CL Quarter Final Draw - Liverpool A Apr 4th - H Apr 10th

[Colin Bells Boots]

I’m married to a red Scouse, all my in-laws, whom I love dearly, are red Scouse, I lived in Liverpool for 8 years in the 80’s (initially as a student), when City were playing away down South and I couldn’t go cos I didn’t have the time or money I used to go to Anfield and stand on the Kop instead, Steve Nicol, Alan Hansen and Ian Rush are all still in my “greatest players I’ve ever seen play” XI, I’ve still got plenty of mates there that I love and respect, and crucially, as you can probably see, I’m not from Manchester and therefore not infused with the mutual enmity that has existed for decades between the two great cities.

Anyway, in light of that lot then, instead of making snide digs about City fans making “embarrassing” remarks about Heysel and Hillsborough, you should ask yourself why it is, over the course of the last decade, that I have come to despise Liverpool FC with a passion that at times even outranks my hatred of the rags. The image of the Scouser as a symbol of good sportsmanship is as far removed from the truth as the Donald Trump Bumper Book of Tweets, and never more manifest than when Raheem Sterling decided he’d have a better chance of success if he joined City rather than stay at Liverpool - a decision since born out by 2 League Cups, 1 League Title and Champions League football 8 seasons in a row (as near guaranteed as you can get). All that patronising Liverpudlian bonhomie disappeared in an instant. The Scouse media mafia went into overdrive. Aldridge, Barnes, McAteer, Fowler, Murphy, etc etc, were on fucking speed dial every day for weeks on Talkshite, slagging the kid off (all about the money, poorly advised, youngsters don’t get a chance at City, should have continued his development under Rodgers, disrespectful, ungrateful, all that’s wrong with the modern game, and so on and so on) and it was the same in the print press. They turned Sterling into a figure of hate, nationally. It was his fault we lost the Euros, scapegoated on the front page of the Sun for having blingy taps - in a house he bought for his mum - he eats at Gregg’s, he’s got a Michael Jackson themed room, he bought a house near a dogging site, his photo used gratuitously in a story about footballers mixing with drug dealers, anything and everything in fact to try and make him look like a nouveau riche vulgarian with more money than sense and to pile pressure on him at grounds all over the country, to make him fail purely in order to vindicate Liverpool’s self imagined position as founder members of the footballing aristocracy. Stuck in a time warp, anyone and everyone connected with Liverpool FC simply could not cope with the notion of there being better options available to modern players than walking under the “This is Anfield” sign. The result? Outrage and spite by the bucketload.

You ever read John Aldridge’s column in the Irish Independent? You fucking should. The levels of ignorance and bitterness about City regularly displayed therein are fucking comical - even allowing for the clickbait nature of modern journalism. Oil money, sovereign wealth behind us - one of the most meaningless phrases out there - no history, dodgy Arab deals to “get around” FFP (even though we’re the most scrutinised club in Europe and every FFP amendment is made purely to try and derail us), and blah, blah, blah. He’s like a living distillation of every Liverpool fan I’ve met since the takeover, churning out the same false, poisonous, rhetoric. Self-entitled to the point of parody. Newsflash. It’s 28 years since you won the league, and your “fantastic European pedigree”, that gets referenced non-stop, amounts to this. 1 European trophy in 34 years (unless you want to chuck in winning the Thursday Night Loser’s Cup in 2010, and it’s probably best not to). It’s not 1983 anymore. It’s 2018. Yeh, we needed a huge initial splurge of cash to achieve what we have in the last 9 years, but courtesy of the Chimps League having been turned into a cartel with a self-perpetuating seedings system and huge prize money, it was the only way to break the hegemony, and in doing so we were just doing what virtually all successful dynasties in football have done since the days of Shankly, Busby, Mercer, Revie and Clough, namely wielding our financial clout. Danny Friszman did it for Arsenal, the rags broke the British transfer record something like 6 times in Taggart’s first 5 years at the club, Matthew Harding and Roman the Rouble funded a Chelsea team that had hitherto won 1 league title and 1 FA Cup in over 100 years of trying, and yet when we did it there was uproar.

