Originally posted by Nicey
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But you sounded so pleasant
Bill shankly to Tommy Smith after he'd turned up for training with a bandaged knee:
'Take that poof bandage off, and what do you mean YOUR knee, it's LIVERPOOL'S knee !'
"Sorry, boss, I should have kept my legs together," said Lawrence. "No, Tommy, your mother should have kept her legs together!," replied Shankly.
* After Tommy Lawrence had let in a fluke goal between his legs -
Originally posted by Nicey View Post
Nicey, that sh!t's riling me as well. It's just constant speculation...all negative. Nothing positive ever. It's ridiculous.Comment
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Originally posted by bazza76 View PostBut you sounded so pleasant
haha... Charity Worker by day .. Horrible Online Cunt by night
Rafa's Online Armchair GeneralAnybody who criticizes Klopp ever is a James Blunt. Nov 2015
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It was going to be like this whoever bought the club as it was a great chance for the press to stir. We as fans know nothing as has always been the way and the purchase will have unsettled us, remember the big fuss about LFC being bought by AMERICANS in the press when it happened. They could be throwing money all over the club and we would be getting this stuff. Press are ******s and too many people are too eager to believe them. The only time I worry is if the echo say it, no longer Bascombe as well as I believe most of his contacts were there because he worked for the echo, now he doesn't I think they have binned him causing his recent articles.Originally posted by desertscouser View Post
Nicey, that sh!t's riling me as well. It's just constant speculation...all negative. Nothing positive ever. It's ridiculous.Comment
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Well said that man.Originally posted by Nicey View Post
Had enough of all this negative bull**** about the owners and Rafa situation, especially as there's no evidence that there is one.
Take today as an example. We've just bought a young centre half (first choice for his national team), and some hysterical cunts are still using it a stick to beat the owners with that they aren't backing Rafa. Pathetic know nothing cunts.
Let's be honest, most of these people wanted some sugar daddy type cunt to come in, lick everyones arse, and spunk untold millions on the stadium and the club and expect nothing in return.
The worst part of it all is that we need to get right behind the lads and Rafa, we're in a **** run of form, but we keep letting these ****in scumbag scally cunt journos distract us from the important stuff with made up bull****. It's disgusting, and I'm ****in fed up of it.I hate PolanskiComment
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Originally posted by CharlieMansonsSquint View Post
We should all verbally gang rape them and run them off the ****ing site .. enough of the niceties .. Unleash the Verbal Dogs of Hell on the the Numpties in out midstAnybody who criticizes Klopp ever is a James Blunt. Nov 2015
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Off to bed .. Remember a little more humanity in humanity is all we need, peace, compassion and understanding.
One Planet
One People
One Love
PS... Lay of Rafa or you will be pissing blood for a weekAnybody who criticizes Klopp ever is a James Blunt. Nov 2015
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Not sure if this has been mentioned already but just incase it hasn't:
Ballague has said Rafa is staying and plans to and doesn't think he is leaving in the summer.
And since Jose left the Chavs that the press have turned their attention to Rafa.
Also said the 'close friend' who was quoted is bollocks also.
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Does Ballague get all his info from the echo these days?Originally posted by The_Milkman View PostNot sure if this has been mentioned already but just incase it hasn't:
Ballague has said Rafa is staying and plans to and doesn't think he is leaving in the summer.
And since Jose left the Chavs that the press have turned their attention to Rafa.
Also said the 'close friend' who was quoted is bollocks also.
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Rafa's emotional interview (ECHO)
Rafa Benitez: Why the hell would I ever want to quit this fantastic club?
Jan 8 2008 by Tony Barrett, Liverpool Echo
RAFA BENITEZ today moved to quell speculation that he feels he is a "dead man walking" at Anfield.
In an unprecedented move, the Liverpool manager has lifted the lid on conversations he had with sections of the media which he believes lies behind the upsurge in speculation about his future at the weekend.
Benitez says he was forced into taking such an unusual step because he wants his thoughts to be made a matter of public record so the Liverpool fans can know exactly what he is thinking without fear of misinterpretation.
A clearly upset Benitez told the ECHO: "I was shocked when I was told about the stories in the Sunday papers and when I saw them for myself I was even more surprised.
"I don't know how many times I have to say I only see my future at Liverpool Football Club before certain people believe me.
"But I will say it again because it is really important that everyone understands this – I love the club, I love the fans, I love the city and I am very, very happy here.
