Death by a thousand cuts

[James P]

We've made mistakes in the transfer market yes but no one is sticking fingers in their ears here. Still in with a shout for 4th and still in the cups. That's progress compared to the shambles last year.

The shambles from the first half of last season, absolutely. In the second half under Kenny we were second only to United on points scored, and then by only one (IIRC). Our current position is very much regression not progression compared to that.

[little dave hedgehog]

Are you seriously suggesting that we should pander to the pressure from a biased, or at the least, uninformed, press following the result of a deeply and fundamentally flawed FA diktat?

if it were me, i'd be suggesting that some reasoned and considered criticism of the fa's penal process is very much in order. i don't think the two choices here are "pander to the pressure etc..." and "make childish, incendiary outbursts in public."

i'd be very happy if the fa were being attacked for its role, but that's not what's happening here.

[MrMichael]

We've made mistakes in the transfer market yes but no one is sticking fingers in their ears here. Still in with a shout for 4th and still in the cups. That's progress compared to the shambles last year.

When Hodgson was sacked we were 19 points off the league leaders. We are now.... 19 points off the league leaders.

Obviously the 2 situations are quite different, give me Kenny a thousand times over Hodgson once, but Kenny has also had much more money to spend that Roy did and much more support from the owners & fans etc. We're not a shambles at the moment.... well, on the pitch we're not, consistently anyway, but we've not been particularly good of late either. Not strengthening at all in Jan, considering Lucas' injury and our lack of attacking creativity & goal scoring, was a bit of a concern for me. Not expecting we should necessarily have spent lots of money or anything, but to have done nothing seemed, well, a bit odd.

[barnes10]

agree with the OP.

Wheels have basically come off and this whole affair has shown our leadership to be very amateurish.

ayre, kenny & comolli run the club more or less and given the sh1t that is going on, I feel FSG will take some sort of action in the not too distant future. how can they not? how suarez will get away with today I'll never know. i think his days are numbered now. he's just too much of a liability unfortunately. and he was the saving grace of keny & comolli's transfers pretty much. shocking return on investment for them as things currently stand... a disaster of a purchase

[peekay]

The only major issue at the club is the on field performance ,the poor performance of our summer signings, and the inability to score goals. I am a bit worried about the ability of our scouting department and the manager to identify targets to take us to the next level. We also appear to have moved away from the fluid pass and move football at the end of last season. We seem to have spent a lot of money in an unbalanced manner with little or no strategy whatsoever. We have 3 wins in our last 10 premier league games. That is the only issue we have. We absolutely need to get it right this summer as we cannot afford another year outside of Champions League.


As for off the field, other than the British press making a big fuss, I really dont think our reputation is being affected. It is making the news only because of the fuss made in England and I am fairly confident most Asians, South Americans are looking at this with bemusement. The British press has been continuously crowing about our global appeal being reduced while we are consistently finding new commercial deals, and breaking sponsorship records left, right and center. So just forget about it for the time being.

[qabiri]

Mate i despair!!!!!

[qabiri]

Transfers come and go things like that can eventually be fixed but victimisation of our players shouldnt be allowed.
English football has set a bad precedent with this case and the repercussions will eventually be felt by the Premier League

Imagine a day when no foreign players decide to play for English clubs because they dont feel backed up.
Suarez is one player. The main point of this whole matter is most people in the media are simply not reporting the facts.
Why should a man shake hands with someone who has tried to ruin his reputation and standing?
I mean look what is happening world wide and not shaking hands is a big deal.
Dumping Suarez would be bad for our reputation and our transfer policy,with people like Evra around this situation could happen to any foreign player or white player.

[kris90210]

Great posts, James. Pretty much sums up how I'm feeling at the moment as well. Where's all this hate come from? You don't see anywhere near the same hatred between fans as you do in other sports.

The silence from the owners is pretty deafening right now, compared with how vocal they were last season. I very much doubt they are happy with how the Suarez situation has been handled - there's no question that our image has been damaged. On top of that they've sanctioned heavy investment in the team, and we've barely improved.

Now we're hearing Dalglish's wife is getting death threats. Is anything worth that? I don't know if he can recover from this - the media have got their knives out now and this won't be going away any time soon.

It's been a depressing few years for Liverpool fans. But at least Hodgson isn't in charge, and Hicks and Gillett are gone too.

