So the Alonso saga has finally ended and he has now gone to Real Madrid. The way this thing has dragged out over the summer has driven us all mad but I’m just glad that it is now over with and we can move on.

Xabi is a great player, perhaps the most accurate passer of a ball over any range that I’ve ever seen. In fact his accuracy is so great that I can exclusively reveal that Madrid had to fight off a late bid from NATO for his services. Apparently they wanted to install his feet into their latest missile guidance system, as in this increasingly PC world of ours it’s considered to be the height of bad manners to continually bomb the shit out of your allies!

Despite the frustration some of us may be feeling at the moment, I think we will all remember him fondly. He was an excellent signing by Rafa and he gave the club five very good years of service and many great memories. My own couple of favourites were his penalty in the CL final in 2005 which he eventually put away from the rebound but what bottle he showed to take it in the first place, and also of course were those fantastic goals he scored with such superb accuracy and technique from inside his own half. So I want to thank Xabi for his five years of great service to the club and I wish him all the very best in his future career.

There’s no doubt we will miss him but how badly and for how long will be determined by what Rafa does next. This thing really couldn’t have happened at a worse time for us. By the end of last season I think it would be a fair assessment to say that we had the best team in the country but the mancs edged us out by having a stronger squad. As our first team already seemed to be in place I thought our main focus over the summer would be on strengthening the squad but it hasn’t worked out that way.

It’s amazing how quickly things can change in football these days, I was about to go through what options Rafa might have in filling the void left by Alonso but now I’ve just got the news that we have signed Alberto Aquilani from Roma subject to a medical. The medical is normally a formality but in this case it may not be quite so straightforward because this guy was injured for a fair chunk of last season and underwent ankle surgery in May which I understand means he won’t be fully recovered for awhile yet.

Our medical staff will really have to be sure about this one because he’ll be eaten alive in the Premiership if he’s got a dodgy ankle. But if it works out then overall you would have to this would be an exciting signing for us. He would certainly be a bit more offense minded in his play and give us another attacking option. I would expect he’ll play further up the field ahead of Masch and behind Gerrard and it would be very useful for us to have another runner from midfield especially against the ten man defences that some teams sometimes frustrate us with.

Although I haven’t seen too much of him, what I have seen I’ve liked and I would be very happy with this signing if the medical works out. A friend of mine who’s a mad keen Juve fan and watches a lot of Italian football tells me he will be a terrific player for us if we can keep him fit. You can always check out some clips of him on You Tube but those little highlight clips could even make a player like Jermaine Peanut look good so I don’t trust what I see on there.

The best way to judge how good a player is, is to ask the fans and as you can see from the reaction to his transfer by the fans on this Roma blog , Alberto must be very good indeed. I suspect he will not be the last new face we’ll see before the transfer window closes, in fact I believe there will be two more additions but that’s another blog.

Anyway in other matters, I just broke off there to watch our penultimate pre-season game with Norwegian side FC Lyn hoping I might see something exciting. Obviously it’s always nice to see some goals but I’m really far more interested in the performance than the results in these games and so far I have to say our performances have been as flat as witches tit overall and we’ve been far too pedestrian for my liking.

As I’ve already said, I don’t care too much about the games themselves because they are really just about getting the side into peak condition ahead of our opening league game at Spurs but so far we still look some way off that and I’m just hoping we will look closer to the finished article in our final warm-up game against Atletico at the weekend. The other disappointment has been the injuries we’ve picked up and I just have my fingers crossed that Dagger and Skary will be fit for the start of the campaign.

From what we have seen, I’ve been impressed with Glen Johnson and I think he will be a real asset to us this season. Some of our other first teamers look there or thereabouts and I think Lucas in particular has done really well. However there have also been one or two who have worried me and chief among them is Degen. I know he’s been out injured for a season and these are only pre-season games but already I can tell that he is the kind of player who will give me nightmares.

He seems to really like to get forward but defensively he looks all over the place and even against some of the inferior opposition we have faced he has managed to get himself in more awkward positions than a blind prostitute! Of course it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been wrong about a player and I hope I am wrong again this time, but on the basis of what we’ve seen of him so far I dread to think of us having to rely on him in the Premiership. I think we should put an armed guard on this guy with orders to shoot to kill if Johnson becomes injured!

