This is just the latest in a string of tough/tricky opening day fixtures that piece of shit computer has saddled us with in recent years. Last season it was Sunderland away, in 2007 it was Villa away, in 2006 it was Sheff Utd away, in 2005 it was Boro away and in 2004 it was Spurs away. 2003 was the last time we got a home opening fixture and that was against the bloody chavs, who beat us 2-1.

Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t be too bothered about us playing Spurs at their place, in fact I’ve always got on well with those guys, so much so that they’ve even invited me to their end of season party which, as ever, will take place in October! But on the opening day they will be full of piss and vinegar, and keen to do well in front of their own fan. So it’s going to be tough to take the three points but we’ll just have to deal with it.

On the plus side, at least we won’t have to play a qualifying tie for the CL this season. Those games can be a real bitch and getting tougher every year. So we can focus on the league and forget about the CL until the group stage gets underway in mid-September. However once it does get started, again the fixture list has done us no favours and almost all of our European games are followed by a tough league fixture.

Our first group game will be followed by an away trip to Wet Spam and after the second we must travel to the chavs. The third game is followed by the mancs coming to Anfield and Birmingham come to our place after the fourth. The Merseyside derby at Goodison follows our fifth game and Arsenal come to Anfield after our sixth and final group game. If we get to the second round we will have our all-important trip to the Theatre of Illusions sandwiched in between our tie and if we manage to get to the semis we will have a trip to the chavs in between both semi-final legs.

I know these fixtures are supposedly randomly generated so there’s little point in moaning about them but there’s no doubt that the way they’ve come out for us is far from ideal. When Rafa defended his team and had the bottle to point out the facts about Alex Fergiescum earlier this year, one of the things he sarcastically suggested was that maybe the Premier League should send the fixtures over to the manc boss and let him sort them out. Well as I read through our fixtures yesterday it occurred to me that maybe that’s exactly what they had done!

Anyway, having so many tough league games closely following important CL games emphasises once again the need for us to strengthen our squad as best we can over the summer because it looks as if the boss is certainly going to have to dig into it over the course of the campaign. I’m happy to see things on the transfer front are starting to stir for us and it looks as if we are very close to securing the signature of Glen Johnson.

We badly needed another option at right-back and in the system we play it’s so important for us to have ball playing full-backs who get forward to support the attack. Johnson would be a quality addition who ticks all of those boxes with the added bonus that he is just coming into his prime, is Premiership proven and would increase our number of English players. Besides that, having a Johnson in our squad could be a good omen as we’ve had a couple of pretty useful ones in the past.

We’ve been crying out for something extra on our right hand side and I think Deadly Dirk and Glenda would be a very useful combination. Some people are a little concerned about his price tag, but that’s something I think we should let the accountants worry about. Rafa knows how much money he has to play with and if he thinks the lad is worth it, that’s good enough for me. The press say the fee would be in the region of £17 or £18 million but given their past record in reporting on such matters, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was a lot less.

I must admit I am a little more concerned with the situation regarding Arbeloa and I was surprised to hear he has only a year left on his contract. On this blog at the start of last season I expressed my doubts about Arby being our first choice right back, but he proved me wrong. I wasn’t convinced by his early performances but gradually he improved and became a lot steadier for us over the course of the campaign and had a very good season overall.

He had to play a lot of games because our only other recognised cover in the position is a promising but inexperienced kid and another guy who is a medical miracle that appears to be made out of glass. Clearly we needed to bring in another quality option and Glen Johnson would appear to be just the job. However, I now hear people calling for Arby to be offloaded and I just fail to see the logic in that.

It would be great for us to have Johnson and Arbeloa competing for the right-back slot in our team but if we bring in Johnson and sell off Arby, surely we will be back in the same boat of having a shortage of cover on the right side of our defence. What would happen if Johnson got injured or needed to be rested? We’d be back to playing players out of position or gambling on inexperience, and that’s a big risk for a team hoping to have the strength and consistency to be challenging for titles.

