Liverpool FC Team Talk/Gossip/Rumours Thread

joe123 wrote: »

Torres never seems to do much talking on the pitch though compared to cara and gerrard who are usually yelling and shouting.

Hope he stays with us forever and ever and ever and ever and ever.

herbieflowers wrote: »

I dunno, I'd imagine he got the captaincy at Athleti more due to him being a phenomenal homegrown talent than for his leadership qualities.

Rafa the Lion Heart

When it comes to Rafa Benitez, my message is simple –
“Sack the Bored”.
I’m not talking about those clueless Yanks who cling on to power along with Rick Parry at the expense of the club’s ambition. No, I’m talking about those nasty Rafa bashers who are just so plain boring, boring, boring.

There have been a lot of comments around this weekend after Liverpool staged their remarkable comeback against Portsmouth. Incredibly it put Liverpool top of the Premier League on Saturday evening.

If you have the privilege of analysing football and potentially influencing opinion, you have a moral responsibility to be fair. When I picked up one of the Sunday papers, when it came to reporting Liverpool’s fight back at Pompey, everything continued along the lines of ‘Liverpool in Crisis’ theme. It was a fairytale – a disgusting manipulation of the truth.

If this is a crisis for a football club that hasn’t won the league title for nearly 20 years, then my name is Hans Christian Andersen. Recent headlines have included lots of ‘Ragas lost the plot’ rants, with words and phrases such as meltdown, crazy days, Reds are a Joke featuring prominently.

These are all agendas driven and they were all exposed as a myth by the character of Benitez’s team on Saturday evening. This is a manager who doesn’t even have full control of who he brings in and out of Anfield. He works for people who sometimes don’t even go to the games and who promised the fans a new stadium which would provide the revenue to compete with Manchester United and develop Liverpool and their brand in a global sense. They have failed spectacularly and Rafa continually cops it for their sins. Just take the Robbie Keane situation. The headlines told us how on Keanes return to Tottenham he ‘stuck the boot in’. The strongest term he used was that it was ‘baffling’. Another cheap headline to grab attention, and another distortion of the truth.
Ian Rush was a legend when he played for Liverpool but exactly what does he know about management? Fans can be gullible and when they hear an ex-favourite such as Rushie speak they are going to listen – even when he is talking tripe. So let’s analyse what Rushie told us. When it came to team selection he told us that when he was in Italy he played in a game where he scored four goals. He was then taken off when he felt if he had stayed on he would have scored a couple more.
The next game Juve lost 1-0 and Rushie’s conclusion was that they lost the game and he didn’t score because he had lost confidence having only scored four in the previous game and not six. You couldn’t make it up!

Some of the ex player brigade at Liverpool make a good living out of criticising Rafa but they do a disservice to the fans and it’s a slur and stain on the great service they gave the club on the pitch.

Robbie Keane showed immense dignity in dealing with questions from journalists looking for the next Benitez attack. The sale of Keane will not define Liverpool’s season because even the player admitted that the move did not work out.

Keane made 21 starts for Liverpool and the bottom line is he didn’t score enough goals. Keane is a good player but he wasn’t good enough for Liverpool. His goal return is irrefutable evidence of that. In the last two matches at home to Chelsea and away to Portsmouth post-Keane, Liverpool have got six precious points. Yet if you picked up the paper during this period, Rafa Benitez selling the striker was the football equivalent of shooting Bambi!

Keane was sold for economic reasons – that’s the way life is at Anfield. And the reason that Liverpool cashed in was because the Americans needed the money. Come the next window, Keane’s price would have come down. That’s why he had to go when he did.
One thing not reported in the thousands of column inches devoted to the Keane sale is one undeniable fact – it was Keane’s choice to go. Keane was protected by his contract. He could have stayed, fought for his place, looked to have improved form and score some goals that would have seen his boyhood heroes miraculously snatch the title.
He chose to leave and go back to Spurs. In the modern game, every transfer is the player’s choice. That truth does not suit the agenda of the football pundits.
Benitez is the prince of Anfield and whilst Alex Ferguson concentrates on one thing – nurturing the empire he has been given so much support to build – Benitez has been fighting on so many different levels. Undermined from within, attached by the British press who hate the idea of a little Spaniard putting manners on them, he has sorted out a dressing room that was in disarray after the Gerard Houllier implosion.
And yet they crank up the pressure, Benitez just goes into overdrive. He has the courage of a lion and Liverpool fans who want to bring the club that Shankly built back to the glory days should get down on their hands and knees and thank him for being prepared to Walk Alone for the cause. It is an abomination that pundits try and tell the football public that Liverpool should win the league. Manchester United are far stronger. Each season Benitez has made Liverpool stronger. That’s called building. It’s called management. He has two top players because of the clubs transfer policy, a club history that has suffocated some of his predecessors and yet they are still in there fighting.

Anyone can listen to the pundits who categorise Liverpool as a team in crisis. But the truth is that as long as the Reds have the great man at the helm, they have hope.
Benitez, take a bow. And shame on you who run from the truth of his greatness

redout wrote: »

Anyone tell me why Liverpool registered Keane on their Champions league squad (Posted above) as he left several days before the deadline for the squads to be presented to UEFA. Just curious also Hyypia is back in the squad now after been left out back at the start of the group stage.

zing wrote: »

Torres yet again pledges his future after being linked to Barca:

http://www.skysports.com/story/0,19528,11661_4910775,00.html

http://www.football365.com/john_nicholson/0,17033,8746_4890720,00.html wrote:

Let me come clean. I have a touch of what I can only call Rafa love.

