No melodrama: we've lost our club

[red g]

what puzzles me about all this stuff is that so called 'intelligent' people are surprised the americans bought as an an 'investment'.

I was never in any doubt about this. We'll be fine just like the Scum as long as football is popular. When it dies and it will then thats the time to start crying. It'll be too late and that goes for all the other foreign owned clubs.

If we wanted to sell out to someone who loved the club then that guy was Morgan. But alas he didn't have sufficient funds. It also makes me laugh that everyman and his dog slagged off old Roman down at the bridge for buying the title yet by recent events thats exactly the type of figure most of us were after on here. Someone with deep enough pockets to buy which ever player the manager required. Its not all about money as Arsenal have proved, not only does Wenger get on with it without moaning to the press ala Rafa the club has resisted selling out to foreign owners. They are proud of their history and in the main get on with it.

that my friend, is a cracking post!!!

The Liverpool way?? only when it suits

[bazza76]

I have to agree. I can't stands it. Just had my mate in work spouting the same stuff. One who works for the official site. Told him to bugger off cos he was depressing me.

I know what you mean, thankfully there is nobody here anymore to bust my balls in work.

[Scratch]

I said get behind the team. I'm incredibly pessimistic about the owners, there's a difference.This isn't idle speculation.

But it is idle specualtion. You've said it comes straight from the desks of the Echo. And they only know what they've been fed (and look at the stuff they reported in the summer to see how far wrong that can be sometimes) and the conclusions they've drawn from the nationals and from rumour. Until there is a direct quote from either Gillett, Hicks or Rafa, then it will remain idle speculation.

I tend to think that if the Americans want to view us as a cash cow, the club will have to be successful. And the only way to do this is to sort a new stadium, get naming rights sorted, and make sure the team is successful on the pitch, ie player purchases. There'd be no point sitting back and doing nothing, cos their "asset" will lose all its value.

[disco]

I'm puzzled by the random outburst (basically repeating the events of the last few weeks), particularly when Tom has made a point of saying the press read this site to gauge mood etc.

Oh I get it, Tom's sending a message....

[chrispy]

Thanks for the info Tom, much appreciated

Desperate days, a clash of cultures, I had a sleepless night last night about our club.

The new owners plan to transfer half the debt for purchasing the club back onto the club (see today's papers). Interest payments will stretch to 30 million a year. That's our annual transfer budget plus some.

No matter, the yanks aren't interested in the club being overly successful. The projected income from media and internet rights means that they'll be milking the club and us for years. Turning a nice profit off our hopes and dreams.

The club is now owned by a neo-con coporate ram raider. Anyone who thinks differently is living in cloud cuckoo land.

Rafa will be gone in the summer. We will not buy the players we need. A well-known Est poster passed me some information last night about Masch. I'll leave him to tell you what it is but it's stomach turning. Don't believe the lies, nothing has changed, Rafa and everything our club stands for is in mortal danger.

I'll leave you with some quotes from Bill Shankly, please compare and contrast with Hick's recent quotes in the Gaurdian.




Now for that facist neo-con ****** hicks:

[AFII]

Rafa warned. Parry uses BBC to dismiss transfer block stories
Posted on December 18th, 2007 by Jim Boardman

The answer, from Rick Parry, was “I can say that this is absolute rubbish.”

But what was the question?

The above quote was reproduced on the BBC website by Phil McNulty, the corporation’s Chief Football Writer, and having worked for the Echo in the past Rick Parry knows he can use him to help get certain messages out. For the record he’s a blue, not a Red.

The question wasn’t printed. But McNulty preceded the answer by saying Parry had “dismissed claims boss Rafael Benitez has been told he cannot do any transfer deals in January,” and spoke of reports “Liverpool’s American co-owners George Gillett and Tom Hicks had placed Benitez under a transfer embargo on moves in and out of Anfield.”

So from reading that, the existence of a “transfer embargo” is “absolute rubbish”.

It’s important we hear the wording of any questions answered by Parry at this time because he’s not exactly shown himself of late to be someone who answers questions openly and honestly. He chooses his words carefully, in a way designed to deflect readers away from the truth. We saw this is his statement on Saturday over the stadium, one which the duty write for the Liverpool fell for as meaning the fancy stadium unveiled in the summer was still to go ahead. Two days later and Parry admitted that this wasn’t actually the case after all.