That said, it’s absolutely crazy in the modern game for any team to allow a player’s contract run down to just one year, but it’s something we’ve been too often guilty of in the past and hopefully this will improve now that Parry is gone and Rafa has more control in these matters. You run the risk of having greedy players, such as we seen recently with Peanut, refusing to move and happy to spend a season biding their time to get themselves a bigger pay day as a free agent when their contract runs out.

I’m not suggesting Arby is anything like the type of scumbag that Peanut was, but if it’s true that he only has a year left on his contract then the club needs to act now. Preferably get him signed up to a new contract but if not, sell him now while we can still get a decent transfer fee to fund a replacement.

There is obviously all of the usual mostly nonsense stories in the press about players coming and going at our club and I wish I had something more concrete to offer but Rafa runs a tight ship and there aren’t as many leaks as there have been in the past. The fact that this comes at a time when there have been 16 people culled from the club’s staff I’m sure is purely coincidental and perhaps best not speculated upon.

My normally reliable sources are as dry as a camel’s bollocks at the moment and very few whispers seem to be coming out. Other than our early links to Silva the only name that’s popped up on my radar screens a few times is Saviola and that’s already been covered in the press so I’m not sure how reliable it is. What I can say as someone who does have a contact or two is that it’s very quiet at the moment, perhaps too quiet.

Maybe it’s just wishful thinking on my part but I get the feeling there may be something stirring at Anfield, something big enough for them to want to keep a lid on it, but I guess time will tell.

Keep the Faith

Everything seemed to be going well for us initially as we pushed forward with a purpose and got the early breakthrough after some great build-up play was finished off superbly by Torres. As we look back at the game now in hindsight it appears that our problem may have been that we scored too early. Once we got the lead we sat back a little with the intention presumably to soak up some of their pressure and pick them off on the counter.

That seemed to be a pretty good tactic and we did manage to create another couple of half-chances that might have allowed us to extend our lead. The problem was that we weren’t defending well. They were getting at our defence too easily and had a few good chances to score even before they got the equaliser. They looked dangerous everytime they came forward and seemed to grow in confidence where as we began to look more and more nervy and unsure, particularly in defence.

You could see their equaliser coming long before our poorly defended corner handed it to them and I was relieved to hear the half-time whistle. I was hoping the break might give us a chance to sort ourselves out for the second half and we did start the half more brightly but it wasn’t long before more sloppiness at the back allowed them to score a second and then a third, in fact we were very lucky that they didn’t score more.

With plenty of time on the clock and shooting into The Kop, you hoped that we might rally ourselves and score at least one goal to improve our faint chances in the second leg but too many heads had dropped in our team and we were well beaten long before the final whistle. Losing to the chavs was bad enough but I thought the manner of our performance on the night was the most disappointing thing of all and I’m sure the manager feels the same way.

Even when results haven’t gone well for us in the past, I have always been impressed by the grit and determination of our side but we saw little of that character on Wednesday. We had so many passengers in our team on the night that I thought we had done a sponsorship deal with British Rail! Riera has played very well recently but was very poor on the night and did little to trouble their makeshift right-back. Aurelio was also below par and error-prone as was a lot of our defensive play, in fact at times it seemed that we were employing our famous doughnut defence, the one with the big hole in the middle!

As he has taken a lot of unfair stick this season I’d like to be kinder to Lucas and the truth is he wasn’t our worst player on the night but I was nervous every time he got the ball and I just thought he looked a little out of his depth and we really badly missed Mascherano. Even Gerrard by his own brilliant standards was virtually anonymous although we now know he was carrying an injury. Of the rest I thought Pepe did well, Alonso did his best as did Arbeloa and Torres did well in the first half but had little to work with in the second.

The problem for us now is that we have to somehow get this result and performance out of our system and get back on track against Blackburn at Anfield tomorrow. The defeat against the chavs was bad enough but if we slip up in this game as well it will only make a bad situation infinitely worse. In the circumstances, Carra has called this the most important league game in his career and its easy see to why.

