Anfield Road

THE NEWS last night that Kenny Dalglish had, officially, been sacked by FSG was big news. If Liverpool’s place in the football world is diminishing nobody seems to have told the news outlets. It wasn’t just sports pages, sports bulletins or local radio talking about the end of Kenny’s second stint as boss and views were sought from ex-players, reporters and fans.

One person whose views were thought relevant is the man who – some argue – got Liverpool FC into this situation of trying to find the right manager in the first place. Christian Purslow was installed, probably by demand of the banks, as the club’s MD in 2009.

Purslow was announced as MD after Liverpool had finished second in the league. The season that followed saw the manager undermined and the club head at speed towards administration whilst the man sent in to save it was pretending all was rosy financially to anybody who’d listen.

It was that pretence – including untrue statements that there had been £20m spent on transfers over and above what came in from sales – that helped set the scene for Rafa’s ultimate departure. For reasons best known to themselves, some fans wanted Rafa out even as he was taking the club towards that second-place finish. “This club exists to win trophies!” they cried, probably literally. Before long they were being used to add to the pressure Rafa was under as certain elements in the boardroom did all they could to distract from the genuine, threatening, problems the club now had with its lenders.

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Liverpool football club are looking for a new manager after Kenny Dalglish left the club for the second time. The manager didn’t leave by mutual consent and didn’t resign, he was sacked.

In a statement, current owners FSG said:

Fenway Sports Group (FSG) and Liverpool Football Club announced that Kenny Dalglish is to leave his post today as Manager after having his contract terminated.

After a careful and deliberative review of the season, the Club came to the decision that a change was appropriate. It is not a decision that was reached lightly or hastily.

The search for a new Manager will begin immediately.

The statement continued with some hollow words of a corporate nature, before including some words from Kenny:
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AT midnight last night the deal that saw Adidas as official kit supplier to Liverpool FC came to an end as the new contract with Warrior Sports kicked-in. After much build-up and expectation the new home shirt for the 2012-13 season was revealed by the club.

The contract is lucrative for the club – and includes for the first time an agreement to produce a new home kit every season rather than every other season – and although many fans would buy the new shirt regardless of how it looked it’s of course important to make sure it will appeal to as many supporters as possible.

Liverpool’s badge – or logo if you prefer – was changed some years back to incorporate not only the Liverbird but also the Shankly Gates and more significantly the eternal flame in memory of the 96 supporters who died as a result of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. The new shirts have gone back to a variation on the previous badge – the Liverbird with the lettering “L.F.C.” underneath and no eternal flame.

Instead of having the flames on the front of the shirt in the club’s crest they are now on the back of the shirt, two flames either side of the number “96″.

Whether this change is good, bad or otherwise is of course an individual choice and on the whole the change seems to have been well received. What hasn’t been well received is the way the change was communicated to those who matter most – the families of the victims.
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THE latest accounts from Liverpool FC show how important the commercial side of the club’s operations are to the club’s future, with a new stadium still as far away from being reality as it’s ever been following what looks to have been little more than a confidence trick from the club’s former owners.

The club have binned the plans for the stadium Tom Hicks promised he’d build and without the extra money coming in from all those extra seats – the whole reason the club was sold in the first place – Liverpool need to find other ways to compete with the rest of the sides looking for top four football, itself a good way to bring in extra income.  The accounts show that commercial income is going up but with football reaching more and more people there’s still plenty of potential to keep it going that way.

One territory that the club and its new owners want to exploit is the US – and as well as sending the side out to play some football there in the summer the club have granted Fox Soccer unprecedented behind-the-scenes access for a new six-part documentary series.

“Our Liverpool: Never Walk Alone” will be produced by multi Emmy award winner Scott Boggins  and will be available to watch globally in the autumn.  If the series works as well as Fox and the club are hoping it won’t just attract new supporters, maybe it will attract new commercial partners – maybe even naming rights partners.

For us it’s about what we get to see in terms of the goings-on behind the scenes at the club, something that raised eyebrows when the announcement was first made. Our dirty laundry was far too public during the difficult days of the last regime and we wouldn’t want this to bring more of it out in the open again for the sake of ratings. And the announcement came a few days after an offshoot of the owners’ company in the US embarrassingly referred to “Liverpool’s world famous griffin.”

