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Throne For Rent. Enquire Within.

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The Fenway Sports Group have terminated their contract with Kenny Dalglish and whilst for some, their heads won’t be in the right place to do so it’s actually a  good day for Liverpool fans to have a good long think about how they approach the future.

The emotional investment made by fans of football in clubs is has rarely ever been returned …but the feeling of being short changed is bitterly exaggerated these days by the unrelenting financial leeching that football clubs impose upon those that fund them. Ticket prices up, satellite subscription prices up, polyester shirt prices up, bottle of pop at half time prices up. Same small, crappy plastic seat.

Liverpool fans need to take stock of what it is exactly that they think they are supporting.

Moyes called Everton the people’s club and this simply serves to reflect a sense of community that still exists on Merseyside. It’s an echo if you like of what they called the ‘Blitz Spirit’ of London. 

For those of you joining us late, the game has changed and nobody values your support or gives a stuff about you. Seriously, they don’t. You storm off in a strop and you are replaced in an instant. You’re a client reference number, credit card number with all but the last four digits asterix’d out. That’s all that you are. Getting in you in and out of the ground, communicating with you? A chore.

The upside to the money pouring in and everything going well is easy. The trappings of wealth and success bring problems that aren’t problems at all. What colour shall I paint my yacht? Should I buy an apartment in Monaco or perhaps St. Moritz? Shall I get, ‘Aguero’ on the back of my replica shirt or, ‘Kompany’?

It’s dealing with losing. Dealing with being hurt, sucking, getting beaten and looking like you’ll never win. Scratching together enough for the kids school uniform that requires talent.

Liverpool lost repeatedly this season. I don’t mean in the conventional sense, by conceding goals I mean as a club.

They bought badly and they spent heavily while they were at it. Andy Carroll seemed only sufficiently humiliated and thus motivated to get into shape physically and mentally by the time it was too late anyway. I could go through the others but it would be to no purpose, everyone saw what happened.

The Suarez business was deeply unpleasant to watch unfold. One of the greatest clubs in the world was hijacked by a tin pot victim mentality that whined and bickered until the owners, the paymasters reminded everyone that ‘normal people’, ‘balanced people’ were at best deeply uncomfortable with the whole business. And so, ‘…stop it!’

Suarez, whilst a talented footballer isn’t an honorable man. He doesn’t conduct himself in an open and honest manner. Like Drogba, he fakes, cheats and plays the ‘sportsmanship’ card to such an extent that no matter what genuine good he may ever do, the response will always be, ‘Yeah, but it’s Suarez.’

Dalglish surprised me that he went along with the siege mentality over the substandard players and Luis Is Innocent rubbish. He emotionally over committed to people that didn’t deserve anyone’s love. Dalglish’s post match interviews were cringe-worthy. Masterclasses in churlishness. Dalglish wrapped himself up and weighted himself down in the emotion of it all and it sank him. 

The argument that the Carling Cup was worth anything was naive. The final itself was unremittingly bad viewing. The naivety displayed here though was eclipsed by the belief that Dalglish had that they were going to beat Chelsea and win the FA Cup too. Of course it didn’t happen and if two pots might in some surreal parallel universe have been staved off criticism of a lackluster season, winning one was no good to anyone on any planet.

For Liverpool fans this might be a good point to draw breath and think about their public image. Think about the future. Football clubs need money, nothing else. Just money. They don’t need petitions,  supporters groups, tips on replica shirt design, letters to the chairman, or to have the name of their purely commercial operation dragged through the mud by extremists. 

King Kenny bit the bullet for a whole heap of quite valid reasons and instead of grieving for someone that didn’t die, it might be a salutary opportunity to think about the best way to support your club, rather than feed the vanity of an emotional investment that’s worth nothing to anyone but you.

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72 comments

  • Tony says:

    24th??

  • Teddyboy says:

    Well,
    Must say i dont feel Kenny hard done by, Hodgson actuslly tried to do something about it, agree about the romantic money view there…
    Hope THFC can accumulate some of that stuff

  • PeterTheStoreyTeller says:

    Is ratboy not humilating us with his moving on to better things talk when the c**t has a long contract.

    • david says:

      He can go as far as I am concerned, provided we get decent money for him.

      • robbie says:

        spot on!! we need to get rid get in ganso or Eriksen to replace him and get it done soon.