While the odds are still well and truly with the mancs in terms of the Premiership this is still the best chance we’ve had since our league drought began and certainly the best in Carra’s career. A win will put us back on top with 6 games to go for at least a couple hours depending on how the mancs get on at Sunderland but a defeat would be a disaster.

It won’t be easy because we know Fergiescum’s mate Allardyce will try to get his team to kick their way through us and will no doubt be sent a magnum of champagne from his buddy if they are successful. If we play anything like we can then we should have no trouble but if half of our team doesn’t turn up like the other night then we could have problems.

I would normally think that the players wouldn’t need any motivation to go out and do their stuff in this one but I thought the same ahead of Wednesday’s game and that didn’t turn out too well. The other complication is Gerrard’s injury and whether he’ll be available, so Rafa has his work cut out to lift the players and mastermind a victory. As ever, I’m optimistic and I’ll predict a 3-1 victory for The Reds and hope that Sunderland can do something against the mancs.

We also have another £20 voucher available for you to buy one or two of those great t-shirts from the good people at Soccerprint T-Shirts . So using the same format as last time, predict the time of the first goal, the score-line and the goalscorers and post it in the comments section to be in with a chance to win. Good luck everybody and a Happy Easter weekend to you all.

Keep the Faith

These will be two extremely tough games against two of the best sides in the world and the outcomes are by no means certain. However, I think we can be pretty certain that there are plenty of people waiting in the wings to once again hang the manager out to dry should we fail in one or both, some of them even claiming to be Liverpool “supporters”.

But I guess we pretty much covered that in the last blog so all I can say is I support the boss this week and regardless of what happens in these upcoming games I’ll be still supporting him next week and for the foreseeable future. That said, make no mistake about it I will still be maintaining my Shanks-given right to have a good moan about things from time to time, after-all everybody’s got to have a hobby!

So on to the football side of things and I’ll leave the Premiership until the next blog and focus on the Champions League for now. When it’s comes to European football there really is no doubt that Rafa Benitez is quite simply the dog’s bollocks, the guy has master-minded more victories in Europe than Napolean! Even his harshest critics in the media, of which there are many, can’t fault him in this regard and some of them have even managed to give him a little bit of credit. There have been some who have attempted to pick holes in it but I think our record in Europe under Benitez well and truly speaks for itself.

While it’s true, as some people suggested in an earlier blog, that you can get away with a few draws in Europe, the fact of the matter is that it’s the same for every team but our record of consistent results over five years makes us quite rightly the number one ranked team in the continent. We’ve got to two finals in three seasons and three semi-finals in four seasons.

Our recent record is pretty damned impressive as well with just two defeats in our last fifty games. We’ve scored in each of our last 16 games in the competition proper and if you include our qualifer at the start of the season it’s 17 from 18 games in which we’ve won 12, drawn 5 and lost just once, that unfortunate 3-2 defeat by the chav’s in last season’s semi.

Obviously we all want to see the team winning the Premiership but we’ve also got a proud tradition in Europe which is also very important and on that side of things we’ve improved immensely under Rafa. Over the years some people have suggested that maybe he prioritises the CL over the Premiership but I think that’s a total misreading of the situation. Football has changed a lot over the last couple of decades and money has become a much more vital ingredient for success.

The old Liverpool way of fielding “the same eleven as last week” no longer really applies in the modern game. The league has now become a battle of attrition where having a strong squad is essential as the games come thick and fast. Every season we always see some teams starting very well over the opening months of the season but when they don’t have the depth in their squad it eventually catch’s up and they drift off the pace.

Some good examples from this season would be Hull City, Aston Villa and unfortunately even ourselves. It’s not just about injuries some players will just lose form, as has happened with several of our own, and there will also be tired legs to contend with etc. In such circumstances you’ve got to dip into your squad and if you haven’t got enough quality there you will suffer and that’s why money is so important.

