PLAYER contracts: worth the paper they’re written on? In the modern game they are there to serve a triple purpose — remunerate the player, provide him with an exit strategy (release clause) and to help the owning/selling club ‘protect’ the...
BRENDAN Rodgers — just lay off him, yeah? It’s a timeless one, isn’t it? Being fickle about a manager. Like the slag-off recidivists that we are, we love to lump it all at his door the very moment things look a little bit dodgy. Yet, as day follows...
STEVE Gerrard Gerrard. So good we named him twice. Like all good things him and us is coming to an end but does it really have to be so soon? On the surface, at face value, perhaps, yes, the time is right. He is nearly 35 and his star is clearly no longer in the...
IT’S been four long years since Christian Purslow pumped his fist and bared his gnashers in triumph outside the High Court in London. Four long years since Liverpool Football Club passed from one set of American owners to the next. Four testing years since the club...
“(the) long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again.” John Maynard Keynes...
SILVER-TONGUED TAW podcaster and writer ROB GUTMANN talks about his day job and the thing he’s proudest of MOST of my adult working life has been spent in the realm of making places for people to eat and drink in. In short, I’ve done bars and restaurants. Mainly in...
I’VE learnt how to pronounce his name. I know how he scores his goals. I could work as the facial recognition guy for the CIA when grainy half arsed photos of him are proffered dubiously forth on social media. I know what his sister’s job is. I know how he has...
(or the further adventures of Martin Samuel, old right wingers, and a Uruguayan centre forward) Good art however “immoral” is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise....
SURVEYING the wreckage of the final week of the summer transfer window and of Liverpool FC’s failure to re-stock its attack it is hard to not to reach the harshest of conclusions. An entire season has been compromised, and a rookie manager left with a task of...
WHEN I last looked the Czechs were still suffixed and twinned with Slovakians. That was a while back though. In carefree, crazier times – When Bohemians and Moravians partied like it was 1899. In 38 when Hitler hijacked their Sudeten lands. Whence, 30 years on,...