"I do not see my future at Real Madrid or Inter Milan or anywhere else. I see my future at Liverpool and this is where I want to stay.
"So to see my name linked with other clubs in such a manner, as it was in certain Sunday newspapers, really disappoints me.
"And the fact that the newspapers said that the stories had come from a source close to me is what disappoints me most."
Benitez believes the stories which appeared in several Sunday newspapers stemmed from a private conversation he had with a group of journalists following the regular weekly press conference at Melwood ahead of the weekend's FA Cup tie at Luton.
But he remains adamant that the stories which appeared following Friday's briefing bear little relation to the conversation which took place.
"I was asked several questions about my future," he said.
"I answered honestly, saying that there had been misunderstandings in the past but they are now in the past and that I am now working very well with the club's owners and Rick Parry and we all have the same objective – to do our very best for Liverpool Football Club.
"Then, just a couple of days later, I see quotes that are supposed to have come from me or from a friend of mine saying I don't see my future at Liverpool.
"All I can say is no such quotes came from me and I know my friends well enough to know that they did not come from them.
"So I can only assume that the conversation I had with the journalists from the Sunday newspapers meant something different to them than it did to me. But they were not my words.
"That is why I am speaking to the ECHO, I want to clear up any confusion and put my side of the story."
As speculation about his future reaches fever pitch Benitez knows his position as Liverpool manager will continue to come under intense scrutiny if results do not pick up.
But he still believes the squad he has assembled will continue to improve – and he also believes it will happen under his stewardship.
"I want to completely commit myself to Liverpool Football Club," he said.
"I do not see my future anywhere else because I do not want to go anywhere else.
"I want to win trophies for my club, for our fans and for the people and I still believe we can do this.
"I think back to the Champions League Final in Istanbul, to the FA Cup Final in Cardiff, to the Super Cup Final in Monaco and so many other great occasions and I know just what this great club is capable of.
"The backing of the supporters has been fantastic. As I walked onto the pitch at Luton on Sunday the fans were singing my name and that means so much to me.
"That is why I want to achieve even more success and I believe we can do that.
"There has been so much improvement here over the last couple of seasons and I believe there is still a lot more to come.
"The squad is now the best it has been since I first came here and we have many young players who are only going to get better.
"So I have no wish to be at any other club. This is a truly special club which means so much to me.
"All I can say is that I want to be here this summer and many other summers after that."
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Well done Rafa, now lets get this sorry mess sorted out pronto ! Tom & George over to you ......Comment
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Sorry mods delete this, did see the other thread ! !
Bugger !Comment
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The press always need a pray.Originally posted by The_Milkman View PostNot sure if this has been mentioned already but just incase it hasn't:
Ballague has said Rafa is staying and plans to and doesn't think he is leaving in the summer.
And since Jose left the Chavs that the press have turned their attention to Rafa.
Also said the 'close friend' who was quoted is bollocks also.
Just believe and you never know what will happen.
According to Benitez it's important not simply to go out to win but to go out prepared to win, which means players have to put in the same level of work on a daily basis. Anything else is unacceptable.
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When Est. was down for a day I was lurking on rawk and remembered this article about Gillett. I was sure somebody will paste it here but didn`t happen. Sorry to do that so late but it shows that meeting with Parry and architects was planned long time ago and press are just talking bollocks as always. It is a long read but well worth it IMO. If it has been on Est. and I missed it my apoplogies.
Story is from Canada's biggest national daily paper.
LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND — The training facility of the Liverpool Football Club can be found in the Mellwood district, smack dab in the middle of town, but few mere mortals here have ever caught more than a glimpse behind its walls. A handful of fans climb on top of dumpsters to watch their heroes at work beyond the high, grey stone fence, and a small pocket of others brave the cold mist in the hopes that a player might stop to provide an autograph. One holds up a sign: "Stevie G — Help me get laid by signing a shirt for my girlfriend."
Stevie G would be Steven Gerrard, local boy, hero, Member of the British Empire, England midfielder, holy of holies. On the way out to Mellwood, passing a crèche set up in front of a local car dealership, the driver offers that's it's not the arrival of the baby Jesus they celebrate this time of year in Liverpool. It's the birth of that other saviour.
In big-time international football, training facilities tend to be about as welcoming as black ops military bases, gated secret places off limits to everyone but the true insiders. Even sportswriters don't normally get past the press conference room, where once a week the manager and a player or two offer their thoughts on a coming match. So this access is extraordinary.
