http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eos532c7JzM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eos532c7JzM

Look forward to your future posts.

Yes, that first paragraph was written because I’ve had people going out of their way to cause trouble here and elsewhere. One example was a visitor who registered under four or five different names and then backed himself up in his own arguments with me! I know you’re here to talk about the Reds and not to cause trouble, but at first reading first thing this morning I wasn’t sure. Apologies for that.

I’ve had a lot of comments about that article on Hicks, maybe I should read it again because I’ve not read it for some time and whenever anyone talks about it they sound like they’re describing something different to what was intended.

I’ll not go into it all again now but this was written at a time when Hicks was getting all the blame, Gillett was being painted as an innocent victim of Hicks’ bullying ways and DIC were the knights in shining armour come to wipe out our debt, build a new stadium and buy loads of players. I tried to point out that Gillett was far from innocent, that DIC were far from knights in shining armour.

The biggest memory I have of that time is the rather chilling realisation that it was George Gillett who’d been the driver behind both the decision to sack Rafa and the decision to replace him with Klinsmann. I never said he’d done this without the blessing of Hicks, but I was trying to point out he’d not been bullied into it all by Hicks either. At that moment in time a lot of people still thought of Gillett as someone who was well-intentioned but out of his depth, someone who’d never have contemplated sacking Rafa but felt he had to so he could keep Hicks happy. This was a time when people thought the Sheikh of Dubai was a boyhood Red and that DIC would wipe our debts out and buy us with cash, throwing a bit more in for new players. People were criticising Hicks for his past as leader of an LBO outfit, but ignoring the fact DIC advertised themselves as such on their website.

I doubt it was because of anything I wrote, but pretty soon DIC stopped being referred to as DIC. Hicks had been dealing with DIC earlier on (remember the memo that got printed in one of the nationals) but now all of a sudden it was just “Dubai” that were trying to buy LFC. I was fighting to make sure we didn’t welcome “DIC” with open arms only to find it was out of the frying pan into the fire.

As far as sources are concerned – well I’ve never spoken to Tom Hicks but I did speak to various people at the time, inside and outside the club. I might update the article sometime and try to explain it better but my biggest issue at the start of those troubles was the treatment of Rafa. All my – and others’ – assumptions about the owners had that whole Klinsmann situation as their foundation. We assumed it was Hicks pushing to sack Rafa, that Gillett had saved him from the sack, that Hicks had found Klinsmann and offered him the job without really giving Gillett a say in the matter. Hicks the bully, Gillett the downtrodden victim!

Hicks made peace with Rafa publicly (whether we believed it was genuine or not) but Gillett didn’t need to. He’d been quiet, he’d not fallen out with Rafa anyway had he? That’s what I’d thought, as had others – and that’s why I was so shocked when I found that Gillett had real anger and maybe even hatred for Rafa a few months later, hatred that went right back to the time of that trouble earlier in the season. All of a sudden the foundations weren’t as strong. Gillett wasn’t the innocent downtrodden out-of-his-depth victim I had assumed he was.

None of that has anything to do with anything I was told by anyone even remotely sympathetic towards Hicks, let alone any of his own people. And you’ll no doubt have seen countless other references from Gillett since then where he makes it clear he’s not a fan of Rafa’s, for example his chat to Jay McKenna of SoS in the Crowne Plaza and also that chat he had with a fan just before he went on his well-publicised visit to the middle east. He didn’t seem to even try and hide his contempt of Rafa if he didn’t think anyone was recording it.

You mentioned Don King and Max Clifford, perhaps the biggest mistake Hicks made during those dark months was not to employ a decent PR company with experience of the British press and people. DIC had David Bick, who is excellent at his job. George Gillett had clearly taken advice (although he claims he doesn’t use PR people) because he knew the right time to disappear and reappear. Even Rick Parry was said to have his own PR rep. Hicks had someone who did PR aimed at financial types communicating to other financial types, and it showed. Nowadays of course he employs Freud Communications, and they seem to have earned their fee by just telling him not to speak too often because he’s far less likely to pick up the phone and chat to Sky these days! Let’s not mention emails…

Why would Rafa be under the impression that he had to sell three or four players in January because he had to lower the wage bill? That’s what he’d been told, I believe, but the owners were – I believe – unaware of this decision! An offer comes in to finance the stadium, and offer that in itself suggests possibilities of opening up avenues towards investment in the club in general – but it’s said to have been knocked back out of hand as soon as it reaches the temporary MD. The temp MD has his own contacts, he’ll sort out the investment himself. Surely if he’s acting in the best interests of Liverpool FC he’ll at least consider such offers, rather than dismiss them out of hand because he’s got his own contacts? If it wasn’t the right offer from LFC’s perspective then fair enough – but that doesn’t seem to be the reason for its rejection.