Of the younger players we’ve seen, it was great to see Nemeth grabbing a couple against Singapore and Spearing looks tidy enough in midfield but I didn’t see anything from any of them to suggest they will be knocking on the first team door anytime soon, or at least that was the case ahead of our game at FC Lyn. Just when I was beginning to despair that any of our younger players were good enough yet to join Insua in making the step up to the first team squad, along came Martin Kelly.

I was hugely impressed by this lad’s performance against Lyn. He looked comfortable at centre back in the first half, equally comfortable at right back in the second half and very useful when he got forward. I believe he was also very impressive while on loan at Huddersfield last season and that Tranmere are currently trying to take him on loan for the coming campaign. But I hope Rafa keeps him with us because on the basis of that one performance alone I would already have him ahead of Degen as cover at right back and possibly even as our fourth choice centre-back if we fail in our attempts to sign Sylvia Dustbin.

In other matters there is a very good cause that I’m hoping to drum up some support for and I’m hoping some of you guys can help. As you know, I’m not normally one to bother you people with such things but I had an e-mail about a cause so worthy that it even moved a miserable shit like me into making a donation. The e-mail was from Cllr Bill McCulloch who is campaigning to raise funds for a permanent memorial to Liverpool and Scotland footballing legend Billy Liddell in his home town of Townhill, Dunfermline.

For those who may not know, Liddell was one of our greatest ever players and there are some people who still regard him as the very best player to ever play for the club. He had a playing career at Liverpool that spanned four decades. He was mainly a left-winger but was the ultimate utility player and during his time he actually played in an incredible nine outfield positions and excelled in all of them, a very useful man to have around in the days before substitutions were allowed.

During the 50’s when Liverpool languished in the second division, the club become known as “Liddelpool” due to the brilliance of the Scottish international who was the clubs top scorer for eight seasons in a row. And as if all of that wasn’t remarkable enough, he played a total of 537 games scoring 229 times and in his entire career he never received a single booking.

When I was a lad and just starting to go to games, a lot of the grown-ups around me still referred to Liddell in the same kind of reverential terms that many of us use today to describe Dalglish. Even though he hung up his boots in 1960 he was still fresh in the minds of people back then in much the same way that King Kenny is today, but as Liddell’s exploits were not captured by any TV cameras this great footballing Legend is largely forgotten by the majority of fans today.

However there are some people trying to ensure that The Great Billy Liddell will be forever remembered and are raising funds to erect a permanent memorial in his honour in his home town. To do this they need to raise a mere £4000 which even in these tight times is a relatively paltry amount. I know that it is less than an hour’s wages for some players and that it is the kind of amount that the club could pay for without even thinking about it but I think that it is fitting that this memorial will be paid for by the fans.

So if any of you would like to help you can do so by making a donation and/or purchasing a raffle ticket.

The raffle prizes include –

A limited edition hand painted statuette of Billy Liddell – a real collectors item

A football signed by the 2009/10 Liverpool first team squad.

A bottle of Scottish Parliament Whisky.

Tickets are only £2 each but you can buy as many as you like, and you can do this on-line simply by clicking the link HERE . Spread the word guys.

Keep the Faith

I had hoped that by now we would be a lot clearer on the future of Xabi Alonso but things are still about as clear as mud and the whole situation still has me as confused as a hungry baby in a topless bar! Quite frankly I have become very tired with reading and writing about it and at this stage, regardless of the outcome, I just want to see an end to it and all of our focus to be totally on the season ahead.

I’m not sure where Alonso’s heart and mind is at the moment but I’m a little disappointed that he has avoided nailing his colours to the wall so far and chosen instead to keep his options open, which has allowed this endless press speculation about his future to run and run. We all love Xabi and I think it’s fair to say that we would see him as a good honest pro, but I think it’s also fair to say that he is beginning to test our patience.

If this thing can be sorted out in the short term it will be great for all concerned but if things continue to drag on and he waits for another couple of weeks to suddenly come out and tell us how much he loves the club and never wants to leave, I think some of our supporters will find it a little hard to take, I know I would!

