IT feels strange to view a derby as a sideshow. At least it’s tempting to fall into this trap. Big Sam will say to his blue boys: “Their heads are elsewhere. Their legs are heavy, their hearts are lost in Europe”. Jürgen Klopp, though, will be taking faces...
JÜRGEN Klopp once described his grand strategy as being a process of “dragging teams down to our level, and then beating them”. He was modestly diminishing a much more sophisticated process. This is not what his Borussia Dortmund did and not what his...
IT’S about us. It should always be about us. But while he’s kicking, a bit of it will always be about him. It’s small minded in extremis to give a shit about Roy Hodgson now. He is yesterday’s man, if he ever was today’s. He is not our business. Beating Manchester...
I WASN’T unduly disheartened by that defeat at Old Trafford last week. In a slightly perverse way I thought it was a marker of the progress the team is making this campaign. We’d lost just three times in the league previously, and two of those setbacks had felt...
MANCHESTER is our Shelbyville. Our parallel universe. To the untrained eye it all looks and feels quite similar. The streets, the bricks, the rain, the lads, the wind, the water, the girls, the food. The football. The devil, though, has always been in the differences....
IS it just me or do you feel like we might just have slightly cheated ourselves out of a proper Champions League night out? Doing Porto 5-0 in the first leg was the best and all that but we could have kept it to two or three. We’d still have been supremely confident...
“Rafa, Rafa… “Rafa, Rafa… “Rafa Benitez… “Xabi Alonso, Garcia and Nunez.” Fucking Antonio Nunez. Remember him? The makeweight in the deal that took Michael Owen to Madrid. He scored a goal for Liverpool Football Club and...
LIVERPOOL have been on their holidays. Jürgen Klopp’s recipe for reducing fatigue and stress on over-worked limbs is to win first legs of Champions League ties 5-0. It’s a natty trick. Liverpool Football Club may have a home fixture against Porto to come on March 6,...
IT’S Feb and it’s fab. The Reds are back in the knockout stage of the European Cup for the first time since 2009. Those were heady days. I was nine years younger for start. My youngest, Rafael, wasn’t even alive. Well, he was about to be alive. I remember the draw...
I’M brimming with something. Not quite confidence. I think it might just be plain old excitement. The Reds aren’t quite on the boil but they continue to simmer nicely. There’s 12 games left and we’ve got ourselves involved in a good, ol’ fashioned run in. I love...