These fears seem to be unfounded, the people behind the documentary come highly recommended and LFC TV people will be around to provide guidance where needed. This isn’t going to be a half-hearted effort from a disinterested distant outlet.

The first promo for the documentary is now available, a teaser of what’s to come, and if that’s anything to go by it looks like it’s going to be something special:

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HAD a brief snooze. Saw Torres score a hat-trick. Chelsea’s Torres. Was I still asleep? Went out. The car said it was three degrees and flashed its warning about ice. There were bits of tree all over the road, at least in the bits of road that weren’t under water, and it’s May in a couple of days. Maybe I was still asleep.

No, a face-stinging walk in that horizontal freezing cold rain would wake anyone up. Water looked choppy, sky was dark, like it was the middle of winter. Everything’s strange. Back home, groggy again, phone out of earshot, computer out of reach, something boring on the telly and none of it news. No idea how Spurs went on, but otherwise not expecting much to have happened in the world of football. Eventually, the computer goes on, the email gets checked. And still everything’s strange.

Slap bang in the middle of an email that started off so normally is this:

“Hodgson for England”

What? Haven’t we done that already? He had a predictable draw yesterday didn’t he?

“Madness from the FA?”

Come on, it’s the wrong end of April for that kind of joke.

Wait; what? They’ve not. Have they?

I checked. “England have been granted permission to talk to Roy Hodgson.”

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“PRO”, a short film about a fictional professional footballer and the impact social media has on his life, is set for its first screening in Liverpool shortly.

The footballer, Thomas Ryder, uses Twitter but gets himself into a bit of trouble when using it – and is also being quietly stalked by a small boy. Co-written by (The Anfield Wrap presenter) Neil Atkinson and Daniel Fitzsimmons, who were also producer and director respectively, the movie’s cast includes Joe Macaulay, Lee Fenwick, Joshua French and Kelly Forshaw.

Neil explains what the film is about: “We wanted to look at the strange status footballers now have in society and in the way in which we interact with them. We switch them easily from hero to villain in terms of what they do both on and off the pitch and especially so as they share more of themselves on social media such as Twitter.

“There are those of us who want their approval and get irritated when we don’t get it. Those of us who get annoyed when they don’t acknowledge they have our approval and infuriated if they don’t seek our approval.
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A DEFEAT at home is disappointing, a defeat at home to the manager you wanted gone in place of the current one is even more disappointing. Even if you try to console yourself, deep down, that it might just help his England chances.

Liverpool’s league season ended, really, a week after winning the Carling Cup. Six days after, if we’re being accurate. Arsenal played like a team who’d have been happy with a draw and Liverpool played them off the park. But Arsenal had a bang-on-form van Persie and Liverpool were still struggling with penalties. Arsenal got all three points.

They weren’t the first ‘big’ team to come to Anfield this season looking like they’d be happy to go back home with a point; a sign of the respect, maybe, that opposing managers have for this Liverpool side and its manager. Respect that, sadly, some Liverpool fans just don’t have for this side or its manager. This side isn’t without its faults – far from it – but maybe those opposing managers have more of an idea of Liverpool’s qualities than the tabloid headline writers that some of Liverpool’s supporters seem to gravitate towards.
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On April 15th 1989 an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest was, like yesterday, like any semi-final, the cause of much anticipation and excitement for supporters of the two teams involved.

It wasn’t quite as much of an early start as yesterday – instead of heading 200 miles to Wembley for a 12.30 kick-off the 1989 semi was a 3pm kick-off 70 miles away in Sheffield.

By 3.06pm the game had been abandoned. There was no celebration afterwards, no disappointment at a defeat. The day ended in tragedy.

Behind Bruce Grobelaar’s goal people were dying.

In all ninety-six Liverpool supporters would die because of the events of that day at Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough stadium.

96 needless deaths. 96 people who will never be forgotten.

23 years later we are still waiting for justice to be done.

23 years later we are still waiting for the cover-ups to be uncovered and the liars to be exposed.

23 years later and we still have to educate people about what really happened because the lies told in 1989 persist.

Today we remember those 96 victims. Today we think of all those who survived the horrors of that day and continued to suffer long afterwards as a result. Today we offer our support, as always, to the families of those who died and to anyone else still hurting from the consequences of a disaster that could – and should – have been so easily avoided.