The Champions League is different and I don’t think the squad element is as much of a factor. Obviously injuries to key players is still a factor but with the away goals rule and the gap between ties etc, the game is as much about tactics as it is about quality and to my mind it is more of a level playing field than the Premiership and in those circumstances Rafa often excels over his rivals. Which is why I mentioned the importance of building a strong squad in the last blog because I firmly believe that if the boss gets the support to add a bit more depth and quality to our squad we will be competing as strongly in the Premiership as we are in Europe.

Anyway, I better finish up here because I’m about to head out to the game. We have a slight advantage going into tonight’s game after our superb team display got us a 1-0 victory at the Bernabeu but this tie is by no means over and there is still much work to be done. The first goal will be all-important, if they get it everything will be up in the air once more but if we can score it we will have a nice little cushion.

At the time of writing this I’m still not sure how things are working out on the injury front. It would be nice to have Arbeloa back in at right back. If he doesn’t play I think it’s going to have to be Carra because I think the boss will be very keen to have Masch back on patrol in front of our back four, but this would men bringing Sami Hyypia back into the centre of defence and we’ll need to be very wary of leaving him exposed to their pace.

I think Torres will start on the bench and maybe brought on later when their defence is starting to tire and it would be very useful for him to gain some match-fitness and maybe even the confidence of a goal into our game against the mancs at the weekend. Riera is suspended but the boss could still start with Babel upfront and play Aurelio on the left side of midfield with Dossena at left-back, as Insua can’t play in this one. But I suspect he might give Eggnog another go and leave Babel on the left side. The rest of the team really picks itself.

I’m heading down to my local boozer to watch the game and I want to be celebrating a Reds victory so I fancy us to take another step on the road to Rome with a 2-1 win and a welcome boost ahead of our trip to the land of prawns.

Keep the Faith

My “short” trip ended up lasting several days longer than planned and I arrived back at Kopblog HQ last night, flat broke and feeling as depressed as a cannibal in a vegetarian restaurant. But I received some excellent news when I returned that lifted my mood. As you’ve probably gathered from the message beneath our Kopblog banner at the top of the page, the site won the Best Sport and Recreational Blog Award at Saturday’s Irish Blog Awards which took place at the Cork Airport International Hotel.

As this category included blogs from all sports there was a very big and impressive list of nominees and I considered it a great achievement that we made the final shortlist of five. However, considering the tough competition from the other excellent blogs on that shortlist and the fact that as I was in the UK I couldn’t attend the event, I figured I stood about as much chance of winning this award as Rafa Benitez does of winning the Football Writers Manager of the Year Award.

So while as a Liverpool fan I remain very disappointed with the result and our performance at Anfield yesterday, on a personal level I am delighted and immensely proud to receive this award. This is the second award won by the site following our Best Football Blog Award in last years New Football Pools Awards. Many thanks to all of you guys for visiting the blog and posting your comments because it is you that have made the site what it is and made it possible for us to receive such recognition.

Also many thanks to the unsung heroes of the site Matt Ladson and Max Munton. I only write the blogs, it is their technical wizardry in the background that keeps the site and all the bells and whistles working. I can assure you that this award will not change me or make me arrogant in any way. I will remain just an ordinary blogging God and just like before, should you ever be fortunate enough to meet me in person remember to avert your eyes from my magnificence and I think a slight courtesy might also be appropriate.

Anyway back to business and yesterday’s game was a real downer for Reds fans. Drawing at home for the sixth time this season has left our title hopes for this season hanging by the tiniest of threads and handed every possible advantage to the mancs. It’s depressing but the reality is we now face a battle to even remain in second place and avoid the potential banana skin of having to play in a qualifying round to get into next seasons Champions League.

As we weren’t involved in last weekend’s FA Cup games the team had the benefit of a long decent break before we headed into the business end of the season and I went to Anfield yesterday full of expectation but my worries began as soon as I heard our starting eleven. The reasons for my fears became very apparent almost from the first whistle. Without Gerrard or Alonso available our team had the footballing equivalent of a lobotomy.