On the plus side, I’m delighted that we have Rafa Benitez in our corner. If Alonso stays with us I’m certain the boss will get his mind right for the season ahead but if he is to leave then I’m equally certain the boss will ensure we receive the maximum price for his services. Real Madrid have managed to screw us in the past and it must be very upsetting for them to be no longer dealing with the moronic Rick Parry who would all too easily cave in to their demands. No, this time they are dealing with a man who is not afraid to call their bluff and if we are forced into to selling the family jewels he will ensure that they pay through the nose.

While the Alonso situation continues to overshadow everything else that’s happening at the club at the moment, at least as far as the press is concerned, I’ve actually been far more interested in following the progress of our team in the couple of pre-season games we’ve had so far. The results of these glorified training sessions really aren’t important but it’s just good to see the players, particularly the young ones, getting a run-out and building their fitness. As is to be expected at this stage the performances haven’t been great so far but these will gradually improve so that hopefully we will be in the peak of condition for our opening game of the season at Spurs.

One thing I’ve noticed recently is that just as the team have begun their pre-season, my mind has also started to go into pre-season mode. Over the summer we’ve only really had all of the usual speculation to mull over but now that the lads are back in training I find that my mind is now turning to the more practical questions about the team as we head into the new campaign.

There are many such questions of varying degrees of importance buzzing around in my head at the moment and they cover every area of the team. In fact there is probably enough material for a dozen blogs but there are five such riddles that have been on my mind recently and I thought I’d start off our Kopblog pre-season by throwing them in the meat grinder.

Benny Onion: He may seem a bit lightweight and there may even be more meat on a butcher’s pencil than there is on our Yossi, but he is a great player. What he may lack in terms of stature, he more than makes up for with his silky play and his very impressive game intelligence. The guy was super for us in the latter half of last season and there are often times when he reminds of Peter Beardsley.

To my opinion he definitely deserves a place in our first eleven but the problem I always have with him is trying to figure out where he should play in our current set-up? He is the gypsy of our team, capable of playing anywhere across the midfield or attack but as yet he doesn’t have a set position that he can call his own. His versatility means he will always get plenty of games and perhaps he is just destined to be the guy who always fills in for others but if he can continue the form he showed at the end of last season, he will be a big asset to us in the campaign ahead.

Riera: I think the best description of his debut season is Jekyll and Hyde. When he first arrived I thought it was terrific the way he slotted straight into the side and provided us with a lot of extra width on the left. However, in the second half of the season he faded badly and some of his performances were actually quite annoying at times. The question is which one was the real Riera?

Perhaps it was just a case of him joining us late and without the benefit of a full pre-season, the rigours of the Premiership eventually caught up with him and he will hopefully be better prepared this time. Maybe his poor finish to the season is still too fresh in my mind but I have my doubts about him and wonder if he can give us the consistency we will need in the next campaign.

Voronin: He returns to us after a fairly successful loan spell in Germany and Rafa has been talking him up a bit lately, which is to be expected, but the truth is if he were really much good he wouldn’t have been sent out on loan in the first place. The guy shows some good touches at times and seems to have a bit of a footballing brain but I just don’t rate him as a top level player and I don’t think he has the quality to be in our team, in fact the last time I seen him he looked about as much use as a milk bucket under a bull’s bollocks!

However, this time last year I said pretty much the same thing about Arbeloa, minus the milk bucket bit, and he proved me wrong so hopefully Voronin will do the same. Let’s face it at the moment it doesn’t look like we have the funds to bring in anybody else so I think we are just going to have to make do with what we’ve got and hopefully Voronin or maybe one or two of our younger players can emerge and make a worthwhile contribution to our attack.

Lucas: He’s another player I have had my doubts about but he endured a tough time last season and I admire the character he showed to come through it and he put in some decent performances at the latter end of last season. One way or another I think this could well be a make or break season for the young Brazilian. So far I think he has pretty much demonstrated that he can be a competent and tidy player in our midfield when we need him but if he is to really make it at Liverpool he is going to have to do more than that.

Perhaps he has been instructed to do so by the boss, but up to now we have often seen him taking the safe option of a short pass to the likes of Alonso or Gerrard etc. Maybe I’m being a little harsh but I view that type of play as not just passing the ball but also passing the responsibility and I think Lucas is now at the stage when he has to start taking on some of that responsibility himself. I think he has the capability and next season I would like to see a bit less of him just making up the numbers and a bit more of him taking control and making things happen, it’s time for him to step it up.