[kris90210]

Transfers come and go things like that can eventually be fixed but victimisation of our players shouldnt be allowed.
English football has set a bad precedent with this case and the repercussions will eventually be felt by the Premier League

Imagine a day when no foreign players decide to play for English clubs because they dont feel backed up.
Suarez is one player. The main point of this whole matter is most people in the media are simply not reporting the facts.
Why should a man shake hands with someone who has tried to ruin his reputation and standing?
I mean look what is happening world wide and not shaking hands is a big deal.
Dumping Suarez would be bad for our reputation and our transfer policy,with people like Evra around this situation could happen to any foreign player or white player.

I'm in two minds about this. On the one hand I feel like we should let it go and move on. On the other, I think Suarez should pursue legal action to clear his name.

[Nicey]

Football is a fickle business full of short memories and thick people, a cup will go some way to healing all this, I hope that classless club goes into administration

[Pablo]

I rarely post long opinions on here, but I feel the need to vent my spleen right now.

I don't expect everyone (maybe anyone!) to agree with me, but I've reached a point where I am deeply embarrassed by the on and off field position our club finds itself in. Almost every day at the moment there's something else that chips away further at our reputation (hence the thread title). The performances on the field are so far below what we expect that I've no answer to the banter from the Spurs, Chelsea, Arsenal and Man U fans I'm surrounded by at work. And worse still all of them, regardless of club affiliation, think that the way that Kenny and Suarez have handled the whole Evra thing is appalling.

I know most of you will say "**** 'em", but it's not that simple. We are Liverpool FC, a club with a reputation second to none, and who have always represented the positive side of the game. For years Man U fans have moaned about the "ABU" phenomenon. I'm afraid that it's rapidly becoming the "ABL" phenomenon instead. We can rail against the media, commentators and Twitter gob****es, but perception is everything, and the perception is that our managers, players and fans are refusing to acknowledge that Suarez has done anything wrong, when the rest of the world is convinced that he has.

This is not to suggest that they are right and we are wrong, but there comes a point where you have to accept what has happened and move on, and Kenny in particular seems unable to do that. I love his passion for the club, and his staunch defence of one his players, but it's playing out very badly in public, making him look dogmatic and intractable. In a world where PR is everything, we're ****ing this up badly.

With regard to the on field performances, I'm lucky enough to remember Kenny as both a player (one of the greatest ever), and as a manager first time round. When he became manager again I was over the moon, and the transformation in the team from Jan to May last year was a joy to watch. That's what makes this season even harder to take.

The loss of Meireles was clearly a blow, as is Lucas's injury, but we all know that the money spent should have taken us to the next level, not set us back. Kenny & Comolli's work in three transfer windows has been well below par. Suarez is clearly a talent, but for all of his skill and trickery his end product has been piss poor. I really hope that will change soon. Carroll is clearly a £15m player starting to find form, so we pissed away £20m there. As far as the summer signings go, we have received value directly inversely proportional to the amount spent: Bellamy has been brilliant, Enrique great, Adam decent, Henderson inconsistent and Downing atrocious. That's no great advert for the scouting approach. The lack of any major investment in January unfortunately points to one of two conclusions: they don't recognise the shortcomings, or FSG don't have sufficient confidence in them to put money on the table. It may have been an overpriced market, but when the need is so stark then you have to do something.

I really want Kenny to be the man to turn this around, but I'm no longer convinced that he is. His judgement has been found wanting several times recently, both on and off field. He is, and always will be, and absolute legend, not least for rescuing us from the clutches of the Bodge. However, this afternoon I found myself watching the first 30 minutes or so of the Spurs match, and couldn't help thinking that for a melty-faced illiterate wheeler-dealer media whore, Redknapp's assembled a team far greater than the sum of its parts that plays football that's great to watch. Pretty much how Kenny's Liverpool team of the late '80s was. And the opposite of what we have now.

Maybe it's just me, on the back of a ridiculously stressful week, seeing everything in a negative light. But I can't help feeling that we're reaching a crisis point, and FSG don't seem the sort to leave these kind of things to chance. Barring a major shift in our results, I think that this summer will be one of huge and fundamental change.

We've not been great by any means. We've not been scoring anywhere near enough goals, and this season we've by and large been very much unable to recapture the spark we had in the latter half of last season. Bolton away was very poor, as was Spurs away, some of the home performances have been very drab, and we were bad today. There has most definitely been an issue with the players brought in, by and large the inverse cost to performance ratio point is quite valid, and although some of those like Henderson and Carroll may well have positive futures in front of them, we paid too much for just currently unrealised potential. Its not all a complete disaster, but its also not a great picture either at the moment and despite a massive overhaul and relatively substantial outlay, we still look to have a lot of work to do to be genuine contenders. An awful lot of work.

