester United would score a late winning goal away to Bolton Wanderers. It was the third time in their past seven league matches that they have scored the only goal of the game in the final seven minutes. History will remember Sir Alex Ferguson as a manager who created teams whose class and flair were exceeded only by an unrivalled will to win. The personnel changes, but the spirit and unquenchable desire live on. And that is just one reason why it has become hard to look beyond them as champions for the third successive season. Over to you, Liverpool.

Bioshock (PS3) Fallout 3 (PS3) Resistance 2 (PS3) ? I want to shoot me some stuff.

"Red cards like that would be nice when we are kicked off the park"? WTF? "Keane should have been sent off in the first minute." WTF mk II? "We'd have won the game had we had eleven men". I thought going down to ten men suited them myself. Before the sending-off we were well on-top. I think someone is under-pressure.

I went the walk in this morning and was put on two lots of Anti-biotics for a bad chest infection but went the game feeling like shit and now feel ten times worse. I was supposed to be reaping the rewards of a lot of hard work at Cream tonight but now have to spend the night in bed spitting shite up and feeling like my lungs are about to collapse. I'm fucking gutted and it looks like I may have to swerve the Newcastle game on Sunday. Are you lot fairing any better than myself and doing much tonight? Go on depress me even more.