As for “the damage done to efforts to get rid of these two clowns” do you not think that damage is being done in other ways? In fact Purslow told SOS that protests put investors off, more or less asking them to stop the protests by the sounds of it.

I’m slightly inclined to agree with him on that front, although I think any protest that caught the eye of potential investors would only scare of potential investors that knew they’d be facing the same protests themselves further down the line. Any investor who was looking to mix their need for profit with the recognition of our needs as supporters wouldn’t be scared off.

On the other hand when the complaints and protests are about something that was never true in the first place might that not frighten off a decent investor too? If a potential investor sent his lacky out to meet some of those complaining about Hicks and Gillett to ask why they were protesting what kind of answers would he get? I think it’s a long time since anyone actually thought properly about why they want Hicks and Gillett out, meaning any reasons given are pretty vague.

We shout “Yanks out” but we don’t for one minute say how. Christian Purslow might be selling us to a hedge fund, but we don’t ask any questions because he seems a nice chap.

We’re like a little old lady letting the nice man into her house to read her meter. He might be a nice man, he might be a meter reader, but the days of just trusting that’s the case by appearances alone are long gone. Yet we’ve let Hicks in, Gillett in, nearly let DIC in and now we’ve let Purslow in and not once did we ask for any credentials.

And that’s all I’m really trying to do.

Regarding your opening paragraph about an” internet troll”. You seem to have an issue with someone. Thats fine, but its nothing to do with me.

The reason i write the posts is because as a Liverpool fan once in a while i like to respond to an article ( ive probably posted 3 comments on all sites in the last year ) Whether that constitutes your idea of “being here for the right reasons” i dont know.

About balance. Im a Liverpool fan, as are the other people who post on this site. We speak with passion about the club, but hopefully it doesnt affect our balance and judgement in what we write, and as a professional journalist that should not be a defence for your articles.

You wrote an article a couple of years ago about Hicks and how he could be a force for good at the club, and you backed the article up with a defence of his actions so far at Liverpool and contrasted it with the behaviour of Gilette. This article got right under my skin when I read it, and it still does. Hicks, with the overwhelming majority of the fans was public enemy number one at the time, justifiably so. He still is with myself and most Liverpool fans ( Gilette is equally as bad ), and I couldnt see how you could write this piece. I dont know your sources or if it was just your opinion at the time, but I couldnt believe what I was reading. Don King and Max Clifford could tell me the moon is made of cheese until their blue in the face and I still wouldnt believe them and I believe it was equally as clear what Hicks intentions where at the time.

Generally I like your articles and your the one feature writer I look for on this site. But when I saw your article on the 24th Jan my reaction was your going against the majority view of LFC fans again. Most fans think Purslow has done a good job, granted we dont have access to the same information as yourself. But if you write an article against the commonly perceived view of the fans, you should expect to be challenged on this ( isnt that what these sites are here for anyway, to get a better understanding ), and back your comments up. My personal view is you may be right ( I dont know ), but you have taken your eye off the target. Purslow, is not the issue, its the owners who are the issue. Regarding Purslow turning money down in the summer, if its not the right offer then thats fine. I believe Liverpool Football Club is a blue chip business in football and for the forseeable future there will always be interest. Lets wait for the right offer. Ok we may not do anything this season or for a couple of years ( I hope im wrong ). Thats painful, but I can take that, as long my children, nephews and nieces can enjoy supporting a successful Liverpool in 10 and 20 years, with the right owners in place.

Back to where I started the “internet troll”. I can take Man U, Chelsea and other fans posting snipe comments at Liverpool and although they may be hurtful at the time, they are soon forgotten. But when you have one of your own, especially someone in a priveleged position as a feature writer on a Liverpool site writing an article about Hicks that he would have been proud to write himself, thats like a hard kick in the groin. So Jim forget about the “internet troll”that irritates you and think of the damage done to efforts to get rid of these two clowns by that kind of piece. Liverpool fans need to stick together not be divided.

