Some words from our captain.

Too right, Mr Gerrard sir! Ultimately it doesn’t matter how we beat United this Saturday.  All the matters is that we beat them.  However before we get all fired up about what’s just about the biggest game in the domestic season over the next few days expect a few updates.   For the sake of completeness, belated reviews of the Middlesborough and Villa results and then a bit of a heart on sleeve rant and round-up about the last couple of weeks as a Liverpool fan.

Karl

UEFA Champion’s League Draw

So then PSV, Atletico Madrid and Marseille.  Ouch! That could have gone better!

Initial reaction is that we should qualify, our European pedigree in recent years suggests that on our day we can take all of those sides.  What’s a little worrying is that all three will believe they have a genuine chance of qualifying, not to mention unique motivation to take some revenge on us.

Marseille deservedly beat us at Anfield last season, but a Torres masterclass tore them apart in the final group game.  It put us through, but let’s not forget cost Marseille a place in round two.

PSV we played four times in the 2006-2007 campaign – winning both group games before a majestic 3-0 away win in the First Leg of the Quarter Final followed by a drab 0-0 back at Anfield.  On that form we’ve nothing to fear, but a closer look at PSV’s Champions League record will show a team who’ve reached the last eight twice in the past four seasons and only once failed to qualify from the group stage.

Finally there’s Atletico.  Obviously the big focus here will be on Torres.  We took away their hero and whilst his armband proved he was a red,  for the previous decade he was the golden boy of the other Madrid.   Imagine Gerrard or Carragher turning out against us? It’s going to be an emotional night at the Vicente Calderón Stadium.  What’s more it won’t just be Nando in line for a reunion.  Little Luis Garcia and Florent Sinama-Pongolle are both ex-reds in the Atletico squad.

Karl

New signing! New signing!

Well almost.  It’s going to happen though, I’m sure of it.  After all, Liverpool missing out on their prime summer targets and then blowing the best part of £10 million on second or third choice targets just a few days shy of transfer deadline day.  I mean that’s never happened before has it?

I admit, I’m being a bit harsh on Senor Riera here.  I’ve never seen him player, I know very little about him other that he’s not in Spanish national side and once had a unsuccessful loan spell at Manchester City.

What’s wound me up here is the same old, same old situation.  We’ve had these kind of signings repeated over the last few years.  They’ve not worked before, so it’s hard to believe that it’ll be any difference this time.

I’m also not entirely sure where Albert fits in.  He can’t operate as a left-back or as a defensive midfielder in the way Gareth Barry could have.  So to make things even more depressing it looks like we’ve shot £9 million on a squad player.  Yes, we do need width and decent wingers, of that there’s no doubt.  I just find it difficult to believe that Riera is anything more another stop-gap signing.

Plus what of our youngsters and reserve options.  People like Paul Anderson and Adam Hamill. Signings like this have the knock-on effect that everyone else gets knocked one-step further down the pecking order.  Instead of looking forward to some young vibrant motivated youngster appearing down the flanks in the early rounds of the league and F.A. Cup’s we can expect to see the likes of Yossi, Voronin and all the other squaddies making us squirm against Lowerleague Albion.

*sigh* Oh and to make it worse Villa have just signed Milner and our new stadium has been delayed yet again!  Has being joint-top of the league ever felt so depressing!?

karl

Fuck off.  Fuck off.  Fuck off.

A quick summary of last week.  We’re all set to sign a player, the team is playing well and Rafa is happy.  Enter stage left Parry, Gilette and Hicks to spoil the party by refusing to stump up the cash for Barry.  So inevitably we now have disharmony between manager and board and what little confidence we’ve managed to muster as fans stripped bare all over again.

Oh and look here’s news of Rafa’s potential resignation (or in this case a denial of it).  I give it a week before one of the tabloid’s publishes a story about DIC launching a new takeover bid.

* * *

Now it’s dead in the water, I feel genuinely embarrassed by how the club handled the entire Barry affair.  Hopefully all Villains will welcome him back with open arms.  It seems the majority of Liverpool fans didn’t want him anyway, so he’s surely better off at a club where he’s a living legend than as a squad player at a club run by the three stooges.

(Karl Eisenhauer)

The off-season for me is usually a period of blissful optimism.  Back in the Roy Evans era I would regularly check the gossip line headlines on teletext several times a day anxiously waiting for the “£10million superstar linked” rumour to turn into a new signing.  Last season it was message boards and transfer rumour blogs, but the feeling was the same.  That excitement that comes with new signings and the blind faith that this time it will be your season.

This year, however, it’s really hard to know what to think. 