When you had your Hillsborough anniversary, we rightly stood in respectful silence. We got our coaches bricked as a thank you. As it goes I think you’ll beat us in the QF’s, not cos you’re better than us, not because you have some magical European power (which the press will drone on about afterwards anyway, til everyone pukes), but purely and simply because the way Guardiola’s teams play make them tailor made for Klopp’s maniacal press. You want to beat Liverpool, you can do it easily by emulating the rags. Sit deep, deny space, counter quickly. City unfortunately won’t play that way and your chances of winning what is unquestionably your cup final will be greatly enhanced as a consequence. Oh, and bearing in mind all of the above, if you’re sitting in the City end, you might want to keep your head down, cos the days of “my enemies enemy is my friend” are long gone.

Absolutely brilliant post EB. The trouble is that despite spelling it out in a manner a chimp could understand, the brainless and bitter Dipper " fans " wont understand a single bit of it.

As thick as pig shit and steeped in fuckin' 'istree - they are the forgotten tribe of the football world.

 

[taleofbluehalves]

Like this bilious shite perhaps?

https://www.independent.ie/sport/so...matched-pep-guardiolas-man-city-36450945.html

Not even going to dignify it with a click.

 

[andyhinch]

Quality post, my best mate has worked in Liverpool for many years, I often visit with work, and have banter with both blue and red scoucers. They're nervous but confident, even if the goals tally is 8 to 4 this year. This last week, the banter has been ramped up, they are feeding off the media hype, gorging on it in fact. It will be raucous, and the banter has become quite nasty, cutting, even lower than I expect from knowledgeable football fans. They won't accept 3 of the 4 goals this season at Anfield came from 3 uncharacteristic defensive mistakes, which Pep has now addressed, and that City would probably have got a 4th with 5 more minutes play. I'm lucky enough to be going to their place, with my mate on Wednesday, and I've been many times, and only seen us win once, Anelka at the Kop end, 16 years or so ago. I've got to say, I'm not looking forward to getting in and out. We'll still get in a boozer nearby, but I don't expect it to be the normal pleasant chatty night with the locals. It's brewing up into a bit of a storm, and should City get a result there, any positive result, they'll get rather upset, so have your wits about you boys and girls.

That's one more than I've seen there, can't wait for Wednesday night and enjoying the famous scouse wit when we give them a footballing lesson.

 

[FrankSwift1]

I’m married to a red Scouse, all my in-laws, whom I love dearly, are red Scouse, I lived in Liverpool for 8 years in the 80’s (initially as a student), when City were playing away down South and I couldn’t go cos I didn’t have the time or money I used to go to Anfield and stand on the Kop instead, Steve Nicol, Alan Hansen and Ian Rush are all still in my “greatest players I’ve ever seen play” XI, I’ve still got plenty of mates there that I love and respect, and crucially, as you can probably see, I’m not from Manchester and therefore not infused with the mutual enmity that has existed for decades between the two great cities.

Anyway, in light of that lot then, instead of making snide digs about City fans making “embarrassing” remarks about Heysel and Hillsborough, you should ask yourself why it is, over the course of the last decade, that I have come to despise Liverpool FC with a passion that at times even outranks my hatred of the rags. The image of the Scouser as a symbol of good sportsmanship is as far removed from the truth as the Donald Trump Bumper Book of Tweets, and never more manifest than when Raheem Sterling decided he’d have a better chance of success if he joined City rather than stay at Liverpool - a decision since born out by 2 League Cups, 1 League Title and Champions League football 8 seasons in a row (as near guaranteed as you can get). All that patronising Liverpudlian bonhomie disappeared in an instant. The Scouse media mafia went into overdrive. Aldridge, Barnes, McAteer, Fowler, Murphy, etc etc, were on fucking speed dial every day for weeks on Talkshite, slagging the kid off (all about the money, poorly advised, youngsters don’t get a chance at City, should have continued his development under Rodgers, disrespectful, ungrateful, all that’s wrong with the modern game, and so on and so on) and it was the same in the print press. They turned Sterling into a figure of hate, nationally. It was his fault we lost the Euros, scapegoated on the front page of the Sun for having blingy taps - in a house he bought for his mum - he eats at Gregg’s, he’s got a Michael Jackson themed room, he bought a house near a dogging site, his photo used gratuitously in a story about footballers mixing with drug dealers, anything and everything in fact to try and make him look like a nouveau riche vulgarian with more money than sense and to pile pressure on him at grounds all over the country, to make him fail purely in order to vindicate Liverpool’s self imagined position as founder members of the footballing aristocracy. Stuck in a time warp, anyone and everyone connected with Liverpool FC simply could not cope with the notion of there being better options available to modern players than walking under the “This is Anfield” sign. The result? Outrage and spite by the bucketload.