Babel: I’ve kept the best until last because I think Babel is the ultimate enigma. This guy has so much potential it’s untrue. He is the fastest player at the club, outstripping even Torres for pace in training. He also has plenty of skill, an eye for goal and his work rate has improved a lot over the last season or so. But while the lad has often proved very useful to us as an impact player from the bench, he has so far seemed incapable of imposing himself on a game for 90 minutes and we’ve seen little sign of him really developing enough pitch smarts to make the most of his talents.

That said, I’m glad we are going to hang on to him for at least another season. There are a couple of reasons for this, firstly we paid a lot of money for him but what we really bought was his potential and as he hasn’t so far lived up to it so we would be unlikely to get back even half of what we paid. That and the fact that we have already put so much time into him may be good enough reasons by themselves why we may as well soldier on with him a bit longer.

But the main reason why I am happy we are hanging on to him is that if, and I know it’s a bloody big if at this stage, Rafa and Co can find the key to Flyin Ryan he would really be a huge asset to add to what we already have. I know that maybe I’m being blinded by the player he could be rather than the player he is and I accept the fact that sometimes you’ve just got to cut your losses, but I just think this kid could really be a star player one day and I would hate to see him come to fruition somewhere else after we’ve done all the groundwork.

Anyway, I think it’s safe to say that he is now very firmly in the last chance saloon and this will be his final opportunity to really deliver on his potential in a Liverpool shirt. I hope for his and our sakes we see a significant improvement from him this season and perhaps the lure of next year’s World Cup finals may provide him with that extra bit of incentive to deliver.

No doubt the season ahead will give us some answers about these and the rest of the players in our squad and it will also provide us with the answer to the ultimate question that’s gnawing away in all of our minds. For too many years we’ve have gone into each season with the big question in our minds being, is our team good enough to be Champions? Now for the first time in about 20 years I think we can go into a season already knowing beyond doubt that our team is now good enough to be Champions but the big question now becomes, can they prove it?

Keep the Faith

Well I just don’t know what to make out of the situation with Xabi Alonso, is he coming or going? The whole thing has got me as confused as a blind lesbian in a fish market. One day he seems almost certain to be on his way out of Anfield after supposedly telling the boss that he wants to leave, and the next day he seems certain to stay with us after Real have supposedly given up on trying to sign him. I don’t know what to believe at the moment but I do know that I’ve got a great big pain in my arse with this ongoing saga.

If Xabi does leave it will be a major disappointment but we’ve had plenty of those over the years and as ever we’ll get over it. No matter which way this thing goes, I just hope it gets sorted out as quickly as possible so we can focus on our preparations for next season. A few words from the man himself wouldn’t go amiss and hopefully we’ll hear something from him when he joins up with the squad this weekend, if not before.

There’s no doubt losing Alonso would be a blow, he is one of our best players and would be very difficult if not impossible to replace but if he’s made up his mind to leave then it’s best to let him go and try to salvage something by getting the best possible price for him. To be totally honest, I’d be more than a little pissed off if he left us at a time when we finally seem to be on the verge of achieving things, but he’s a player I’ve developed a lot of respect for over the last five years so no matter what happens I certainly won’t be throwing any flak in his direction.

However, it is annoying to see the media vultures using this situation as yet another stick to beat up on Rafa Benitez. During his time at Anfield we have regularly seen him being criticised in the press for his tactics, team selections, transfers, conduct on the bench, arrogance etc, etc, etc. Rarely if ever do we see the likes of Alex Fergiescum subjected to such constant critical analysis but it seems to be open season when it comes to our boss and anything goes.

Now it appears that they are blaming his poor man-management skills as one of the main reasons why we may lose Alonso and just like much of the other crap they write, that is complete and utter bollocks! This is typical lazy journalism based largely on the fact that Xabi was nearly sold to Juventus last summer and to read some of the reports you would think Rafa had tried to drag him away at gunpoint. But this is clearly ridiculous and you only have to look around at what’s happening in the transfer market at the moment to see why.

