wacko

every time I watched him before he went to Chelsea I wasn't particularly impressed. Might have just picked a bizarre selection of games to watch like. Could be. I remember him scoring 4 in a CL game not long before he joined Chelsea, but I don't think it was against decent opposition.

Torres to Chelsea makes Carroll look a shrewd bit of business I'd back Torres to find his best form for Chelsea before I'd back Carroll to find his best form for Liverpool. Sadly, so would I. Carroll to LFC has been almost as bad as Shevchenko to Chelsea. That's still the gold standard of bad transfers, IMO. Rebrov to Spurs. Good call, but a lot cheaper that Sheva.

Torres to Chelsea makes Carroll look a shrewd bit of business I'd back Torres to find his best form for Chelsea before I'd back Carroll to find his best form for Liverpool. Sadly, so would I. Carroll to LFC has been almost as bad as Shevchenko to Chelsea. That's still the gold standard of bad transfers, IMO.

Oh aye. It's ridiculous the way some fans reflexively back Kenny and won't hear a word against him. Right now, Kenny's doing every bit as badly as Hodgson did.

No idea why you've addressed that to me. I was never on the Kenny bandwagon.

No. Further upstairs.

That's a load of balls that. Kenny was a perfectly sensible caretaker appointment at the time, and he did well enough to justify being given a crack at the job permanently. There's absolutely no pressing need to get shot of him right now (we're already in the only European competition we're going to get into, and we're not getting relegated). There's no evidence whatsoever that the owners are in the slightest bit sensitive to what the fans think. We'll maybe find that out this summer. Personally, I'd like to see him moved back upstairs in the summer and Rafa given his job back.

It's like Japanese honour, they will never say it. More likely for the Kop to perform Seppuku than accept Dalglish is the problem Hopefully the owners won't be so blinded by the past. As the Glazers' tenure at Man Utd and H&G's at Liverpool have shown, fans don't have much of a say and even less effect on what happens. Our recent form looks to me like the players have lost confidence in Kenny and are showing it on the pitch. They'll probably make a good show of the Cup, but not in the league.

'Tis the hope we cling to …

How do you figure that?

FFS.

hm, massive assumption for me - for a start he wasn't given 100m to splurge, chances are he'd have done things very differently had he been He'd almost certainly have acted differently in the transfer market, but I don't think it would have changed anything on the pitch. Sure, Hodgson's hands were tied in the transfer market (he had to sell to buy), but it's not like he inherited a crappy squad that forced him to play the way he chose to. £80m of the money Dalglish has spent came from selling players Hodgson had at his disposal, so the difference is about £40m, not £100m, and 10 points off the CL places, while by no means great, is a damn sight better 4 points off the relegation zone. No, Dalglish is not doing particularly well, especially in view of how much he's spent (if only Rafa had been given that kind of backing!), but it's still a damn sight better than Hodgson did, and he was only getting worse when he got the boot. Why compare Hodgson unfavourably with Rafa when they were never given the same resources and didn't even share the same football philosophy? That's a good one. Rafa hardly shared a philosophy with Houllier, yet took his squad and won the Champions League. The fucking Champions League. With Djimi fucking Traore. He also spent less that first summer than Hodgson did. And got Xabi Alonso and Luis Garcia, not Christian shitting Poulsen. Hodgson doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Benitez. I cannot possibly conceive how anyone could not compare Hodgson's face-rubbing dive for the relegation zone unfavorably with winning the fucking Champions League. Maybe he would. So what? His performance was utterly unacceptable given the quality of the squad he had. His squad or not. He's supposed to be a professional football manager and be able to deal with such things. Instead, he was totally out of his depth. And? That has nothing whatsoever to do with how unbelievably bad Hodgson was.

hm, massive assumption for me - for a start he wasn't given 100m to splurge, chances are he'd have done things very differently had he been He'd almost certainly have acted differently in the transfer market, but I don't think it would have changed anything on the pitch. Sure, Hodgson's hands were tied in the transfer market (he had to sell to buy), but it's not like he inherited a crappy squad that forced him to play the way he chose to. £80m of the money Dalglish has spent came from selling players Hodgson had at his disposal, so the difference is about £40m, not £100m, and 10 points off the CL places, while by no means great, is a damn sight better 4 points off the relegation zone. No, Dalglish is not doing particularly well, especially in view of how much he's spent (if only Rafa had been given that kind of backing!), but it's still a damn sight better than Hodgson did, and he was only getting worse when he got the boot.

It wasn't his explicit aim, but it was clearly where he was going. A side that has European aspirations simply has to play possession football (it took Ferguson a very long time to realise that), whereas Hodgson was taking us away from that. He took a tactically sophisticated and fairly skillful side and set about turning it into a bunch of typically English clodhoppers. Intentional or not, the obvious place for such a side is not in the CL spots, and even if they did manage it, they'd never get anywhere. Hodgson is all about (and very good at) building a side that's hard to beat. This is a very different thing to building a side to win. It's negative, destructive. To win, a side has to be positive, constructive. We had enough of negative football under Houllier. It just doesn't work for clubs that aspire to the top because your opponents intend to play the same, negative football against you. To be a top side, you have to be able to go out there to win games, not just to not lose them. If you settle for the latter, mediocrity shall be your fate. That wasn't acceptable to us. Wacko I don't quite agree wit the distinction betwee KD and Hodgson. To me KD is pretty defensive too as reflected in his purchase of players like Carroll, Henderson and to a lesser extent Adams who would fit more into the mould of clodhoppers thank skilfull. Even Downing is more of an English type winger who primarily tries to get crosses in as opposed to more skilful wingers like Nani, Adam Johnson and Walcott. I do agree with ur view though that setting up not to lose only gets you mediocrity and to qualify for CL and challenge at the top end you need to be set up to win. This has been mine (and a few others) observation/criticism of Pardew as well. He is clearly a manager who sets up his team not to lose, hence playing a defender on the wing and limiting the movement of Cabaye from venturing too much forward either to have a pop or even arrive late in the box. Aside from the second half against Sunderland, we've not played to win for quite some time and unless this changes, results will show as we drop off from the business end of the table. Oh aye, Kenny is pretty defensive, but nowhere near as much as Hodgson was. By all appearances, he really was planning to remodel Liverpool after his typical bottom-half scrapper sides. Yup. They (we?) just can't stop poking the wound

