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big fat fooker sam
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Originally posted by Oberon View PostBang goes Fat Sam's only chance of a trophy this year

No, no, they'll have the Intertoto to compete in come the end of the season.
Although does that count as next season? Probably. Hmmm, it's tough being Newcastle manager: Not competing in 3 of 4 trophies a season.
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You'd think a manager of a big club like that should be winning trophies every year!Originally posted by Redlife View PostNo, no, they'll have the Intertoto to compete in come the end of the season.
Although does that count as next season? Probably. Hmmm, it's tough being Newcastle manager: Not competing in 3 of 4 trophies a season.
Seems to me he's lucky to be in a job!!I don't need a lift, I need ammunition
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Gambling Benitez refuses to buy into cult of football bull
Sunday September 30 2007 - Irish Indy
It was another tough week for Rafael Benitez. In fact, it sometimes seems that every week in which he is not in immediate preparation for a Champions League final is one in which Benitez has to answer questions about his future, his rotation policy or, these days, his beard.
But Benitez' refusal to engage in any discourse which might even resemble accepted levels of bull**** (see his answer on Mourinho's departure last week) has irritated a lot of people. Sam Allardyce made the perceptive comment a couple of weeks ago that were it not for the two Champions League finals, Benitez would have struggled to keep his job.
We look forward to more from Allardyce over the season along these lines. I'm sure it could become a series with Sam contending that if it hadn't been for the incident on the Dealey Plaza, JFK's trip to Dallas would have been a triumph. In later episodes, he'll explain why Decca were right to turn down the Beatles and how, if you ignore Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt Pepper, the White Album and Abbey Road, nobody could listen to them. Finally, with the aid of a Powerpoint presentation and buckets of statistics, Sam will contest that -- if you put to one side for a moment the violent suppression of free speech and the murder of the monks -- democracy is flourishing in Burma.

Allardyce, of course, is everything Benitez is not. Sam is a flimflam artist determined to elevate brutality to a science on the football field, primarily through bull****.
"He likes football," Benitez occasionally says of somebody he's signed and it is often suggested that he is limited in his observation because of some language difficulty. In fact, watching any Allardyce team reminds you that football is full of players who play like they don't like football, giving the ball away with glee and eager to do as little with it as possible.
But after Liverpool's home draw with Birmingham last weekend, many were ready to join with Allardyce and suggest that Benitez was running out of time. Delivering an end-of-season verdict in September, a chorus asked why Liverpool's title ambitions had been jeopardised by the failure to select Fernando Torres.
It is a legitimate question and it is almost the right one, but the correct question, and one ignored by most last week, is why was Steven Gerrard not playing?
A friend of mine, deeply troubled by events at Anfield last weekend, was in the middle of a heartfelt diatribe about Benitez' rotation policy and the decision not to play Torres and Gerrard, when it was pointed out to him that Gerrard had played. Yet, he had watched the entire game and had no recollection of any contribution from Gerrard. He assumed this was because Gerrard hadn't been playing, but then he recalled him leading the teams out and remembered that Gerrard had, in fact, been selected in his "favoured" central midfield position.
This has played little part in the story of Liverpool's week. Benitez tried to drop it into the news cycle after last Saturday's game when he told the daily journalists that Gerrard wasn't fresh since he returned from playing the hero with England, but nobody was interested.
Instead they took the familiar line about Rafa's rotation with the standard fallback that "Steven Gerrard was strangely quiet", a sentence now published so many times it has had a direct bearing on global warming.
Of course, Liverpool's chances of victory would have increased if Torres was playing, but despite his enthusiastic response to the physical treatment at Reading on Tuesday, there are valid reasons for leaving a player on the bench who is in his first year in England and has never faced the demands of the Champions League before.
In some ways, Benitez will have to tussle with similar issues around Torres as he has faced with Gerrard for many years.
Against Porto and Birmingham, he has looked bewildered. It is a look he often wore whenever he faced Roy Keane or Patrick Vieira. That he should be equally perplexed by Mehdi Nafti and Wilson Palacios is the most worrying aspect for Liverpool and their title challenge.
But Torres, too, challenges the notion of team before the individual, but for better reasons than Gerrard. It is hard to argue, as Benitez does, that his four strikers are interchangeable when one is demonstrably superior.
Yet those who were so angered by Benitez' decision not to pick Torres last Saturday, would be equally quick to call the phone-in shows if he was unavailable for crucial matches next February and March thanks to some fatigue-related injury. Benitez takes gambles which don't always come off and he is clearly under more pressure since the American owners came in. But his greatest strength has always been a refusal to be swayed by what other people think.
In the case of Gerrard, it is time it came to the fore again.
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Genius.Originally posted by peekay View PostWe look forward to more from Allardyce over the season along these lines. I'm sure it could become a series with Sam contending that if it hadn't been for the incident on the Dealey Plaza, JFK's trip to Dallas would have been a triumph. In later episodes, he'll explain why Decca were right to turn down the Beatles and how, if you ignore Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt Pepper, the White Album and Abbey Road, nobody could listen to them. Finally, with the aid of a Powerpoint presentation and buckets of statistics, Sam will contest that -- if you put to one side for a moment the violent suppression of free speech and the murder of the monks -- democracy is flourishing in Burma.
Just when I discovered the meaning of life, they changed it
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