We stroll past the dining hall where they're setting up for the players' family Christmas party, placing bright red crackers at every place. We walk past the swimming pool into the medical wing, where various players are having their sore extremities tended to. We are in the boot room, on a terrace overlooking the practice field, in the gym. Occasionally, someone seems a bit startled at the strangers' presence, until they note the identity of the tour guide: U.S. businessman George Gillett, the co-owner, the boss.
And finally, while descending the stairs toward the entrance, Stevie G himself comes into view, nicking a Christmas chocolate bar from behind the receptionist's desk, while fellow icon, fellow homeboy Jamie Carragher looks on. It is the stuff of a Liverpudlian schoolboy's wet dream.
Greeting their employer and his guests, the lads couldn't be more polite.
"Jamie," Gillett asks, "can you show them how you speak Scouse?"
That is the distinctive, local dialect, and maybe if the question had come from someone other than the team owner, maybe if Carragher wasn't so easy going, it would have been greeted with all of the enthusiasm an African American might show if asked to demonstrate a few dance steps.
But it's also true that the more time you spend with Gillett, the more you come to understand the power of his simple, unpretentious charm. There's a sharp business mind there, and the deal-making nerves of a burglar, but what eventually won so many over in Montreal, what must win them over here, is the ability to make people understand that his heart's in the right place.
Carragher smiles and throws out a few lines, and everybody has a good laugh.
THE AMERICANS
They are nearly always referred to as "the Americans," an eyebrow-raised pejorative implicit in most every mention. Sometimes, for variety, it becomes "the boys from stateside," or something suggestive of cowboys or George W. Bush, but anyone reading the popular press instantly gets the message.
Who are Gillett and Liverpool co-owner Tom Hicks to own one of the great English sporting institutions? What could they possibly understand of its glorious history, its distinct culture, its beating-heart importance to the local populace? Seven of the 20 teams of the English Premier League are now in the control of foreigners, so you'd think the xenophobic novelty would have worn off by now, and the league long ago became a massive, international television-driven business built to a large degree on non-English playing talent. The takeover of Manchester United by the reviled Glazer family, who never speak to the press, who rarely turn up at matches, who were burned in effigy by the club's supporters, was accomplished 2 1/2 years ago, and besides the Yanks, the league also has its Russian oligarchs and deposed Thai politicians and the rest.
But apparently there are clubs and there are clubs, and then there is Liverpool FC, with home stadium Anfield and its Kop seating area and the You'll Never Walk Alone anthem, with a trophy room unmatched in the English game. This isn't McCulture. This isn't like everything else. This is distinct. This is a big, global commercial enterprise, selling jerseys to the Japanese, television subscriptions in Nairobi, but it's first and foremost organic, of the place, and that can't really be bought or sold. At least for one of the Americans, all of that ought to ring familiar, having been down a very similar road before.
Gillett, a doctor's son from Racine, Wisc., whose businesses include ski resorts and meat packers and car dealerships, who has owned or owns television stations and newspapers, part of the Miami Dolphins, all of the Harlem Globetrotters and a NASCAR team, is on a magnificent roll right now. Only 15 years removed from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, when a credit squeeze forced him to walk away from the company he'd built and start again nearly from scratch, he is riding high on several fronts, food and automobiles and, most publicly, professional sports.
In 2001, Gillett purchased the Montreal Canadiens and their arena from the Molson family, after initially sitting back patiently and waiting as no one from within Quebec chose to buy the iconic franchise. It turned out to be a very savvy business decision: The rise of the Canadian dollar has transformed NHL franchises in Canada into sure-fire money makers, and the Bell Centre, playing host to acts from both sides of the great linguistic divide, is one of the busiest in North America. But Gillett has had to work hard to erase the stigma that came when the original deal was announced. (Habs' U.S. owner greeted warily: Gillett strikes $250-million deal, tells anxious fans the team will stay," read The Globe and Mail's front page headline the day the deal was revealed.) He has largely achieved that by hiring good, credible people to run the franchise, such as Bob Gainey and Pierre Boivin, and especially by letting the fans gradually get to know him.
Gillett is charismatic, he is humble, he is quick with a handshake and a smile, he is a listener, all great assets in his business life, and maybe, eventually, in Liverpool, they'll believe him and trust him and have faith that his goals and aspirations are the same as their own.