Very much this. Wacko could just as well have been describing KKK in his last post. Liverpool today is very much a hard working team that's good at forcing errors and then exploit them. Except for the racist cunt, there's not a lot of flair in their team. Not much I can add to that. I don't see how people were pissed at Hodgson yet class KKK as very much taking them in a completely different direction. Just can't see it. We've hardly gone from strength to strength under Kenny, but let's be fair: he did win the Carling Cup as opposed to crashing out at the first hurdle to Northampton fucking Town. Obviously, the tens of millions Kenny has spent must have helped, despite how he's wasted a lot of that, but all the comparisons of Kenny's and Roy's records are bunk. Of the 13 games Hodgson won at Liverpool, four of them were against Mickey Mouse sides in Europa League, FFS. Here's a very good analysis. Long story short, Kenny isn't setting any records (he's doing about as well as Houllier), but Hodgson was utter shit. To be clear, I don't think Kenny is doing a particularly good job, but he certainly isn't doing a really shitty one like Hodgson.

It wasn't his explicit aim, but it was clearly where he was going. A side that has European aspirations simply has to play possession football (it took Ferguson a very long time to realise that), whereas Hodgson was taking us away from that. He took a tactically sophisticated and fairly skillful side and set about turning it into a bunch of typically English clodhoppers. Intentional or not, the obvious place for such a side is not in the CL spots, and even if they did manage it, they'd never get anywhere. Hodgson is all about (and very good at) building a side that's hard to beat. This is a very different thing to building a side to win. It's negative, destructive. To win, a side has to be positive, constructive. We had enough of negative football under Houllier. It just doesn't work for clubs that aspire to the top because your opponents intend to play the same, negative football against you. To be a top side, you have to be able to go out there to win games, not just to not lose them. If you settle for the latter, mediocrity shall be your fate. That wasn't acceptable to us.

Like Hodgson? Right. Because Hodgson wasn't obviously driving the side towards his mid-table comfort zone from the second he arrived. Working or not, at least Kenny's aim is to improve the side, not to entrench it where it stands in the hope of avoiding further decline, like Hodgson did.

You say that, but I'm just waiting for one of the RAWK mods to see what I've been writing on here and ban me.

Agreed. It was never like that before (Benitez haters were tolerated just fine, and while no Kenny, he is still revered thanks to Istanbul). TBH, I find it very surprising. Especially Pheeny. I interact quite a lot with him in the cycling thread, and I would never have expected him to behave like this, locking threads just for criticising Kenny regardless of whether the criticism was well-founded and -reasoned or not. I mean, the RAWK mods have always been significantly stricter than on here, but that's understandable given RAWK's much larger number of posters (and therefore idiots). But they've been swept up in this whole them-against-us siege mentality that's massively intensified since this Suarez thing blew up (it has been there for a long time), and RAWK's football forum really has turned into something resembling a police state. In a way, it's not entirely surprising because Scousers have a very pronounced them-vs-us mentality, but I'd always pegged the RAWK mods as significantly more objective than your average person. Personally, I find the North Korean attitude to criticism of Kenny embarrassing. And of course, the same is true of the entire club's behaviour surrounding the Suarez-Evra affair. I've always found the loyalty of Liverpool fans enormously endearing—their tendency to give a manager time, to let him build his own side before passing judgement and to assess him on his own terms—in stark contrast to, say, Real Madrid or Schalke fans. There is little reflexive outrage that we didn't get into the CL, or that we lost this or that game. But the flip side of that is this embarrassingly dogmatic dedication to King Kenny, regardless of what the current reality is. And I'm inclined to say that it most affects the most hardcore fans, the ones who have best embodied this admirable mantra of patience and one-step-at-a-time progression. It's sad. By comparison, I'm a very casual fan, but I've always been proud to be a part of what i considered to be a largely knowledgable, reasonable and intelligent fanbase. At the moment, I'm far more embarrassed than proud. And that has nothing to do with the way the team is playing.

Really? He was a sound poster. Sadly, that's the current state of affairs on RAWK. It's become a police state since Kenny became manager.

Just a matter of time before someone on Wearside will name their poor kid Ftm. sportsdirect.com@Colin Smith.

When I read about people like this, I think the Germans might actually be onto something by insisting you prove that the name you give your kid is a real name. But when I start thinking about that, I realise that people who want to give their kid a name like that should have the child confiscated on the spot. Probably for the best in the long run.

It would if they'd just shut up about it.

Of course that's what it sounds like: that's what the story says. Is there any evidence at all that this is actually what happened?

Well yeah. It means the side isn't shit in an absolute sense, which is certainly something. Yet, you're clearly doing something wrong if you can regularly beat/draw with the top sides in the division but struggle so badly in the supposedly easy games. Evra *is* a cunt (it was he who kicked off the French revolt at the last World Cup). Not that this somehow means the FA ruling was wrong. I get and admire the whole unconditional support of your club thing, but extending that to the people who own/run/play for the club is neither admirable nor sensible.