With little quality in the wide areas we rely on our central midfield to provide us with some creativity but yesterday our team had no brain, what we had instead was Mascherano and Lucas. Although we’ve seen little evidence of it this season, on his day Masch is one of the best defensive midfielders in the world but he does little for the team in an attacking sense. I don’t wish to be too hard on Lucas after the stick he has already had to endure this season but the truth of the matter is he often plays the game like a blind crab, almost always going sideways and lacking the vision to play a decent forward pass.

Ahead of the game yesterday this is what worried me most because whenever we play these two together we always struggle to create in an attacking sense. Sure playing them may make us a bit more solid defensively and may also offer us a bit more control but sometimes a little bit of control has to be sacrificed at the altar of creativity particularly in a home game against a mid-table team that we simply had to win.

If we had no other choice than I would simply accept it and hope for the best but the fact is we did have another choice but we weren’t bold enough to use it. When we played Pompey in our previous game Aurelio put in an excellent display in central midfield spraying passes around and even capping his performance with a goal. In that one game he did more than Lucas has ever done in that position and he quite rightly received a lot of praise from fans and even the manager for his display.

So, particularly in regard to the absence of Gerrard and Alonso, I was quite frankly amazed to see him on the bench on Sunday and you can’t help but ask yourself just what does a player have to do to keep his place in the side? Regular visitors to this blog will know that I try to avoid being kneejerk and I am still a supporter of the boss but I just believe that on this occasion he got it wrong on the day. I know if Benny Onion’s great shot had got past the keeper or if we were given that late penalty for a clear hand-ball, we might have got away with it as we have in some other games but we just can’t keep going from game to game hoping we’ll get away with it, which is what we appear to be doing lately.

I’m not trying to be wise after the fact so you’ll just have to take my word for this but had I been able to put up a blog before the game, the team I would have preferred to see us start with from the players we had available would have been Reina, Carra, Skrtel, Agger, Insua, Kuyt, Masch, Aurelio, Babel, Benny and Torres. Granted this is an armchair opinion but that would have been my team based on the fact that these are the players that I would regard as being the most in-form of the ones we had available, with the exception of Masch and Babel but remember that would have been my choice before the game and I would have been hoping that these two might have showed a bit of form on the day.

I think Agger is too good a player to be left on the sidelines so I’d move Carra right to accommodate him and sacrifice Arby and I’d have had Insua straight back in at left back to hopefully pick up where we left off before he went on international duty. In midfield Kuyt on the right where his hard work is most effective, Masch doing the defensive bit, Aurelio pulling the strings and it would be really a toss-up between Babel and Riera as to which of them is the most out of form but I’d go for Babel purely for his pace. Upfront I would have had Benny, probably our most in form player at the moment, playing behind Torres where hopefully his intelligent use of the ball would create some opportunities for El Nino.

Now granted as I mentioned earlier this would have been only my armchair opinion and I obviously wouldn’t have had the benefit of seeing the numerous training sessions available to our coaches but to my mind that side would have had a much better chance of delivering us our badly needed win on the day. But it’s all water under the bridge now and we are where we are.

We’ve still got a slight chance if we could win all of our remaining games but with the way we’ve been playing since Christmas I can’t say I’m very confident of that happening and I’m just hoping we can win enough of them to get as close as we can and ensure that we at least finish second which would at least be a big improvement on previous seasons.

So our thoughts must now turn to our big CL clash with Real Madrid and it’s a competition which now represents our best hope of any silverware this season. Despite our frustrations this season, if we could somehow manage to win the CL and finish second in the league I would definitely be celebrating what I would consider to be a successful season. I’m currently doing a Q&A session with a Real Madrid website so I’ll post up my answers to their questions on Wednesday ahead of the game. That’s all for now from your “multi award winning” blogger but now that I’ve done my bit in the trophy department let’s hope the team can follow suit!

Keep the Faith

Well, 2009 sees Kopblog again in the nomination process, so if you think Gerry and the blog are worthy of taking the accolade for a second consecutive year, click here to place your vote. Select Liverpool: Kopblog.com.