But right now, in the middle of a season where the club's on-field fortunes are teetering, Gillett is still very much "the other," and for some still very much "the enemy."
STAKES HIGH
This kind of week you just don't experience in North American professional sports. On Tuesday, the same night his Canadiens were mailing in a dreadful performance against the Tampa Bay Lightning at the Bell Centre, Gillett flew to Marseille, France, by private jet, where Liverpool was playing the local French club Olympique, in the last, decisive match of the first round of the Champions League. The stakes: claim victory, advance to the final 16, and pocket a television cheque for £13-million ($25.6-million Canadian), which could come in mighty handy once the player transfer window opens in January. (Not to mention that it would keep alive the chance to win a trophy that Liverpool has claimed five times before, more than any other English team.) Lose, and return home to dispirited fans, and to growing controversy.
Liverpool manager Rafael Benitez, who is still something of a hero for leading the club to the miracle Champions League win in 2005 and then back to the final last year, had suggested to reporters that he and "the Americans" weren't on the same page about buying players to improve the team, that "the Americans" perhaps didn't really understand the business of football, that maybe "the Americans" didn't really know the game. It's safe to assume Gillett and Hicks were not amused, and that Benitez's future with the club might have hung in the balance in Marseille.
They won, 4-0, Liverpool's most impressive performance of the season. Returning home to slightly-less-restless natives, the team prepared for a match against its most hated domestic rival, Manchester United, at Anfield. Still, a showdown loomed between the manager and the owners, a widely-reported meeting set to immediately follow the match. In Britain, where the sport is an obsession, where media competition is fierce, and where access to the principals is scarce, a little bit of information can be spun into a whole lot of column inches, with many a straw man erected and knocked down in the process. The looming face-to-face between the owners and Benitez was the week's big story (at least until Fabio Capello's hiring as England manager supplanted it), but there were also reports that Gillett and Hicks were about to abandon their plans to build a new stadium, and that Hicks was about to leave the partnership, perhaps to buy a club in Italy or France.
Though by and large, after the initial period of suspicion, Gillett's relationship with the press in Montreal has been cordial, he sounds like someone who feels badly burned — which is why, after an initial period of openness, he isn't talking to reporters here. "I hate to say it, because I used to own newspapers, I used to own TV stations, but as much as I love people and as much as I'm willing to sit down and chat with anybody, I'm really not comfortable with the media," he says. "They haven't respected and honoured with integrity understandings that I've had and the understandings that friends and confidantes and family have had, and I've seen some people hurt and damaged by that lack of respect and trust. I've come over here with some of that suspicion and I think it's been good. My normal instinct would have been to have been much more open."
No one in the wider world or the English press is going to see what happened over the next 48 hours. The previous Friday, there was a scheduled meeting between the owners, club administrators, and one of two competing architectural firms hoping to build the new stadium in Stanley Park, just across the road from Anfield, and only 400 metres from Goodison Park, home ground of Everton FC. (That would be the stadium project they are allegedly about to abandon.) Plans have been made slightly less elaborate in an effort to decrease the bill, but whichever design is chosen, it will still cost in excess of $700-million and push capacity from 44,000 to 70,000 or more — at least 20,000 of them in a new, still single-tier Kop — plus loads of suites and club seating, which will help accommodate the 71,000 fans on the season-ticket waiting list. A final decision on the design will be made after both architects make their pitch at a meeting in New York on Jan. 9.
(It is something to hear Hicks, in his drawl, speaking about the Kop, Anfield's famous end stand, as though he grew up there. He also owns the Dallas Stars and Texas Rangers, and on first encounter, is one of those cowboy-booted everything's-bigger-in-Texas characters who lacks Gillett's ease with the common folk.) The old Anfield will be torn down when the new ground is completed, but the actual pitch will be left as is, with good reason. Every year, between 40 and 60 Liverpool supporters have their ashes scattered on, or buried beneath, the green, green grass. Can't have them paved over.
Next comes a meeting with the contractors who will build the park, with plans to put shovel to ground in the summer of 2008. Lunch is spent with a transplanted American named Jeff Jones, who runs Apple, the company that manages the interests of the Beatles and their heirs. He and Gillett talk about the possibility of incorporating some kind of Beatles museum feature into the new park. After that, Gillett opts not to let anyone play fly-on-the wall while he meets a player agent, no doubt discussing what talent might or might not be bought, at great expense, to help Liverpool challenge in the Premier League and continue its success in Europe.