Spiralling costs, according to Parry, were to blame for the change of heart - not the “credit crunch”. But the price of steel isn’t actually going up at the rate it used to be any more. What unforeseen “spiralling costs” can have arisen in the four months since the plans were unveiled? Even in October Hicks said he wasn’t worried that the cost had gone up since the unveiling of the plans, as he started to try and get some different finance in place to cover both the cost of the stadium and the purchase costs of the club - debt he said he’d not put on the club. Some stories, and a mounting number of them, claim that due to the “credit crunch” the owners were told they’d need to, in effect, put a deposit down to get that amount of a loan without having to pay massive repayments. They didn’t want to put their own money down though - after all part of their reason for getting a loan was to take away their own liability for that money. So the “downgrading” - as Parry called it originally - is because they can’t get a loan for the amount they need for the fancy stadium, not without taking a risk themselves.

So today we can only assume that Parry was asked by McNulty if the owners had said that all transfers in January were to be blocked. That’s what the “absolute rubbish” response was to. Of course that means very little - the answer would work if the club had decided to consider any offers for players, or if they’d agreed to consider small purchases on an individual basis.

The next question should have been - can Rafa have the players he’d identified just before the owners got all angry about things. Which was just after they’d realised they probably couldn’t have the loan they wanted after all.

Rafa wanted to sell a couple of players, and bring some players in. Two were Bosmans, another was AC Milan’s defender Kakha Kaladze, who Rafa had reportedly negotiated a fee of around £4m for. Finally he’d agreed a deal with Kia Joorabchian for the services of Javier Mascherano in a permanent deal.

Mascherano’s deal was believed to have come in at a rate of £17m, but this wasn’t to be paid all in one go.

That’s why another statement from McNulty is quite concerning: “Liverpool, however, are likely to wait until the summer to complete a proposed £17m move for Javier Mascherano.”

Why wait? Are they waiting until the end of the season because they’re planning to sack Rafa, as was reported, and if not, what’s the issue with signing the player now, ensuring he’s not going to be tempted by offers from other clubs?

The report also says: “The meeting [on Sunday evening] was described as ‘amicable’ - although BBC Sport understands the American duo made it clear to Benitez that any further debate on club policy must not be made public.” When the BBC use the word “understands” it means they’ve been told something, something they can’t repeat as a quote. In other words, for example, Rick Parry might tell them something, but he doesn’t want his name next to it.

So it’s acceptable for Rafa to be warned publicly, through the BBC, not to debate club policy in public? Is that not a touch hypocritical?

The details of the latest bungle in the stadium plans are being admitted a little more each day. Speaking to the Echo, Parry said today: “The objective on day one in building the new stadium was to generate more cash to fund the team and we must never get away from that objective. We remain confident we can achieve that and still produce a very impressive solution.”

That solution will either come from the original designers of “The Parry Bowl” (the original stadium ridiculed as “obsolete” by Tom Hicks), Manchester-based AFL, or it will come from the Dallas architects HKS, who produced the plans that were revealed in the summer which are now classed as too expensive.

In October 2003 Parry was promising the stadium would be opened in 2006, well before the Capital of Culture title hit the city in 2008. He said: “If we sit around now, this new stadium won’t be ready for 2006 and that would have a lot of knock-on effects for the Capital of Culture year in 2008. We have to carry on.” The statement is still on the official site (click here). In the same interview Parry says of selling the naming rights for the stadium: “At the risk of hanging myself in the future, we’ve said from the beginning that we’re not interested in selling our soul and that remains true today.”

This summer the club said the stadium would open in 2010, now they’re saying 2011. And they’ve not even applied for planning permission for whichever version they settle on.

It seems a little unfair that Rafa Benitez is living with pressures of having the threat of the sack hanging over him, despite still performing pretty well under less favourable conditions than he expected, yet Parry can continue to do his job so, quite frankly, poorly. Perhaps Parry’s not at fault; perhaps he’s always just been the messenger. Certainly at the moment it seems he’s not empowered to be anything more.

http://www.anfieldroad.com/news/2007...tml/#more-2745

[dww]

This anti-Parry propaganda is getting very tiresome.

[Rich]

joins www.upthegunners.org

[Harv]

Jesus titty****ing christ!!

This **** just doesnt stop does it.

Thats it lads the **** has hit the fan, lets all get on Arsenal.

[Red_hot]

Jesus titty****ing christ!!

[bazza76]

The thing is though, I have lost count of the amount of thread I have read starting off with someone posting negative rumors about LFC that actually don't come true.
We can all put 2 & 2 together, but considering what has been posted in the past, Rafa should already be sacked. We should have had no money to spend last summer either.

[kopash]

it's hard to believe anything in the press - even the Echo. No-one but a select few know what's going on.

Others like lawyers etc. do but they really should not be sharing should the fancy keeping their jobs...

[Red_Polo]

No melodrama?!

[Chiccada]

Is no one else tired of this whole situation?

Im a Liverpool supporter, was before all this silly furore and I will be afterwards.

So to hell with all the bullsh!t that none of us actually 100% know about. It helps no one.

[Johnny]

Did tom`s mystery poster confirm what he was saying in this thread?