You may also wish to vote for Gerry in the best writer category and for the This Is Anfield website which runs the blog in the best online fanzine category.

Cheers!

Just wanted to let you all know you can now subscribe to Kopblog and receive a notification each time a new blog is added to the site. It’s free, you won’t get spam bla bla bla. [More Info] Just enter your email below to get started.

Those of you savvy enough to know about RSS feeds might be interested to subscribe to Kopblog’s new feed, here. If you’re not sure what RSS is, click here (or not if you don’t care to know!)

Congratulations to Timmy for winning the Marseille tickets and I’m sure you’ll all agree it was a great competition run by Gerry.

I doubt that any one of us would have had Keane at the top of our lists of potential summer signings, not because we didn’t rate him but because he seemed to be embedded in at Spurs and it wouldn’t have appeared to be a likely signing. However, thankfully Rafa set his sights on the player and now Robbie is well and truly a Red.

I think most people would agree that Keane is a very good signing for us but the question is, is he a great one? Is he a player that can bring us yet another step closer to challenging and potentially winning the Premiership among other things? I believe that he most definitely is.

If you’re thinking about world class players he is probably not someone that would immediately spring to mind but by any definition of that category of player, that’s exactly what he is. Granted I may be slightly biased towards him given the facts that he is not only a fellow Irishman but also a fellow Dubliner, but to be honest I really only consider that a slightly added bonus because I really couldn’t give a damn where any of our players come from as long as they are good enough to strengthen the team, and Keane certainly does that.

His record pretty much speaks for itself. He has scored goals at every club he’s been at and he’s also been a favourite among the supporters of all of his past clubs which tells you almost as much about him as his goals. I am probably more aware of him for his performances at international level for the Rep of Ireland . I think I must have seen all of his 81 international games and I’ve certainly seen all of his 33 international goals which is a very decent total and a record haul for Ireland.

So it’s easy to see why he is such a big favourite among the Irish fans and chants of “Keane-o, Keane-o” ring around the ground every time he dons the Green. Obviously his goals are a big part of it but they are not the only reason why he is so popular with our supporters. Ever since he won his first cap about ten years ago, Keane has always put in the kind of wholehearted performances that fans love to see from their players. Whether we are playing San Marino or Brazil, he always gives it 100%.

He is a ball of energy that torments defenders but he also has a very good football brain and is very clever in his play both on and off the ball. Obviously I would have preferred it if he has a couple of years younger, but at 28 he is in his prime at the moment and I have absolutely no doubt that he will prove to be a huge asset for us in attack, both with his goals and with his clever attacking play that will certainly help us to open some of the more stubborn defences.

In one of the blogs during last season I mentioned that we needed to find a good strike partner for Torres and that the ideal candidate would not only have to be able form a good productive partnership with him but also be capable of replacing him in the side when the need arises and also be able to weigh in with their own fair share of goals. Keane is one of the few players around that can tick all of those boxes and I’m delighted that Rafa has pushed the boat out to bring him in.

From an overall team point of view I’m feeling pretty good about things at the moment. With Agger back again, our options at the centre of defence look pretty solid, in central midfield we are also looking very strong, even if we don’t manage to sign Barry and our attack will be a lot more dangerous with the addition of Keane not to mention this new lad Eggnog who I believe is looking promising and scored in our 4-0 win over Rangers and our 4-1 win over Valerenga, although I wasn’t able to see either of those games, so you guys will know a lot more about that then I do.

As ever it’s on the flanks where we are still struggling to find some decent options. It remains to be seen how good Degan and Dossena will prove to be as attacking full-backs. If they are effective we should be in pretty good shape, as I think a good attacking full-back is just as good as a winger. But if they don’t provide us with the width we need, it’s hard to see where it’s going to come from. All of our other options in the wide midfield area’s are players who constantly try to come inside with the ball and, with the possible exception of Flyin Ryan, we don’t really have a wide player that can really take on a full-back down the flanks.