The next day, for a lark, there's a trip 30 minutes down the road to the new home ground of Manchester City, where what has long been the town's second side is enjoying surprising success under manager Sven-Goran Eriksson. (There are seven Premier League teams within spitting distance of each other in this part of Northern England, along with a large collection of smaller clubs in the lower divisions.) Today they're playing Bolton Wanderers, and Gillett will watch from the directors' box.
We are greeted effusively by Thaksin Sunawatra, the club's chairman, almost certainly the only owner of a professional sports franchise to have been deposed from his previous job (as Prime Minister of Thailand) by a military coup, and to have been condemned by Human Rights Watch for, among other things, his government's employment of torture. Even George Steinbrenner has never been accused of that. It's a great photo op, the new face of Premier League ownership in a single frame — a guy from Middle America breaking bread with one from Bangkok who knows he can't go home.
Back in Liverpool, after his companions have retired for the evening, Gillett is wakened every 10 minutes into the wee hours of the morning by telephone calls from the Bell Centre. His Habs are beating the Leafs, and he wants to know every detail.
MONTREAL LESSONS
Gillett has learned plenty in Montreal. How to tread lightly around a distinct culture. How to accept the inevitable slings and arrows. How sports franchises with great histories are forever competing against their own glorious past. How the real equity in a team can't be measured in the number of luxury suites, but in the loyalty and passion of the consumers. Find a club where the game is deeply ingrained, where the fans really care and where they have cared forever, and the value grows exponentially. Still, as an outsider, there is no getting around the fact that you have to win over the faithful.
"We went into a relatively hostile environment in Montreal — culturally at least," Gillett acknowledges. "We didn't come from that community. A lot of the people knew that the club was for sale and none of the locals bought it so you obviously go in with a level of suspicion. What's wrong? Your first reaction is there must be something wrong with it.
"Rather than saying [to the fans] I come with the answer, I clearly don't. I think you'd be terribly presumptuous to come into a community like Montreal with 24 Stanley Cups and say I can do it better. I don't think we came with an answer. I think we came with questions."
They also arrived in the wake of another U.S. sports owner, Jeffrey Loria, who had bought the Montreal Expos from local interests when no one else wanted them, said all of the right things about being committed to the city and to making baseball work in Montreal, and then engineered the team's exit. Loria was cast as a cartoon villain, the cynical foreign opportunist. And now here was another American, apparently a friendlier one, but one whose motives were instantly called into question simply because of what had gone before. It is a pattern that has been repeated in Liverpool.
"For the first year in Montreal, more than half the articles were about whether we were like Loria or not," says George's son Foster Gillett, who moved to Montreal to help run the Canadiens, and is now a resident in Liverpool, working in an office next door to Benitez's so that the family has a full-time presence here. "It took us a while to stand on our own two feet and not be continually compared to these Americans who came before us. I think here, a lot of that was with the Glazers. I don't even like to say our names in the same sentence for fear that it gets written and talked about. We try to be very different. I respect the Glazers. I think they're a phenomenal family and they have unbelievable assets but I think we're different people."
Having been encouraged by the success of the Canadiens and bullish on the prospects of blue-chip professional sports franchises, Gillett began exploring possibilities in the Premier League several years before the Liverpool opportunity presented itself. Foster, a passionate sports fan, was a driving force (Gillett's other sons have followed their own hearts, involved in the real estate and the automotive sides of the family business).
"We started looking for clubs that had a very strong fan base that perhaps weren't as well developed as they might have been," George Gillett says. They made a serious pass at purchasing another club, which Gillett declines to identify, but which is widely believed to have been Aston Villa. (They lost out there to another American: Randy Lerner, who also owns the Cleveland Browns.)
Then, the investment banker with whom they had been working called to say that Liverpool might be in play. The team's owners had come to understand the economic necessity of a new stadium but couldn't finance it. (Of the rest of the game's big four, Manchester United had greatly expanded Old Trafford and Arsenal had the new Emirates Stadium, which in a non-salary-capped sport gave them a significant competitive advantage, while Chelsea benefited from the apparently bottomless pockets of owner Roman Abramovich.) Gillett liked what he saw: the fanatical supporter base that would surely fill every seat in a new park; the largely untapped opportunities available through new media; Liverpool's position as a global brand, second on the planet only to Manchester United, and first in many places; a television bonanza for the Premier League that it turned out lay just beyond the horizon.
