Some more context. At the end of last season, having shown them their best six months in over a decade, Martin O’Neill was being vilified by the Villains. Now he’s great again. Arsene Wenger was being gunned at by Gunners, now he’s back on track. Top managers have bad spells. Shit happens. Well-run clubs stick by good men; bad ones end up like Newcastle.
Some more context. At the end of last season, having shown them their best six months in over a decade, Martin O’Neill was being vilified by the Villains. Now he’s great again. Arsene Wenger was being gunned at by Gunners, now he’s back on track. Top managers have bad spells. Shit happens. Well-run clubs stick by good men; bad ones end up like Newcastle.
That was meant like seeing as how bad Liverpool fans say the club is being run then they won't be sticking by their good man (Benitez). Or did I read it wrong
That Redknapp interview is classic, never seen it before, love the way he regains his composure to carry on with the interview only to turn away again and have a go at the player
Super Joe wrote:That was meant like seeing as how bad Liverpool fans say the club is being run then they won't be sticking by their good man (Benitez). Or did I read it wrong
Oh sorry mate.
The papers are really trying to build up pressure on him over here though.
They've never liked the guy because he's his own man and I suppose can appear aloof.
It's daily 2 page spreads about his signings, his tactics etc
I don't think the owners could afford to sack him anyway, which is good as he's about the only (off the pitch) man that has held the club together for the past few years.
They weren't really a team at all. They were a ragbag of assorted and ill-formed talent sustained by an uncanny suspicion that, however improbably, they might just get there in the end.
Luis Garcia could score a fantasy or, as Jose Mourinho will always swear, a phantom goal but for much of the rest of the time he was a professional disaster area. His game was often nothing so much as a haemorrhage of possession. Harry Kewell was the big gamble in the final against a Milan team which so catastrophically and noisily celebrated its triumph at half-time, and, embarrassingly, he was withdrawn before the interval.
Yet when the dawn came up over Istanbul we were all agog when Benitez declared that now he would build a team.
Why wouldn't you believe in such a miracle worker who was fresh from Valencia and his breaking of the Spanish stranglehold exerted by Real Madrid and Barcelona? True, he plainly had much to learn about the Premier League and the kind of players it required, but in conjuring the great victory he had defied so many odds that a little bit of adapting to his new terrain was not so much to expect. Even then, he had acquired a player who looked as if he could conquer not only a new environment but the football equivalent of the mountains of the moon.
Xabi Alonso plays for Real Madrid now of course, and it is impossible to detach this bleak development for Liverpool with what is becoming increasingly evident as one of the two great flaws in Benitez's competitive persona. One is that he too rarely – and at Anfield now there is the cumulative evidence presented by 68 signings – recognises the quality of a player who can give so much more to the team than the sum of his individual talent. The other is that when he gets one, supremely in the case of the gifted Alonso, he signally fails to cherish him.
The disaffection between the coach and the player, which apparently arose over Alonso's demand for parental leave, was said to have been mended but the move to Madrid said differently, especially at the end of the season in which the brilliant force of the Basque midfielder was arguably as influential to Liverpool's progress as the pyrotechnics of Fernando Torres and Steven Gerrard.
The £20m replacement Alberto Aquilani is currently inching towards fitness, but his absence at such a crucial stage of an embattled club's season could hardly be rivalled as a damning statement about lost momentum. In Italy the word is that Aquilani has talent but a less than overwhelming playing personality, a handicap at Roma that was disastrously compounded by his proneness to injury.
Inevitably, Benitez is skewered now by the appalling realisation that without Gerrard and Torres, his team – five years after the brilliant dawn of Istanbul – is mired in profound mediocrity, a reality that no doubt provoked from the normally relentless Javier Mascherano a statement about the extent of the team's lost confidence.
Scumbags, all of em. It's not journalism, it's attacks.
Big Boy wrote:These guys write it because people are daft enough to read the rubbish they print. If you don't give them an audience, they'll soon be unemployed.
I read it on the internet from football sites but I shouldn't read it at all.
Infact that article is the perfect example of trying to appear intelligent using unnecessarily big words but making very little sense and making almost no valid points whatsoever.
BaaBaa. wrote:The papers are really trying to build up pressure on him over here though. They've never liked the guy because he's his own man and I suppose can appear aloof.
It's daily 2 page spreads about his signings, his tactics etc
I don't think the owners could afford to sack him anyway, which is good as he's about the only (off the pitch) man that has held the club together for the past few years.
Despite your current bad patch, I do think he's a top manager and the right man for the job. He's proved his worth with the European cup successes and they should stick by him at least until this time next season and review it then if it's still not going right.
Anyway that's enough praise and niceties, he's a filthy theiving mickey mouser just like the rest of 'em. That feels better
I wasn't so impressed with the Blue Boys this evening, but then we scored two late goals via the Drog. The 2nd was awesome, I don't believe there is a better player on current form playing anywhere in the World, at the moment.
And what a sight it was to bring on the subs, world class players all of them which saw us go from 0-1 to 2-1 in no time at all and then there is Petr Cech.
What is happening to this once so great keeper? Madrids equaliser through a late free kick, however good it was, was down to poor wall and keeper positioning and telegraphed a mile off. Please God let him become the keeper of old.
Still we are all but through as are the Mancs who had an even rougher ride tonight!
I'll be surprised if we fill the bench.