I would feel a lot better if we brought in at least one decent winger, but our attack does look like it will have a lot of movement next season so hopefully we won’t end up being as narrow as we have in the past and it won’t be as much of a problem. Anyway, once this Gareth Barry saga reaches its conclusion there will still be a lot of time left in the transfer window, so who knows, maybe Rafa isn’t finished with his signings yet and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he is already monitoring some young winger somewhere that none of us have ever heard of, I guess time will tell.

Keep The Faith

I don’t mean any disrespect to the lad, he’s 19, 6ft 3inches tall, apparently lightening quick and with a very good goal-scoring record at youth level for France. So he sounds like a very decent prospect for the future and I obviously hope he develops into a star player for us. But to be honest I think we already have a youth squad full of very promising prospects for the future and until some of these lads start to break into our first team, I find it hard to get too excited about us adding another one. My main concern at the moment is with the present and I was expecting that during the past week we would have secured a signing with a bit more significance then Noggin the Nog!

Our potential signing of Gareth Barry looks further away than ever, in fact it’s beginning to look extremely doubtful at this stage but it does look like the signing of Robbie Keane is very much on the cards. I happen to work a short distance away from Keane’s family home and a couple of the locals I work with, who are near neighbours of the family, have told me quite definitely that this deal was done by the middle of last week and that only the medical remains to be done.

That said, I’m still not going to count my chickens until I see Rafa holding a press conference to unveil him as a Liverpool player because with Rick Parry in charge of our transfer dealings, anything can happen and usually does! As a Chief Executive this guy is about as useful as a hedgehog in a condom factory and I wouldn’t trust him to go down to the local shop to buy a pint of milk, much less have him in charge of multi-million pound player transfers.

I covered this ground in a recent blog when I questioned the sanity of the people in charge at Liverpool University who awarded this moron an honorary degree so I won’t go over it again. However, as they are practically joined at the hip, a number of people asked me why I hadn’t given any mention of the incompetence of David Moores during that blog. My explanation for that was that firstly I focused totally on Parry in that blog because he was the one receiving the degree and secondly is the fact that I have had plenty to say about Moores in previous blogs.

Again, I won’t recover old ground at this stage but I can sum up my thoughts on our former chairman quite briefly. Basically the man sickens me. I think his sense of decency was far-outweighed by his sense of greed and he sold us out. So as far as the role he played in creating the current mess at our club, I think he is as guilty as a nun doing press-ups in a cucumber field.

And clearly I am not the only one who feels that way. Another who shares this opinion is a great friend of ours here at Kopblog known to us by his username of AnimalCol. Col sent me an e-mail a couple of weeks back outlining his own thoughts on David Moores and as you will see, he goes in to great detail and as usual makes some excellent points. I think you guys will find his opinion interesting, so I’ve copied it below.

My opinion, for what it is worth is that both Parry and Moores are to blame for our current situation, but Moores a lot more than Parry.

Moores has also been involved in the appointment of in my opinion, an inept CEO in Parry who is paid massive wages and has to be given 2 years notice to get rid of him. Moores is the number one reason the club is in the state it’s in at the moment because of who he sold it to. But he’s 88 million richer and a lifetime member of the board. Not bad for a piss poor performance, is it?

Apologies that this blog has turned into yet another epic, but I think it was worth it and there should be plenty there for you guys to mull over, check out the “click here” links by the way, I think you will find them interesting. Of course, opinions are like arseholes, everyone has one and everyone thinks that everyone else’s stinks! So there may be some people who feel that AnimalCol or myself are being unduly harsh on Moores or indeed Parry (ok, maybe that’s stretching things a bit too far!), but if there is anybody out there who would care to mount a defence on their part then as ever you can e-mail me by using the link on the left-hand side of the page and I can assure you I will give your views equal prominence on a future blog.

Anyway, I’ll sign off for now and I hope that in the next blog we will be getting back to the football and judging the merits of the Robbie Keane signing.

