Liverpool: the idiocy files
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Winner of the “idiot of 2007” award: Peter Crouch If you want to know about Crouch – read is autobiography. In it he launches into a wholesale attack on the town of Chelmsford – page after page saying how the population are sub-human, demented idiots who go around pouring oil down the drains, and beating each other up. It is one of the wildest craziest pieces of writing in football. No that is wrong. It is not one of them – it is by far the worst example of writing in any football book. If he had written in the same way about people from (say) Pakistan, or people of a particular ethnic group, he would have been condemned as racist. But he chose a small English town. How weird is that? But that’s not all you need to know about the Crouch person. He has been sent off for every one of the four teams he has played for – quite a record (even Robbie Savage hasn’t managed that). The latest was the sending off against Chelsea in the little cup semi-final in December 2007. The offence was fairly awful – a dreadful lunge in which he can be seen with both feet off the ground flying through the air towards Chelsea’s John Obi Mikel. Worse, he argued with the ref for a while before going off, screaming “Fuck off” at the crowd who were booing him as he left. (It is generally accepted that players should never do anything to inflame a crowd – and some players have been given extra time out of the game for such events, although the FA have a long history of extreme leniency when dealing with Liverpool. It was undoubtedly with this feeling that Liverpool players can get away with anything in his mind that Crouch then decided to take matters much further. He went public with an attack on all non-English players (including presumably those who play for Liverpool) accusing them of repeatedly diving and making up injuries. This is of course an attack on the integrity of other footballers – something the FA is supposed to protect and which can lead to a charge of “bringing the game into disrepute”. What he said swas, “If you go in on Lampard or Terry, would they roll around like Mikel did?… Foreign players have brought a lot to our game but that’s something you don’t want to see.” Because of the curious nature of the discrimination and racism laws it is not illegal to single out a group by their country of origin. But it is something more commonly associated with the politics of the BNP – a party that has at time been associated by repute with… Chelsea. Runner up nutter at Liverpool This is the one and only Jermaine Pennant. He is (according to girlfriend Amii Grove) addicted to X Box and plays it all day and night. She says she tried to stop him playing by introducing him to other games like Scrabble, but then he became hooked on that, “spending ages trying to save up the lettersw for the word ‘zoo’ on the assumption it was a game winner.” (Our thanks to the Sun for that one). Rafa Benitez: maniac at the helm If you are looking for a man out of touch with his own reality, and that of the every day world, look no further than Rafa Benitez. After losing the Euro Cup final in 2006 Arsene Wenger said, “I believe in my players – we have a young team and they are growing together.” After losing the Euro Cup final in 2007 Benitez said “We need to move quicker [on transfers] than Man U and Chelsea, and this is a crucial time… I have targets in mind and if we cannot make a major signing in the next week I will disappointed. If we miss out now, it might be a struggle to make the top four again next season.” Of course in one sense he was utterly right – in a season that saw his Weetabix team lose to Arsenal’s reserve squad 3-6 at Anfield, and to the Arsenal first time 1-3, plus have a 3-0 drubbing at the Emirates, clearly anyone would realise that they had one hell of a problem. But the problem is not that the owners won’t give him loads of dosh – or at least it should not be. Because this is the man who spent £23 million on Sissoko, Bellamy, Crouch and Gonzalez in the two years since the Istanbul cup final, and yet did not put any of them in the starting 11 for the 2007 final. Let’s get that quite clear. He spent on that bunch of players alone more than Arsenal did on all players in 2 years, and yet was so disatisfied with the results of his own judgement he didn’t use any of them to start the next Euro final. In total this madman has spent £100m in four years and still can’t muster a team to defeat Arsenal’s very young, injury ravaged team over three games. Yes they did get a 4-1 win against Arsenal eventually, with the season’s main issue (who gets into the Champions League) all done and dusted, and they deserve credit for that. But nothing takes away the overwhelming failure of his purchases thus far. Just look at the expenditure for 2006/7
So there we have it – it is not just that he spent all that money year after year after year – but rather that he is saying in June 2007, “if you don’t give me money you can’t have a team that will compete.” Liverpool Weetabix fans welcome their new owners It is a measure of the state of Liverpool FC and the mindset of its fans that Hicks and Gillett have been welcomed by supporters of Liverpool. The pair paid £178m for the club, borrowed from the Royal Bank of Scotland, with interest payments on the loan amounting to over £21m a year. The approach was the same as that used at Manchester. The profit pays for the loan. The club must make a profit – if it doesn’t it is scuppered, because there is not enough money to pay for the purchase. Hicks boasts of the way he has conned Liverpool. “When I was in the leverage buy-out business we bought Weetabix and we leveraged it up to make our return,” he told the Guardian in May 2007. ” You could say that anyone who was eating Weetabix was paying for our purchase of Weetabix. It was just business. It is the same for Liverpool; revenues come in from whatever source and go out to whatever source and, if there is money left over, it is profit,” he said. Hicks has enjoyed mixed fortunes with his American sports teams, with the Dallas Stars winning ice hockey’s ultimate prize, the Stanley Cup. The Texas Rangers, on the other hand, have not finished higher than third in their four-team division since 2000 and are currently (spring 2007) at the base of