Gillett's original bid finished second to one from Dubai International Capital. ("We lost to a country," he says.) When that deal collapsed, but with the price now inflated, he persuaded Hicks to come in as his equal partner. The two had worked together before in the purchase of the Swifts meat processing empire. They landed the team, for a reported purchase price of £220-million, along with the commitment to invest nearly that amount again in a new stadium.
Nowhere among the serious bidders was anyone from Britain. Asked to explain that, Gillett says that sometimes it's harder to recognize the true value of what's in your own neighbourhood, and speaks to the inherent risks of investing enormous sums in professional sports.
"It is a daunting challenge to think about going into a business where you don't have a hell of a lot of fixed assets," he says. "Your greatest assets walk out the dressing-room door every day. They're subject to illness and injury and god knows what."
So why is he so gung-ho about the sports business? "Each person in life has their own comfort zone," Gillett says. "Some people jaywalk. And we see people dive across interstates. Other people only cross at the intersection and only do it with the lights."
In his life, in his business, he sometimes crosses against a red? "Maybe more often than I should have," he laughs.
That seems all the more evident, given the stories that begin to circulate in the next few days about a refinancing scheme sought by Hicks and Gillett in these tight-money times, about the owners and the club itself assuming significant amounts of new liability in order to kick off stadium construction. But Gillett has already explained, quietly, how in his business debt can be your friend, how the payoff of getting to the finish line in this case is enormous, how the risk, in gambling on a mass passion, might not be all that it seems.
TURBULENCE
Liverpool lose 1-0 to Manchester United, blowing a couple of good scoring chances in the first half, and being largely outclassed after that. (When the public-address announcer welcomes Hicks and Gillett to the owners box, the crowd reacts with rather muted enthusiasm, and when he goes on to inform the faithful that one of Hicks's sons had proposed to his girlfriend the day before in the centre of the pitch, and that she'd said yes, the glad tidings are hardly acknowledged.) The team's chances of challenging for the league title now appear slim, and the postmatch chorus of You'll Never Walk Alone from a half-empty Kop is more mournful than defiant. At the manager's press conference, the air is grim, and Benitez chooses his words extremely carefully.
"There was a misunderstanding and now we will talk about the future to know exactly what is the situation," he says. "It is important to clarify the situation. Maybe it is not so important to talk about names [of players] but the most important things is to talk about the decisions of each one for the future."
The owners spend another hour or so schmoozing in the directors' lounge with sponsors and significant supporters and friends before they slip off discretely for the great meeting: Gillett, Hicks, Benitez and Foster Gillett are the only ones in the room for what is reportedly a sometimes heated discussion that lasts for nearly three hours.
Afterward, a press release is issued, saying all of the right things about better communication and shared vision and letting bygones be bygones, but perhaps Hicks gets closer to the point when, arriving at the hotel bar that night, he says loud enough for anyone to hear: "Don't worry — we didn't fire Rafa."
At the same hotel, Gillett is later accosted by a perpetually-drunk Liverpool zealot from Iceland who has been hanging around all weekend, and who doesn't think much of American owners. (Over the past few days, he has also encountered supporters from Singapore, from Italy, from Norway and elsewhere, all of them here just to attend the match, testament to LFC's power as an international brand). He handles the situation diplomatically, just as he did with all of the Liverpool subscribers, whose angry e-mails about the Benitez situation Gillett answered with individual phone calls. It is obviously still a bumpy ride.
"I think that the cultural differences between America and England should theoretically be less than between an American and a Québécois," Gillett says. "But I'm not sure that they are. I think that maybe the French Canadians made it easier for us. Maybe the English situation was made more difficult."
Rumours swirl in the press that the stadium won't ever be built, that "the Americans" are looking for a way out, that Benitez's departure is imminent, that this great cultural disconnect will prove fatal. In the face of that, the Gilletts soldier on, battling to win Scouser hearts and minds, one at a time.
"Last night I went out with my wife and I had this nice young girl come up to me and she looked sweet," Foster Gillett says. "She introduced herself and then said, 'You stole my family jewels. You ran away with them. I don't trust you.' That's what she wanted to say. She got her minute with the Gilletts and she said we don't trust you yet. And I think that's fair. We have to prove ourselves, too."
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