Then there's the Suarez thing. I think we've been stitched up badly by various groups with various agendas here, but to some degree we have also handled the whole thing badly. It was a tricky situation anyway but we've been somewhat naive at the minimum, and allowed that horrible c*nt Fergie and his cronies to take more control of this than we could have, and portray us in a very unsympathetic light as a club. Its all been extremely unpleasant, rights or wrongs there is no way the club can't have a lot of regrets about how this has all happened.

Its just very depressing imo.

Two excellent posts

[RedReet]

I don’t get this whole moral high ground or bigger picture crap. Rafa was perfectly dignified during his years here while the uk media persecuted him and where did that get him? Where did that get us? The one time he did dare speak out against the FA and Ferguson he was accused of losing his mind for being so brazen. I don’t know if Suarez is innocent or not, but if the club truly believe he is then they are entitled to defend him, despite how his persecutors and the wider public may portray it.

[FrankB34]

With caution advised for the language used from the start in the article below, football moved just a little bit closer to its utter moral collapse yesterday.

It was a day when the football almost didn't matter.

After all of the "Negro" and "Your sister's cunt" debacle between Patrice Evra and Luis Suárez at the first meeting of Liverpool and Manchester United back in October, as well as the FA hearing which found Suárez guilty of using racist and insulting language, but which also explicitly stated that neither the FA nor Patrice Evra regarded Suárez as a racist, things were apparently going to be made better with a handshake. (Note that Sepp Blatter advocated this method of resolving issues and was roundly condemned by the mainstream media, who seem to have rather flexible morals when it suits).

At first glance during the team presentations before the match, it looked like Luis Suárez was going to shake the hand of Patrice Evra, before moving past him and on to David De Gea. Looking more closely, you can see Evra's hand moves down and away from Suárez after Evra had shaken Jordan Henderson's hand (the previous Liverpool player in the line). At best, no-one could call Evra's hand "outstretched".

Once again though, in common with the FA tribunal that found Suárez guilty "on the balance of probabilities" (note: Suárez was not found "guilty beyond reasonable doubt"), where there is a situation involving the 2 players where considerable doubt exists as to who said or did what, the media seem instantaneously to afford all benefit of the doubt to Patrice Evra and absolutely none to Luis Suárez.

With the media presenting the situation as a cut-and-dried case of Suárez refusing to shake Evra's hand, (and presumably, Evra is also guilty of common assault on Suárez by forcefully grabbing his arm "in protest" at Suárez's "refusal" to shake hands), what did Ferguson have to say about the handshake incident?

"I couldn't believe it...He's a disgrace to Liverpool Football Club. That player should not be allowed to play for Liverpool again. The history that club's got and he does that and, in a situation like today, he could have caused a riot. I thought that was really disappointing, that guy. It was terrible, what he did."

I'm sorry - is Ferguson still talking about the lack of a handshake here? "Could have caused a riot". "It was terrible, what he did". It sounds from those quotes like Suárez had just gone on to pitch and murdered someone.

Maybe he had assaulted one of the fans by running at the crowd and then kung-fu kicking one of them? No, Suárez didn't do that.

Maybe he had betrayed his brother by sleeping with his brother's wife over a sustained period, leaving his brother's marriage in tatters, only then to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on covering up the truth from the public eye, whilst earning money in sponsorship deals by trading on a squeaky-clean public image, like Tiger Woods, and in doing so, defrauding both the sponsors and the public? No, Suárez didn't do that.

Maybe he had been accused of calling someone "a ****ing black *******"? No, in the original case, Suárez was only accused of using his native Spanish word for "black". But Ferguson wasn't even referring to this.

Maybe Suárez "forgot" to take a mandatory drugs test, which is considered all around the world as a failure of a drugs test by default, and maybe Suárez is therefore considered a drugs cheat? No, Suárez didn't miss a drugs test and is not a drugs cheat.

At worst, Suárez refused to shake the hand of someone he considers to be a liar and a fabricator, someone he thinks lied to the football authorities which resulting in him missing about a fifth of the season through suspension. Would you shake the hand of someone you thought cost you £40,000? (And that's only relevant, if you think it was Suárez's fault the two players didn't shake hands).