the American League West. “I feel kind of guilty. It’s like buying a baseball team a month before they go to the world series. I had nothing to do with it but I’m going to enjoy it,” he said. Past stories Although our aim was to record idiocy that occurred in the news each day, watching Liverpool v Arsenal in the FA Cup on 6 January 2006 reminded several of us of one of the all-time moment’s of stupidness, from the Arsenal Liverpool cup game three years before. Two events stood out from this game. The first we all recalled, but none of us could put the players name the event. In brief, an Arsenal player was down injured and a Liverpool player, instead of kicking the ball straight out, kicked the ball at the Arsenal player in the hope that it would bounce off him and into touch, thus giving Liverpool the throw in. This was crazy since under convention Arsenal would have taken the throw in (had Liverpool put the ball out in the normal way) and returned the ball to Liverpool. The Liverpool player was sent off. But if that wasn’t enough, idiocy reached even higher proportions when a certain Carragher found a pound coin lying by the side of the pitch and threw it at someone in the crowd. He too was sent off. This is the only occasion we have ever found of a player of any club throwing a coin at the crowd. Now we have to be fair and accept that it is possible (although certainly not proven) that the coin was thrown at the players by someone in the crowd. If so that is utterly deplorable and we can only hope that one way or another the person who did this has been banned from being at Arsenal games. But no matter what the situation, for Carragher to throw a coin into the crowd was insane. He was of course banned for 3 games, but sadly no further action was taken. What should have happened was that the player should have suffered the same fate as any other person who throws a coin at Arsenal – he should have suffered a banning order for life. He didn’t and he plays on in Liverpool Arsenal games. Such leniency by the Arsenal didn’t do him much good on 6 January 2007 however. Maybe he was distracted by saying to himself, over and over, “I must now throw things into the crowd.” But of course, Liverpool has a history of being very silly. During the dictatorship of M Houllier the manager tried to sign French under-21 striker Didier Baptiste for £3.5m. It wasn’t the fact Gerard Houllier was signing a Frenchman of high potential that provoked so much controversy – nor that he had beaten the notable M Wenger to the signature. It was the fact that Baptiste didn’t actually exist. He was an entirely fictious footballer who plays for Hardchester United, the football team in the TV soap “Dream Team”. In 1915, Manchester United beat Liverpool 2-0 in a First Division fixture that was later proved to be fixed. After an FA inquiry into the match, eight players were banned for life – four from Liverpool, three from Manchester United and one from Chester. The ringleader was thought to be a player called Sheldon who was in the Liverpool team and had previously played for United. One of the United players was subsequently killed during the war, while six of the others involved admitted their guilt and were later pardoned and allowed to play again. Yet another Liverpool case of committing the crime and then getting off later. In February 2007, three days before a vital Champions League game against Barca Liverpool took their players on a break to Portugal for a break (they having no FA Cup match the weekend of 17/18 February having been slaughtered in the FA Cup at home 3-1 by Arsenal reserves, in January.) Despite having a previous history of violence and drunkenness the manager, a Mr Benitez, decided to leave the players alone with their alcohol in Vale do Lobo while he wandered off to another resort (Vilamoura) for no apparent reason (other than, presumably to get away from the boorish behaviour of his players. This is how the Guardian described what followed: “the dispute… started with a karaoke competition in the early hours of Friday morning when Bellamy took offence at the Norwegian left back’s refusal to sign. Increasingly irritated by the Welsh-man’s jibes, Riise reportedly became incandescent and surrounded by fellow players the pair squared up to each other, trading expletives. Although things calmed down as the group dispersed and headed for their rooms Bellamy apparently felt he had lost face in front of his team-maters and, having armed himself with a golf club, tracked down Riise before allegedly swinging it at his legs.” Earlier in the evening police had been called to calm down Pennant Fowler and Dudek. The Guardian report continues by saying that a policeman was then head butted. Let’s just pause a minute here. This squad includes several players known to have a drink related violent past. But the manager left them alone with drink. Let’s also look at what set this all off – karaoke. Now to carry on, because this gets even better. In reporting the story the Liverpool Echo insisted that Bellamy has been “exploited”. I’ll print that again because you probably did not believe this. In reporting the story the Liverpool Echo insisted that Bellamy has been “exploited”. According to the Echo’s Anfield sources, Bellamy was considered “an easy target to deflect blame from a large number of players involved in breaches of discipline” – including usual suspects like Robbie Fowler and Jermaine Pennant, as well as Jerzy Dudek. Meanwhile, as Liverpool’s PR machine cranked out a picture of Bellamy and Riise hugging and instead of getting rid of the players or at least enquiring into how a manager who supposedly knows a thing of two left this much of n’ere do wells alone with a load of alcohol – the club began its investigation on how the Val Del Lobo incident was leaked amid, to quote the Echo, “concern Bellamy may be the victim of deliberate attempts to further damage his name”. For a man who has received a caution for hitting a woman in a nightclub, thrown chairs at an assistant manager and has been charged on other occasions, that seems odd. What we have is an enquiry into how the story was leaked and no enquiry into how the manager could make such an atrocious error, nor indeed into the fight itself. Of course you wouldn’t believe it, but then you realise this is Liverpool, so then you do. |