        • Eyeball Paul says:

          Exactly lads, HH is remarkable quiet on the subject of ‘No like Chicken Badge – Part 2’ …..Luka should p*ss off now, he has about as much loyalty to Spurs as Sol Campbell….again, he should take a long hard look at his own performances throughout the season and then ask himself, ‘could he have done more to help us succeed in getting turd place at least? He is the epitomy of what is wrong with the modern day footballer….Adios pipsqueek, enjoy Manchester, enjoy Liverpool, enjoy West London – you is still a tosser…

  • SerfCity says:

    If all it takes is a trip to Boston, I’ll cover Harry’s airfare myself. Hell, I’ll even throw in a pair of Red Sox tickets.

  • cyril says:

    liverpool let themselves down very dadly over the suarez affair and kenny’s churlishness, indeed downright rudeness to interviewers under the very mistaken impression that he was being amusing and witty was cringe inducingly embrrassing. he should never have gone back and they should never have taken him back. a lack of familiarity with the english game probably led them to believe he could do the job. sad that his memeory there is now tainted. as to “ratboy”, i think we should calmly wait and see. he said he was looking forward to the higest level in regard to the euros and has been misquoted. he learned a lesson last summer and is unlikley to want to eat humble pie twice. if chelsea win i doubt levey will let him go due to the precedent for bale and others. if chelsea lose i wd imagine that with other business done he would let him leave for 35 mill. i would. he has not dominated and dictated a game all season. beautiful football with great composure and wonderful skills that take him past a player, BUT he has made a dumb square pass to the opposition more often than he has made the telling pass thro to a striker or even bale. and he does not score anywhere near enough. we can do better for less than 35 mill

    • david says:

      Suspect Man U will be in for him, a bidding war with Chelsea is no bad thing. For all his movement and quality, his lack of goals and as you say, failure to dominate games means I too think we should sell for decent money.

      • Jamie says:

        I think this Modric goals business gets talked about a lot, so I just looked up Xavi’s goal record. 48 in 414 career appearances for Barcelona. Modric at Spurs 13 in 125. So both roughly 1 in 10.
        Fair enough Xavi is a better version of Modders. But they both perform more or less the same role, namely picking it up from the back 4 and get us up the pitch. His form dipped after Jan certainly, but the critique of him reminds me of Carrick, who also never scored… nobody realised how important he was until he was gone. I wouldn’t sell without an equal replacement, and there ain’t many – hence his price tag!

        • david says:

          Those are interesting stats, but how many assists does Modric have in comparision with Xavi ? I suspect there is a huge difference between the two
          and Xavi can dominate a game whereas Luka does not and sometimes vanishes altogether.
          Re Carrick, I never really rated him and only appreciated what he brought to the team after he left so fair play on that point.

        • Jamie says:

          I guess my point on Modric is his role is so deep that assists isn’t the real way of measuring his contribution. It’s the number of times he completes an intelligent forward pass. Xavi is kind of the same, I don’t know those stats but when I’ve watched him he does most of his work outside the final third..lets be honest if it wasn’t for last summers chicken badge antics we wouldn’t be hyper critical of him. I understand that, loyalty works both ways – but my take is if Harry can settle Bale and Modric down, heck I’m prepared to put it all behind us with all three of them (so long as HR stops talking up what a great job he’s doing)

        • david says:

          On his good days, he sets the tone and pace of our play and is almost like the teams heart beat. On his bad days, he can tend to vanish and become a luxury.
          He is not helping himself with these comments in the press (if they are true) and as you say, a lot of us have gone off him because of those comments.
          Going to be a long and interesting transfer window!

        • LLL says:

          You are quite right. Criticizing Modric for his goal ratio is naive in the extreme. That isn’t his job. Neither are direct assists. However, if you look at how many assists are ‘assisted’ by his initial pass I think you’d all be quite surprised. And generally speaking, he is the heartbeat of the team setting the tempo and movement.

        • david says:

          If we accept he does not score many goals or provide many direct assists for goals, is he really worth 35-40 million ?
          I think Man U will be after him but would he want to move up there or hang around for renewed interest from Chelsea ?

    • The Tottinghams says:

      “they should never have taken him back” I totally agree. Just like us and the boy Keane

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