We also thank those people across the world, irrespective of who they support or where they are from, who take time to show their respects and send their support.

The 96 who died were Liverpool fans, but they could have been fans of any club, they could have been anyone’s son, daughter, brother, sister, dad, granddad. They are all missed.

In memory of the ninety-six.

John Alfred Anderson (62)
Colin Mark Ashcroft (19)
James Gary Aspinall (18)
Kester Roger Marcus Ball (16)
Gerard Bernard Patrick Baron (67)
Simon Bell (17)
Barry Sidney Bennett (26)
David John Benson (22)
David William Birtle (22)
Tony Bland (22)
Paul David Brady (21)
Andrew Mark Brookes (26)
Carl Brown (18)
David Steven Brown (25)
Henry Thomas Burke (47)
Peter Andrew Burkett (24)
Paul William Carlile (19)
Raymond Thomas Chapman (50)
Gary Christopher Church (19)
Joseph Clark (29)
Paul Clark (18)
Gary Collins (22)
Stephen Paul Copoc (20)
Tracey Elizabeth Cox (23)
James Philip Delaney (19)
Christopher Barry Devonside (18)
Christopher Edwards (29)
Vincent Michael Fitzsimmons (34)
Thomas Steven Fox (21)
Jon-Paul Gilhooley (10)
Barry Glover (27)
Ian Thomas Glover (20)
Derrick George Godwin (24)
Roy Harry Hamilton (34)
Philip Hammond (14)
Eric Hankin (33)
Gary Harrison (27)
Stephen Francis Harrison (31)
Peter Andrew Harrison (15)
David Hawley (39)
James Robert Hennessy (29)
Paul Anthony Hewitson (26)
Carl Darren Hewitt (17)
Nicholas Michael Hewitt (16)
Sarah Louise Hicks (19)
Victoria Jane Hicks (15)
Gordon Rodney Horn (20)
Arthur Horrocks (41)
Thomas Howard (39)
Thomas Anthony Howard (14)
Eric George Hughes (42)
Alan Johnston (29)
Christine Anne Jones (27)
Gary Philip Jones (18)
Richard Jones (25)
Nicholas Peter Joynes (27)
Anthony Peter Kelly (29)
Michael David Kelly (38)
Carl David Lewis (18)
David William Mather (19)
Brian Christopher Mathews (38)
Francis Joseph McAllister (27)
John McBrien (18)
Marion Hazel McCabe (21)
Joseph Daniel McCarthy (21)
Peter McDonnell (21)
Alan McGlone (28)
Keith McGrath (17)
Paul Brian Murray (14)
Lee Nicol (14)
Stephen Francis O’Neill (17)
Jonathon Owens (18)
William Roy Pemberton (23)
Carl William Rimmer (21)
David George Rimmer (38)
Graham John Roberts (24)
Steven Joseph Robinson (17)
Henry Charles Rogers (17)
Colin Andrew Hugh William Sefton (23)
Inger Shah (38)
Paula Ann Smith (26)
Adam Edward Spearritt (14)
Philip John Steele (15)
David Leonard Thomas (23)
Patrik John Thompson (35)
Peter Reuben Thompson (30)
Stuart Paul William Thompson (17)
Peter Francis Tootle (21)
Christopher James Traynor (26)
Martin Kevin Traynor (16)
Kevin Tyrrell (15)
Colin Wafer (19)
Ian David Whelan (19)
Martin Kenneth Wild (29)
Kevin Daniel Williams (15)
Graham John Wright (17)

You’ll Never Walk Alone. Rest in Peace.

PEPE REINA ran to Brad Jones to congratulate him at the end of today’s FA Cup Semi-final, one of many signs of the obvious camaraderie on display at Anfield, not to mention the popularity the Australian international has with his team mates. Jones was in between the sticks for Liverpool as Reina served the last of his three-match suspension and did all that was asked of him as the Reds booked a third trip to Wembley with a 2-1 win over Everton.

After the game Brad spoke to ESPN but was modest about his own part in a win that might be talked about as much as the final in years to come: “We knew that the game was going to be fairly even,” Brad said, “and we know that they have a lot of quality players and a good front-line, so we just had to deal with it.

“The boys at the back are fantastic players and I think they dealt with it well. I didn’t have a lot to do.”
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