For that lack of a handshake, Ferguson thinks he deserves to be sacked by Liverpool? For that action, there could have been a riot at Old Trafford? Never mind the fundamental question: what has the status of Liverpool's employees got to do with Ferguson anyway? How would he react to being told by Kenny Dalglish what players should be allowed to play for Manchester United?

For the record, in the line-up, Suárez did shake the hands of (at least) 2 alleged adulterers and an alleged shoplifter and tried to shake the hand of a proven drugs cheat, who then refused to shake his hand! What principles the drugs cheat has.

Is anyone seeing any kind of underlying agenda here?

With Sky's Geoff Shreeves serving up tough questions like: "Can I ask for your reaction on Luis Suárez's refusal to shake Patrice Evra's hand?" and "Do you understand why Rio Ferdinand subsequently refused to shake his (Suárez's) hand having seen him blank Patrice Evra?" (what a nasty, probing, spiteful question that is to put to Rio Ferdinand's manager), it's no wonder the vast majority of non-Liverpool fans think Suárez is guilty of everything from racism to the extinction of the dinosaurs and the death of Princess Diana.

But does a handshake before a match matter anyway? One wouldn't really think so: witness Roy Keane, Roy Carroll, Paul Scholes and Wayne Rooney all refusing to shake the hand of Patrick Vieira before the Arsenal v Manchester United match in February 2005, when there was real animosity between the two teams, and especially the two captains, in a volatile atmosphere.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFkYRXlwQxA"]Keane and Viera fight in the tunnel - YouTube[/ame] - watch from 1:05 to see the refusal to shake hands, which, if the same logic as Ferguson has used is applied here, should have seen that match end the United careers of almost half Ferguson's team.

Note that 2 of the 4 players refusing Vieira's handshake played today against Liverpool. Where was the fuss then? Where were the outrageous claims that that could have caused a riot?

The treatment of Suárez in the media, by the FA and by Manchester United's PR machine and by Ferguson in particular is nothing short of disgraceful - the kind of treatment that could easily be seen as bullying and the hounding out of English football a player of unquestionable ability.

So how did Suárez behave today? Well, he was quite simply on his best behaviour, except when he was upset at not being awarded a free-kick in the first half, but Ferdinand's challenge was terrifically timed and not a foul.

Best behaviour from Suárez - even when confronted by an utterly odious act of childishness from Patrice Evra at the end of the 2-1 United victory (think Martin Keown celebrating against Ruud van Nistelrooy). Evra deliberately, provocatively, triumphantly and even sickeningly danced in front of Suárez to celebrate the win as Suárez was making his way to the tunnel.

The referee saw fit to move in between the two players and talk to Evra about his actions. Suárez just carried on walking calmly towards the tunnel as the United fans continued to insult him.

Suárez has since tweeted: "We lost and we are sad because we have made a big effort...Disappointed because everything is not that it seems..." - a reference to the non-handshake.

As for Kenny Dalglish, he looked shocked when Shreeves put it to him that Suárez had refused to shake Evra's hand. Dalglish seemed to be unaware that handshakes hadn't taken place.

And here's where I would criticise Suárez.

My thinking is that everybody on the Liverpool side of things thought Suárez would shake Evra's hand. There would have been plenty of conversations with Suárez prior to the match about that. If they had thought he wouldn't shake hands, Dalglish could easily have left him on the bench and brought him on later - substitutes don't take part in the farcical pre-match line-up for handshakes.

So, from Dalglish's reaction to being told the handshake didn't take place, I think Dalglish realised that Suárez has undermined him and left him open to all sorts of questions from the media, far stronger than Shreeves' questions of today.

Note here, that the lack of a handshake was presented to Dalglish as a fait accompli (ie that it was Suárez's fault, rather than it being Evra's fault or any kind of misunderstanding).

So my conclusion is that Suárez should have made every effort to shake Evra's hand, regardless of whose hand was pulled away. He should have made this effort, not because he's a guilty man or because he has a point to prove, but simply to stop the circus around him and his club persisting for several more weeks.

I'm certain that very few journalists or non-Liverpool fans have read all of the 115-page report on the Suárez-Evra hearing (I have and I found it to be unbelievably biased and so full of holes that if it were a boat, the Titanic had more chance of staying afloat), but unfortunately that doesn't stop people either writing or thinking that they know about Liverpool, Suárez, who he is and what he represents.

A handshake would have done a lot to help this.

Suárez is guilty though - but of being naive. Naive in thinking that he could use his native language/culture on a football field in England and not be accused of racism, naive in not realising that his actions don't just reflect on him but have implications for Liverpool FC and its fans and naive in thinking that not shaking someone's hand wouldn't make international headlines in the current context.