In the modern game the powers of the players and their agents seem to be increasing all the time, while the powers of managers and clubs seem to be diminishing. It makes me laugh when a player signs a new contract at a club and it gets greeted with headlines about them “committing” themselves to the club for the next 4 years or whatever.

Contracts mean very little these days and regardless of their length it appears that players can walk away pretty much whenever they choose, and often do. Alternatively they can also sit on their arses, run down their contracts and refuse to move on even when it’s clear they are not in the manager’s plans, as we seen recently with Peanut. So my point is that had Alonso moved to Juve last summer, the player and his agent would have been very much involved in making it happen and he wouldn’t have been forced to go anywhere he didn’t want to.

Besides this if Xabi was feeling so unsettled about what went on last summer, as the press claim, then it’s strange that he went on to have his best ever season for us and as recently as just before the Confetti Cup he was saying how very happy he was at Liverpool. So all I’m saying is that if Alonso does end up moving on to Real Madrid there is no way any blame should be placed at Rafa’s door.

I don’t think the boss can do any more to keep the player then he’s already done. Time and again he has publicly stated that Alonso is an important player for us and he is not for sale, the club even released an official hands-off statement and let’s not forget the player still has three years remaining on a fat contract. These are hardly the actions of a manager trying to supposedly force a player out of a club, as some media morons claim.

The reason why the boss has placed such a large price on the players head is simply because he doesn’t want to sell him but if he is forced into it, he wants to ensure that the club is amply compensated and has enough funds to bring in a couple of quality replacements. My intention here is to counter some of the crap that’s been in the press recently and I’m not trying to have a go at Xabi, but it has to be said that if he does move to Madrid it will be down to the efforts of him and his agent not Rafa Benitez.

Anyway, like just about every other Reds fan I know, I’m just totally pissed off with all of this crap and I just want to see it sorted out as quickly as possible. Thankfully we’ve got a little game against St Gallen tonight and even though it’s a pretty meaningless friendly, I’m looking forward to seeing a little action. This is a very small first step in what will hopefully be a very memorable season for us and it will be particularly interesting to see Glen Johnson in action for us for the first time and some of the younger players getting a run out.

Apparently Rafa intends to give all of the 24 players he has available, some time on the pitch. According to the official site our starting eleven will be Cavalieri, San Jose, Degen, Insua, Carragher, Spearing, Gerrard, El Zhar, Babel, Voronin, Nemeth and in the second half we can expect to see the likes of Martin, Darby, Skrtel, Johnson, Kelly, Plessis, Pacheco, Benayoun, Lucas, Ngog, Gulacsi, Ayala and Kuyt.

The LFC TV station is available free for the next couple of weeks or so and they are showing a delayed transmission of the game at 9pm in this part of the world. So I’ll be having some of that and I’ve got some ice cold Stella waiting in the fridge, life is good! I don’t care too much about the result but just give me a few goals for The Reds and no injuries, and I’ll be as happy as a pig in shit!

Keep the Faith

Firstly congrats to NigeriaKopite for winning my brilliantly designed t-shirt, well done mate and hopefully you have received your voucher by now. If I can find a way to get it off the ground, I hope this will be the first in a range of Kopblog exclusive t-shirts, the latest in trendy apparel for the pisshead about town. I’ve got a mind full of ideas but I’m not sure how to set it up yet or even if I should, but I’ll give it some thought.

In other matters, I’ve just had a very frustrating few days. I thought I had the best of security on my laptop but somehow a virus snuck through my defences and infected my whole system. I tried everything I could to get rid of it but this thing just seemed to be indestructible. It was one of those rootkit viruses, a real nasty little bastard that hides away and hits you when you least expect it, in football terms it would be very much like a Joey Barton!

In the end I decided to use my nuclear button and rebooted my system back to a restore point I created a year ago. This obviously got rid of the virus but I lost everything from the past year and had to spend many hours updating and installing software etc. It was just as well I did though because I soon discovered that the asshole responsible for infecting my machine had also used it as a means of getting into my e-mails etc and was in the process of emptying my paypal account, but I managed to stop him just in time. On the plus side, the experience has given me a newfound respect for poor old Helen, it’s certainly no fun having a Trojan inside you!