The cryptic press conferences, the conspiracies, the paranoia all delivered with a half-smile, with a twinkle of bemusement in the eye and a plethora of downright hard to understand football decisions make him endlessly fascinating, hint at genius and madness and make him compulsive viewing. I love that his decisions are often opaque and highly unusual.

There have been times when he appears to be wilfully damaging Liverpool's title chances, which surely can't be his intentions, he is working to a different set of judgements and values that he simply won't allow to falter.

But that's exactly why Rafa has a genius element about him. He does things his own way, he walks a different path and he walks it on his own if necessary. That is the mark of an original thinker. Everyone else might think he is mad, but he won't be swayed by common opinion, assumption or default thinking. Like all true eccentrics he probably doesn't even see how odd his behaviour can be.

Just because everyone else who has spent 20 million on a striker would play him every game is irrelevant to Rafa. If he bought him and thinks having seen him up close, he's not suitable, he just doesn't play him until he changes. If he doesn't change he'll just sell him. He did. If Liverpool win the league and in fact, even if they finish second, he will have been vindicated. The victory against Chelsea goes some way to doing that already.

Buying a player is always a bit of a lottery because you don't know how he will fit in with the other players both in terms of football and relationship-wise. You don't really know someone until you work with them day in and day out. The wrong thing to do would be to stick with the player just because you paid all that money for him, if indeed he did buy him.

And aside from anything else you have to have a huge pair of bollocks to make a decision like that. Plenty would crumble, give in and play him. Not Rafa. He doesn't lack bottle, this fella.

Let's not forget that the club's owners have tried to undermine him at times and he's had to deal with more off-field politics than most managers could tolerate. He's kept the side at or near the top all season despite it being up for sale, despite the future being very uncertain.

The Premier League's managers are a mixed bunch of faux academics, a few old school shouters, straight talkers and cod-psychologists, but Rafa is different from all of them.

Liverpool is such a huge club, one of the biggest and most scrutinised on the planet. It's not a job in the 21st century for a regular guy. It's too big, too intense. You need a big personality, strength of mind and purpose to even have a chance. Whatever you do you will be scrutinised in minute detail and you have to stand up to that pressure. It's not a normal job; there is no place to hide. Everyone thinks they know better than you.

His grossly mis-named 'rant' was five minutes of pure theatre, full of wry humour and sarcasm and hugely entertaining. Those who criticise him for it should ask themselves this; do you really want a league full of corporate speak say-nothings? Do you want a man who comes out with little more than strings of clichés? There are enough of them already. You can debate forever if it helps or hinders the player's performance, but for the neutral looking on, we can only applaud and call for an encore.

And yet there are times when it seems as though he is deliberately speaking less than fluent English for the purposes of obfuscation. Sometimes he seems to speak the language really well, other times he struggles with it, which only adds to his cryptic fascination. It is a brilliant ploy to pretend to understand or express less than you really do when speaking a second language but all the same, he is a master of deflecting questions he doesn't want to answer, fending of inquisitions with smiling, slightly suspicious eyes and a little laugh.

I also like that while he is a cerebral man, he is also full of boiling emotion and patrols the touchline on occasions with uncontrolled fury and frustration, unable to sit still, wracked with tension, so much so that he often barely celebrates a goal.

People say his sides are overly defensive and lack creativity but he clearly doesn't care. This is his way. It's how he thinks he can win the league and the Champions League and he just won't be moved from it. He's accused of being stubborn but you can't run a club like Liverpool on passing whims and fancies from wise-after-the-event-give-us-success-now phone-in callers and commentators.

To supporters of less stellar clubs, to hear Liverpool 'fans' berate him for his tactics and his selections of players such as Kuyt even despite the club being 1st or 2nd in the league, seems hugely self-indulgent and grossly lacks perspective. He is right to ignore such noises off.

His critics think that Liverpool would be more successful if they just threw the kitchen sink at every game, but we have no proof of that - it didn't work a few years ago for Newcastle - and Liverpool have hardly been unsuccessful under his guidance.

Trying to break the stranglehold that Manchester United and Arsenal have had on the league for so many years is no small task. He is up against two of the best managers of the modern era with so much momentum and experience behind them. After all, he's 11 years younger than Wenger and nearly 20 younger than Fergie and is surely still learning the art of English management. It's not unreasonable to assume his best, most successful years are still ahead of him in English football.

It is almost totally down to Rafa that as a neutral, I want Liverpool to win the league, if only to seem him stick it to his critics both within and without the club and their ability to beat the other top clubs may yet be the key to them doing that.

But even if he doesn't I hope he sticks around for many years because English football is a better, more entertaining place for his presence and football is all about entertainment on and off the pitch.

And on top of all these things he sports a fine beard that closely resembles the kind of felt-tip beard you get with putting felt-tip onto a brown boiled egg. Add to that the charm a Spanish burr gives to the English language and you have got a downright fantastic manager.

Like Mourinho before him, he might drive you nuts, he might sometimes seem unbearable or just downright odd, but also like Mourinho, you'd bloody well miss him if he wasn't around. Long live the Rafalution.