That's it.

As for Ferguson, he is an utter opportunist and hypocrite. He will stop at nothing to cause problems for Liverpool, especially Suárez, and seems to enjoy bringing the game into disrepute (not that he'll ever be charged for it, mind).

Evra behaves like an immature, petulant child (2010 World Cup anyone? French legend Lilian Thuram advised the French Football Federation that Evra should never play for France again for his role as captain in the player strike in South Africa).

And then there's Sky Sports, sitting in the middle, with fake outrage at the declining moral standards of the game, which they subsequently "reluctantly" report on and constantly perpetuate the decay of football in this country.

Then I and thousands of my fellow amateur football administrators have to pick up the pieces every week following well-publicised incidents like this and deal with the worsening behaviour of huge numbers of amateur footballers out there, who emulate all this Premier League garbage.

In this case, football is not being helped by many of football's stakeholders (players, administrators like Gordon Taylor, the FA, certain clubs and managers, the media) all trying to heap the blame and society's ills on one man's shoulders and ignoring the hypocrisy of many of their positions.

A very sad state of affairs. I am starting to fall out of love with the Premier League and what it represents, because it certainly doesn't represent fairness or balance any more.

24-hour sports media perpetuates stories about stories. Where's the substance? Opinions, over-reaction, speculation and sensationalism cover virtually all of Sky Sports' coverage, especially the Sky Sports News. Where's the journalism involved? When the coverage of and reaction to a story supercedes the story itself, something's wrong.

As for a real look at racism in football, take a look at the famous Witch scene from Monty Python's Quest For The Holy Grail:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrzMhU_4m-g"]She's a witch! - YouTube[/ame]

and instead of the witch, imagine the same scene involving the media having "found" a racist. There's a great many parallels between this sketch and Suárez's treatment by both the media and the FA.

He floats. Burn him - he's a witch. Burn him. Burn him.

I put forward the above arguments, because I don't see anyone else representing an alternative viewpoint in the media - the discussion is generally about the degree of evil Suárez shows, and not a discussion about whether he's evil or not.

I am not going to blindly defend Suárez however. There was a bigger picture today which Suárez seems not to have grasped - he should have been big enough to understand that there was more than just him on view, regarding the handshake today. Rightly or wrongly, Liverpool will suffer once again from what Suárez is perceived to have done, and because no-one in the media seems willing to scratch beyond the surface and put forward the point of view that Suárez actually hasn't done much, if anything, wrong.

The media seem to be gleefully happy (in the worst ironical sense) to fill their broadcast hours/column inches accusing Dalglish of not being willing to let the Suárez situation go - although I'm not sure anyone would be happy to just drop a topic which has cost you your best player for almost a quarter of the season.

Nevertheless, the media really don't seem to comment very much on Ferguson's consistent stoking of the fire with his unnecessary comments. And compare and contrast the detestable actions of Evra after the final whistle with the non-handshake - then compare how many column inches and broadcasting hours will be filled with the obnoxious actions of a Manchester United player against the column inches and broadcasting hours filled with how awful the Liverpool player Suárez is for not shaking hands with a person Suárez considers to be a liar.

Is this (conscious or sub-conscious) lack of balance struck for selfish journalistic reasons? Is it because Ferguson, incredibly and quite unbelievably, has individual journalists banned from Old Trafford if he doesn't like what they write?

The more I think about this, the more shocking and mendacious this situation is: United are almost certainly guaranteed favouritism in the UK media because an individual journalist jeopardises his career if he cannot report from Old Trafford - what use is he to a media outlet if he is not able to cover one of the most popular English clubs?

How is this situation beneficial to the overall level of the sport in England? How have the authorities allowed this situation to arise? Do Liverpool need to follow the same tactics to achieve even a remotely level playing field in the increasingly important PR arena?

It would be sad and laughable if it wasn't so serious. And how many double-standards need to be applied to different clubs before clubs, fans and administrators actually do something about it?

And I'm really not sure where we go from here. Amateur administrators will have to pick up the pieces from this current situation, whilst being given very little help or leadership and the game and society will move on.

But football lost today - for all sorts of reasons.

By Jonny leesey

[Lee]

Great article that.

Suarez (and Dalglish to a certain degree) getting absolute pelters on the radio this morning.

[RedReet]

I am still ****ing fuming today and I have tried to avoid every media outlet possible. I can only imagine how Suarez must feel.