Keep the Faith

Apologies for the delay since the last blog, the wireless router replacement I’ve been waiting an eternity on, finally arrived but the idiots at Eircom managed to send me a faulty one, so now I’m waiting for a bloody replacement for the replacement! Thankfully a mate of mine had an old one which he’s loaned me, it’s not wireless but it’ll do the job so I’m back up and running again. That picture on the left is of me with the blog award at Kopblog HQ, my trophy room is now bigger then Newcastle’s!

Mind you, there hasn’t really been a lot happening during my enforced absence. I know some people are getting frustrated at the lack of activity on the transfer front, but in fairness it’s been pretty quiet everywhere at the moment and at least we did manage to get our two new full-backs fairly quickly, so I’m remaining patient for the moment.

The Gareth Barry saga is still dragging on and has become a bit of a pain. As I’ve said in previous blogs, I think he’s a quality player and would be a very good addition to the side but if it’s not sorted out soon I think we should walk away and move on to another target. Obviously it’s not the players fault, I think it’s clear he wants to come to Anfield but Moaning O’Neill is being a right tit about it. It would serve him right if we did walk away from the deal now because it would leave him with an extremely unhappy player on his hands that will end up walking away for a pittance next season.(click here)

As usual we are being linked with all sorts of other players the latest being Robbie Keane, who’s a player that could certainly do a job for us but it seems an unlikely deal unless Spurs are that desperate to sign Peter Crouch. We all know that we need to bring in at least one winger and David Silva seems to be one of the chief names mentioned as a possible target.

He’s a player I’ve mentioned myself in the past but I must admit that I’ve been less than impressed with what I seen of him in Euro 2008. There’s no doubt he’s a skilful player and I’m sure he would get us a few goals, but I think he’s one of those players that would do our heads in. He seems to drift in and out of games and doesn’t seem to do much in the way of tracking back. I just can’t see him being a Rafa type of player.

Off the pitch, I see that our two moronic owners seem to have kissed and made up, now if only they’d both agree to just piss off out of the club, life would be great. During the week they made a big deal about the Liverpool City Council giving yet more planning permission for our new stadium to proceed, but I thought we were given the go ahead for that ages ago, just how much bloody planning permission do we need? (click here)

I know we really need the extra cash the increased capacity of this new stadium would generate to help us compete at the top level and I must admit I do really like the design, but I just can’t get enthusiastic about it with these two clowns in charge. This is because I know this stadium would be built on foundations of debt, massive debts so large that it’s doubtful any of us will be around long enough to see the club making any kind of a dent in them.

In fact I honestly feel that unless we can manage to get some new owners in soon, with the kind of financial muscle of the likes of DIC, we could really be only just a couple of poor seasons away from being in real danger of going down the tubes. It’s just amazing that a simple thing such as a lack of homework that a basic goggle search would have provided, has allowed these two Americans to come in and do such damage to a club that has spent over a century building its reputation as one of the best run in the game and that many fans have spent their whole lives supporting. And what I find even more incredible is the news that Rick Parry, the man most directly responsible for the incompetence that has caused this mess, is about to be awarded an honorary degree by the University of Liverpool for his “services to football”.

I’m struggling to think of anybody less deserving of such an honour. The only thing worthy of note on his football CV is the appointment of Rafa Benitez as our manager, the rest is pretty much just a catalogue of incompetence and stupidity that has caused us to miss out on multiple signings, almost cost us to lose our captain and most important player, and if we don’t manage to get some new owners in soon, it could very well cost us our club.

Even the marketing of the club worldwide, for which he is meant to be responsible, is a complete joke in comparison to others and let’s not even bother discussing the many ticketing allocation messes he has presided over, and the list goes on. So just exactly what “service to football” these muppets are referring to, is a complete mystery!

I don’t know what bunch of clowns runs that university, but clearly there’s not a single Liverpool fan among them. Presumably in the future we can also expect them to offer honorary degrees to Tom Hicks and George Gillett for their services to honesty, or George Bush for his services to world peace or even Paul Merson for his services to intelligence! I think it’s pretty clear that if idiots could fly, the University of Liverpool would be an airport.

Keep the Faith