Anyway with all that going on I had lost touch with what was happening in the footballing world but once I had brought myself back up to speed I found that I hadn’t missed anything, in fact things are more or less exactly the same as they were a few days ago. The media is still full of the usual much ado about nothing but the worrying thing from a Liverpool point of view is that despite the club issuing a statement a couple of weeks ago stating it’s unwillingness to sell Masch or Alonso, the stories just won’t go away and they do appear to have some substance.

I think it’s fair to say that there is nothing we would all like more than to see both of these guys still in our team at the start of the season. It would be difficult for us to replace either one of them but if we were to lose both it would certainly be a big blow, although I just can’t agree that it would necessarily be a knock-out punch to our chances next season that some doomsday merchants seem to be predicting.

I can certainly understand the concern a lot of fans have about this situation. Now that we seem to be finally on the verge of making that big step forward we’ve all been waiting for, it would be very disappointing for us to lose two of our most important players, but should it happen life will go on. Maybe age has brought me wisdom or made me a little bit soft in the head but over the years I’ve been privileged enough to see some of our greatest ever players in action and while they were all fantastic in their day, there came a time when each of them either hung up their boots or moved on.

I’m not saying I didn’t spent time fretting about some of these departures but over time I soon learned that life goes on and it often proved to be the case that when one hero departs, another emerges. I don’t need anyone to tell me how important Xabi and Masch are to our team, I’ve written a lot about them both in past blogs and I am very well aware that they are two of our best. That said, I just don’t buy into the argument some people make that our prospects next season will be finished without them.

Damaged yes, but over, no way. We’ve got too many other good players for this to be the case. Let me emphasise again that I would be delighted to see them both in our team next season but if they leave we will still have players such as Gerrard, Torres, Carra, Pepe, Agger, Kuyt, Benny, Skrtel, Johnson, Rier, Insua, Babel and all of the others giving it everything they have to bring us success and that ain’t to shabby.

Even more importantly we will also still have Rafa and knowing that crafty bastard he is most likely already working on plans B, C, D and E. This guy leaves nothing to chance and he will be well prepared to cope with whatever scenario may come our way. Besides this, both players have plenty of time left on their contracts so it’s not as if they will walk away for nothing. We don’t want to sell either of them but if we are forced into it, each of them will bring us a hefty fee to fund replacements.

So overall I would regard the possible uncertainty regarding their futures at Anfield as a cause for concern, but certainly not a cause for panic. Rafa has built us a team, not a collection of individuals and I’m confident we will cope with whatever circumstance may throw our way. For example, if at this time last year we had known that Gerrard and Torres would only be available to play together for us in less than 20 games there would have been plenty of doom and gloom about, but the boss managed that situation and we ended up with our highest ever points total and pushed the mancs all the way.

I suspect calm heads will be needed more than ever in the season ahead, so let’s not go losing ours before it even begins. I actually believe Xabi and Masch will stay with us and at the very least I just can’t see us losing them both, but should that prove to be the case we will cope with it and I still think we will have an excellent chance of getting our hands on the title. So keep your chins up (quite literally in the case of Fat Scouser) and as ever;

Keep the Faith

Great news on the transfer front at last with the news that Liverpool have confirmed the signing of Glen Johnson. He is Rafa’s first major signing of the summer and a quality addition in an area where we badly needed more options. The fact that he also turned down the chance to rejoin the chavs is also a good sign and will immediately put him in the good books with Reds fans.

But the most important thing about Johnson is that he’s a bloody good player. Some have had reservations about his overall defensive qualities but these are the same reservations that are always expressed about attacking full-backs. Pushing forward there is always a chance that they can sometimes be caught out but Johnson will have an excellent partner on the right hand side in Dirk Kuyt and the hardest working player in the game will be sure to give him plenty of cover.

I look forward to seeing the Doris and Glenda partnership on our right next season. They seem to have qualities that could complement each other well and it should certainly improve our attacking options on that side. However, as I said in the last blog, I still think we should try to hang on to Arbeloa as well. Arby and Johnson vying for the right-back spot would give us plenty of cover and over the course of the season I think they would both get plenty of games.

