IN the course of my life, I’ve been in the fortunate position of being able to have a number of debates with Jimmy McGovern, a close family friend and someone I respect above all others. The first took place in a Transit van on the way back to Merseyside from a...
LAST night, during Liverpool’s 1-1 draw with Sion, I responded to a tweet from Rory Smith, my colleague at The Times, in which he stated that “the utter silence of English grounds in Europe has to be a small factor in poor results.” Sat at a near mute Anfield, I saw...
EVERY community has ways of using labels to damn individuals into loathing, suspicion or worse. In inner city areas, daubing “so-and-so is a grass” on a wall has long been a particularly effective weapon; in the middle ages ordinary people held responsible for crop...
FOR more than 20 years, the scenario has been the same. As soon as Liverpool encounter problems, they look to the transfer market for a solution only to end up creating new ones. If the definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting...
ALMOST 12 months ago, José Mourinho celebrated a Chelsea goal by venturing into the stand behind his dugout and hugging his 13-year-old son. The heartwarming moment was captured for posterity but the significance of this tender moment between father and child went way...
FORMBY, an affluent suburb on the outskirts of Merseyside, has been home to enough Premier League footballers to put together a star-studded mixed age representative team. Steven Gerrard, Leighton Baines, Jordan Henderson, Alan Shearer, Neil Ruddock, Glen Johnson,...
ACCORDING to official figures, a total of 1,730 people were killed and another 185,540 were injured on Britain’s roads in the year to June 2013. Globally, there were 15 passenger plane crashes resulting in 362 fatalities. Little wonder, then, that there has been such...
Anyone who has ever tweeted the words “socialism,” “Marxism”or “communist” will know what happens next. Within minutes your tweet is seized upon by Robot J McCarthy (@RedScareBot) who hunts down and exposes Twitter’s left wing sympathisers wherever they may be. It is...
AS a boy growing up in Kirkby, John Coleman played football on one of the best and most natural academies that the English game has known. The pitches at Brookfield School produced not one but two European Cup-winning captains in Phil Thompson and Dennis Mortimer,...
AFTER 23 years of banging their heads against a succession of brick walls put in front of them by an establishment that didn’t seem to care, the Hillsborough families and their supporters have spent the past three months pinching themselves. From David Cameron...