Already we’ve signed three new first team players, two new coaching staff and added a handful of Europe’s finest young talent to our reserve and youth team setups.  Despite all this a number of unanswered questions are slowing grinding down my usual optimism.

Concurrent with the new signings has been the biggest morale sucker.  The Gareth Barry saga.  I genuinely don’t know now whether to admire MON’s steadfast refusal to budge from his £18million valuation (or £17million and Steve Finnan as it’s now meant to be) or be angered by his pig-headed valuations of not just Barry, but now Finnan too.  I guess it’s a mixture of both.

A bigger worry was confirmed on Thursday, when Rafa more or less admitted that we were skint, and in order to buy the one or two big name signings (It’s always one or two we’re missing isn’t it?) that we need he would have to sell first.   In my purest footballing dreams this is actually how it should be, managers wheeling and dealing with only a bit extra earned in prize money swelling there coffers.  Yet with the rest of the top four able to spend, spend, spend and even Villa supposedly having substantial backing available, as a Liverpool fan I’m left with a mix of fret n’ fury.  Just over a year ago we were assured of substantial Yankee Dollar.  Twelve months on and Snoogy Doogy has most definitely left the building.

Then there’s the new signings themselves.  Degen, Dossena and Cavalieri. All three come without any real national reputation and so for now have to be placed in the squad player (read Stop-Gap) signing pile under Rafa that includes the likes of Arbeloa, Bellamy, Benayoun, Kromkamp,  Pennant and Luis Garcia.

A major frustration is that when Rafa has been given the money to secure his first choices those players have become core to our first team and rarely let the side down.  Agger, Skrtel, Masch, Torres… successes so far everyone.  Given that Dossena has cost a Liverpool side watching the pennies a whopping £7 million perhaps we can expect a similar return, but unlike those four he lacks for International experience and at 26 years old is a couple of years than those players too.

There are one or two glimmers of hope however.  Rafa’s remarkable candour in press interviews for one.  Merrily confirming names such as David Villa and Robbie Keane were on his shopping list and confirming that there would be at least one new striker to replace the outgoing Crouch.  I’m taking it on faith, but surely a manager so passionately backed during our blackest hours last season by the Kop faithful would not be foolish enough to chase a Villa and deliver another Voronin?

Most intriguingly of all there’s the Fab four.  Insua, Plessis, Nemeth and Pacheco. Who?  The four stand-out young stars from last season’s title-winning reserve side.  Sure we’ve been here before – Besian Idrizaj, Le Tallec, Linfield… only this time there’s just that little extra buzz.  This time Rafa seems more willing to take a gamble.  It’s been a long time since we saw Carragher, Owen and Gerrard breakthrough.  With Torres and the Spanish lads still on leave post-Euro 2008 and Babel, Leiva and Masch heading off to Beijing in chase of Olympic Gold pre-season offers up a golden chance for new stars to be born and it all starts in just a few hours against Tranmere!

Karl Eisenhauer

Now then.

It’s all becoming a bit unsavoury.   I’ve very mixed feelings about the Barry transfer largely due to two of our closest friends, and creators of our excellent sister*-blog ‘Oh, It Must Be! It Is!‘ being ardent Villa fans.

Having your club captain (and fan favourite) openly criticise your manager and publically state his intention to join a rival team cannot be easy reading, and given the paper printing the story he’s hardly endearing himself to Liverpool fans either.

Karl Eisenhauer

* – I say sister.  I mean more like an anorexic junkie, slapper, half-cousin obviously.

So, 42 years after we were last represented by the winner of a major international tournament, the Euro 2008-winning Spain squad contained four Liverpool players (jointly “donating” the most players to the squad, along with Valencia), all of whom saw match action during the tournament. We’ll finish the “Eurowatch” roundup of our various players’ (and ex-players’) fortunes early in the coming week, but for now, I just wanted to say congratulations to Jose Reina, Alvaro Arbeloa, Xabi Alonso (even if he does bugger off to Juve shortly) and final-winning goalscorer Fernando Torres! Let’s just hope it’s some kind of omen for the season ahead…

(Seb Patrick)

“You can’t play with your ball here”.

The word’s spoken by a faceless exec, after some friends and I had purchased a ball from the club shop and began an impromptu kick-about.  Kind of sums up the Parry-era doesn’t it?

There doesn’t seem to be an awful lot going on for Liverpool fans right now,  more accurately there isn’t an awful lot to feel excited about.  Whilst the likes of Villa and Arshavin dance their way across the fields of Austria and Switzerland as Red fans we can only watch glumly, from the sidelines in the knowledge that such riches are currently beyond our means.