But Johnson wasn’t our only signing and I suppose it had to happen one day, Jesus has finally come to Anfield. Another signing Liverpool have made is 16yr old Jesus Fernandez Saez (Suso), who has joined us from Cadiz. Apparently it’s not just his first name that he has in common with his famous namesake but, according to his former coach (Click Here) , this kid can also walk on water!

It’s great that we have made our first move on the transfer front of the summer and I’m sure it won’t be our last as Rafa will no doubt be working hard to bring in another couple of additions, to give us that extra little bit of strength and quality to improve on our endeavours from last season. Johnson has the right stuff, in more ways than one, and is a strong beginning to an important summer for us in the transfer market.

Until we make our next move we’ll have to content ourselves with the usual exaggerated bullshit in the press. In many ways the crap these clowns write can be very annoying but I must admit there is a small part of me that is a little amused by the irony of it all, for reasons which I’ll attempt to explain.

You see it wasn’t so long ago that many of these same morons were calling us a “one man team” and claiming that Steven Gerrard was practically keeping us afloat singlehandedly. Then Fernando Torres arrived and suddenly we became a “two man team”, which is a term I was still hearing last season despite the fact that we collected a record number of points and came pretty damn close to winning the title with both of them missing a lot of games through injury.

I would certainly agree that Gerrard and Torres may be our two most important players but referring to our side as a one or a two man team is extremely stupid and totally disrespectful to the rest of our team. But the ironic thing is now that Torres and Gerrard have recently happily signed off on fresh new deals to keep them at Anfield for the foreseeable future, it is our other players, presumably the ones many of these idiot journos dismissed as bit part players in our “two man team”, that are appearing on the wish lists of other top teams around Europe and giving these same press clowns something to fill their pages with.

It seems like Liverpool players have become the latest fashion accessory in football and every billionaire owner wants to have at least one of them in their team! If we believe that there is even the smallest grain of truth in many of these press stories then it would appear that in recent weeks the club have had enquiries for Alonso, Masch, Benny Onion, Babel, Dossena, Arby, Dagger and even Reina. That’s quite a bit of interest for a bunch of “bit part players”.

I mean other than losing the Ladyboy to Real Madrid and Tevez who doesn’t belong to them anyway, I haven’t heard of any teams knocking on the mancs door to make any enquires for the likes of Carrick, Fletcher, O’Shit, Evra, Park, Ferdinand or Van Der Sulk etc. And the chavs haven’t been inundated with requests for the likes of Teary, Cashley Cole, Bootswinger, Plank Lampard, Obi Wan Kenobi, Michael Bollocks or the rest. I would expect there may eventually be some callers for Adebayor and Fabregas at the Gooners, but other than that no-one seems too interested any of their other players.

No, it’s the Liverpool players that are attracting attention and are in demand, which may be a little disconcerting at times but it is a sure sign that we are most definitely making waves and going in the right direction. I know from reading the comments on previous blogs that some people are concerned about the possibility of us losing one or two players and that’s understandable, but I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about such things.

My view on such matters has largely remained the same from the day that Keegan left us to join Hamburg all those years ago. Basically I’ve always been of the opinion that if, for whatever reason, a player no longer wants to play in front of The Kop for Liverpool Football Club then we are better off without them, and it really is as simple as that as far as I’m concerned.

We may feel the loss in the short term, but in the long term it will be their loss, just ask Michael Owen! This club is much bigger than any player and we will carry on regardless. We may not be the richest club in the world but our players are very well paid and if any of them want to earn an extra few grand somewhere else, let them go and do it. I think it really depends on what a player wants from his career but at Liverpool we write songs for our heroes, at other clubs they can only write cheques!

On a final note, if you’re planning on buying any merchandise such as LFC books, replica kits, retro shirts, t-shirts, DVDs etc, could you give the TIA site shop a try first (Click Here). The lads on the main site have just relaunched the shop and any commissions earned through sales goes straight back into both the main site and here at Kopblog, so give it a try and hopefully you’ll find what you’re looking for.

And on a final, final note, I have personally designed a Liverpool t-shirt aimed mainly at our often neglected but completely fantastic international supporters, which I’ll be unveiling in the next blog and giving away a couple of them in competitions over the next week.

Keep the Faith