But even if you weren’t here for the right reasons it would still be important to try and address your points.

Balance: I’ll own up to one thing that will always alter the balance of what I say or write – I’m a Liverpool fan. I try as hard as I can to be open-minded about everything I hear to do with Liverpool, but it’s always hard to do that without some bias towards the club. But I do try hard to be open-minded, otherwise I might fall into that trap that we’ve all fallen into at some stage in the past few years: letting our love of the club blind us to the facts.

That’s caused me problems over the past few years, mainly from people who seem to have the good of LFC low down in their priorities. They are so sure that they are right that they will go to extraordinary lengths to try and show it, to the extent where they tell as many lies as the people they’re so vocal about!

You mentioned Ian Ayre there. Where does this myth come from that he is a Hicks appointee? He was appointed before Hicks and Gillett fell out, he was a joint appointment. I’ve no idea if he’d done work for either of them before he came to LFC, or if either of them had even met him. I don’t know what criteria they had for picking the final candidate out of all those they (presumably) interviewed. But if one of them was uncomfortable with him then he would not have been appointed.

His colleague Nash is also a joint-appointee, but is also often painted as aligned to Hicks. Again, where does this come from?

Ayre is as much a Hicks appointee as Sammy Lee or Kenny Dalglish, and nobody would accuse either of them of being somehow helping Hicks with his evil plans to destroy LFC. Well, not many would, but there’s always someone who’s a bit of a crank.

Just before Christmas the then-board of LFC voted that Ayre and Nash be appointed to the board of the club. Why would Gillett allow two extra seats on the board to both be given to people who are under the control of Hicks?

It’s no secret that Hicks wanted Parry out – if Ayre was as pro-Hicks / anti-Gillett as the rumour-mongers would have us believe then I don’t doubt for one minute that Ayre would have gone at the same time as Parry, just to keep Gillett happy.

I personally think Ayre has done a far better job of bringing in money from commercial deals than anyone who preceded him – but we’ve never had anyone at that level purely working on the commercial side of the club before. Maybe someobody else could have done even better, I don’t know. If we’re talking purely about the extra money he’s brought in then I can’t really fault him. If we’re talking about the balance between getting the money in and doing what’s right for the supporters then I can think of things to be critical of – the hotel-plus-ticket-plus-programme scheme with Thomas Cook for example.

Just to set the record straight, Ian Ayre isn’t providing me with information. I’ve no idea how Ayre feels about Purslow or vice versa, and I’m sure I’d never get anything other than a professional response if I tried to find out. And – in my opinion – Ayre is unlikely to be aware of the details or even the existence of the stadium finance offer I mentioned. I personally don’t think it even got as far as being discussed by the board (although Ayre wasn’t on the board at that time anyway).

What I will say is that I get “information” from various sources, directly or indirectly, and it’s often this mix of sources that makes it stand out that something’s amiss. You compare notes and inconsistencies jump out. So you look into it all a little bit more, or to go back to those sources for clarification on a point that might have seemed minor when first mentioned – and all of a sudden there’s a massive hole in what’s being said.

Christian Purslow was – I believe – helping in the search for investment a long time before he was appointed as MD of the club. Was he working for “the club”, Hicks, Gillett or himself at that time? Gillett and Hicks certainly weren’t getting on with each other at that time, a time when their differences were being aired in public. A time when DIC/Dubai had – or thought they had – persuaded Gillett to sell his half and were working on getting Hicks to join him. A time when Hicks was looking for someone to help him buy Gillett out so he could take control.

I still have the same questions now really – who is Purslow working for? Himself? Midocean? Gillett? Hicks?, Gillett and Hicks? Or LFC? What’s his priority?

We’ll find out soon enough of course, but I can’t help but wonder how different this season might have been even if he’d just owned up from last August that the transfer budget had been slashed to nothing instead of trying to make us fall for his explanation that the missing £35m went on improved contracts.

I’d like to see him interviewed by one of those “top class” journalists you mention because so far he’s not faced anything like the kind of grilling that might tell us the truth about where the money is going.