It’s all ifs, buts and maybes right now.  The Gareth Barry saga rolls ever onwards,  Juve seem a bit closer to coming in for Xavi and Pompey’s bid for Crouch has been dismissed, with their eyes possibly switching to Yossi instead.   So quiet is the transfer talk around Anfield right now that the Mirror’s taken to making things up .  Originally the Mirror rticle had Rafa demanding money to sign Daniel Alves, some coup that would be since he’s already signed an agreement to join Barcelona.

Surprisingly news that work has finally begun on the new stadium has made few headlines. Although given the on-off-on-off-oh shit we’ve got no money-on-off-on nature of the project under Hicks and Gilett it’s fair to say this latest step is to be taken with a pinch of salt.

The Barry transfer is starting to feel ever more important.  On the one hand we don’t want to be held to ransom, but if we come out of this summer yet again with Rafa getting only his 2nd or 3rd choices for each position how can we realistically expect anything apart from another season where we’re out of the title race by Xmas and scrapping for 4th with Everton come the springtime?

Hopefully the current transfer nonsense is all part of a smoke and mirrors attempt to cover up something positive, “Hope in our hearts” – for sure, no?

Karl Eisenhauer

So that’s £139,634 off the monthly wage bill.

It’s difficult right now to think of Riise without thinking of that own-goal, but to remember him for one dreadful moment would be a great disservice for a player who brought a lot of delight during his seven years at Anfield.

Signed for £4million from Monaco back in the summer of 2001, he made an immediate impact – scoring on his debut in the European Super Cup against reigning Champions League er.. champions Bryan Munich.  He went on to hit another six goals in that first season, including trademark belters against Everton and United and quickly established himself as a club favourite.

His returns might never have been quite so fruitful after that, particularly in recent seasons – but his most significant moment in a red shirt, of course, was the pinpoint cross onto Gerrard’s head that set the team on their way to the Comeback of Comebacks in Istanbul. For that alone, he’ll always have a place in Anfield lore, and 741 would like to wish him all the best at his new club.

For Liverpool it looks a great bit of business. We’ve recouped around half of the money spent on Dossena and with Emilio Insua impressing in the reserves it looks like there could be a bit of a scrap for the left-back slot next season. And if nothing else, it means we’ll never have to hear the “Hey baby” song again…

]]> http://liverpool741.wordpress.com/2008/06/18/goodnight-john-boy/feed/ 4 Karl Mona Riise http://liverpool741.wordpress.com/2008/06/18/new-away-kit/ http://liverpool741.wordpress.com/2008/06/18/new-away-kit/#comments Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:30:51 +0000 Seb Patrick http://liverpool741.wordpress.com/?p=28 ]]>

Football Shirt Culture (pretty much the best site out there for collating leaked kit pictures that float around fan forums, bookmark fans) have posted scans of a leaflet that would seem to confirm our new away kit for 08/09 as being a fetching grey and red number…

EDIT 19.06.08 – The kit is now available to pre-order, with some proper pictures now up, in the online shop.

Pictures of the kit were first leaked onto the net a few months back, around the same time as pictures of the home kit started to show up. The number and quality of pictures already out there suggested that the kit was indeed genuine – particularly when the veracity of the home kit pics was confirmed – but this is the first time any official club documentation (in this case, a card sent out to season ticket holders) has featured it.

At the time of those initial leaks, I was quite pleased by the idea of a grey kit – it immediately harkens back to the classic late ’80s Candy strips, which of course were the away colours the last time we won the title. One concern I had about the shirt was that the white Carlsberg logo looked wrong, and I hoped that before the official launch it would be changed to red or green. Sadly, this hasn’t proved to be the case, and it looks rather out of place on an otherwise smart shirt :

The checkerboard detail takes some getting used to, but also goes some way towards making the kit look distinctive. Note also the collar detail – I like how the adidas stripes run into it and it then goes around the back of the neck. All in all, it’s a decent kit – a vast improvement on last year’s – and despite that poor sponsor logo colour choice, it feels very “Liverpool”, and I’m certainly still interested in buying it. Even better, though, is the away goalie kit :

It’s green! Proper, goalkeeper green! A simple green shirt with white adidas stripes and big thick cuffs! I’ve wanted us to have a GK shirt like this for years! It’s a total Bruce Grobbelaar-era effort! My only problem with it is that it should clearly be the home shirt, and the black AC Milan-style effort used as the away version. Nevertheless, this has leapt to the top of my “want” list immediately. All in all, I think the four kits so far (with a European away shirt still to be officially announced or unveiled, but supposedly it’s dark green with a navy/black collar) are the strongest set of strips we’ve had in years, even better than adidas’ first season back. Long may this sort of thing continue!

Seb Patrick