You ever read John Aldridge’s column in the Irish Independent? You fucking should. The levels of ignorance and bitterness about City regularly displayed therein are fucking comical - even allowing for the clickbait nature of modern journalism. Oil money, sovereign wealth behind us - one of the most meaningless phrases out there - no history, dodgy Arab deals to “get around” FFP (even though we’re the most scrutinised club in Europe and every FFP amendment is made purely to try and derail us), and blah, blah, blah. He’s like a living distillation of every Liverpool fan I’ve met since the takeover, churning out the same false, poisonous, rhetoric. Self-entitled to the point of parody. Newsflash. It’s 28 years since you won the league, and your “fantastic European pedigree”, that gets referenced non-stop, amounts to this. 1 European trophy in 34 years (unless you want to chuck in winning the Thursday Night Loser’s Cup in 2010, and it’s probably best not to). It’s not 1983 anymore. It’s 2018. Yeh, we needed a huge initial splurge of cash to achieve what we have in the last 9 years, but courtesy of the Chimps League having been turned into a cartel with a self-perpetuating seedings system and huge prize money, it was the only way to break the hegemony, and in doing so we were just doing what virtually all successful dynasties in football have done since the days of Shankly, Busby, Mercer, Revie and Clough, namely wielding our financial clout. Danny Friszman did it for Arsenal, the rags broke the British transfer record something like 6 times in Taggart’s first 5 years at the club, Matthew Harding and Roman the Rouble funded a Chelsea team that had hitherto won 1 league title and 1 FA Cup in over 100 years of trying, and yet when we did it there was uproar.

When you had your Hillsborough anniversary, we rightly stood in respectful silence. We got our coaches bricked as a thank you. As it goes I think you’ll beat us in the QF’s, not cos you’re better than us, not because you have some magical European power (which the press will drone on about afterwards anyway, til everyone pukes), but purely and simply because the way Guardiola’s teams play make them tailor made for Klopp’s maniacal press. You want to beat Liverpool, you can do it easily by emulating the rags. Sit deep, deny space, counter quickly. City unfortunately won’t play that way and your chances of winning what is unquestionably your cup final will be greatly enhanced as a consequence. Oh, and bearing in mind all of the above, if you’re sitting in the City end, you might want to keep your head down, cos the days of “my enemies enemy is my friend” are long gone.

Fantastic post especially the part regarding Sterling .

 

[Didsbury Dave]

More great work.

I just hope you have overrated their chances of beating City. We'll find out soon enough.

It’s a great post but I believe EB’s glass half full nature is driving his paranoia about the result. Unless we have another big off day, Liverpool’s press could open up the park for us quite magnificently. Let’s see how they cope with Silva and De Bruyne in the space that opens up behind their press.

It could be a dream of a fixture if we keep everyone fit and get them back into their rhythm.

 

[RACHACE]

I’m married to a red Scouse, all my in-laws, whom I love dearly, are red Scouse, I lived in Liverpool for 8 years in the 80’s (initially as a student), when City were playing away down South and I couldn’t go cos I didn’t have the time or money I used to go to Anfield and stand on the Kop instead, Steve Nicol, Alan Hansen and Ian Rush are all still in my “greatest players I’ve ever seen play” XI, I’ve still got plenty of mates there that I love and respect, and crucially, as you can probably see, I’m not from Manchester and therefore not infused with the mutual enmity that has existed for decades between the two great cities.

Anyway, in light of that lot then, instead of making snide digs about City fans making “embarrassing” remarks about Heysel and Hillsborough, you should ask yourself why it is, over the course of the last decade, that I have come to despise Liverpool FC with a passion that at times even outranks my hatred of the rags. The image of the Scouser as a symbol of good sportsmanship is as far removed from the truth as the Donald Trump Bumper Book of Tweets, and never more manifest than when Raheem Sterling decided he’d have a better chance of success if he joined City rather than stay at Liverpool - a decision since born out by 2 League Cups, 1 League Title and Champions League football 8 seasons in a row (as near guaranteed as you can get). All that patronising Liverpudlian bonhomie disappeared in an instant. The Scouse media mafia went into overdrive. Aldridge, Barnes, McAteer, Fowler, Murphy, etc etc, were on fucking speed dial every day for weeks on Talkshite, slagging the kid off (all about the money, poorly advised, youngsters don’t get a chance at City, should have continued his development under Rodgers, disrespectful, ungrateful, all that’s wrong with the modern game, and so on and so on) and it was the same in the print press. They turned Sterling into a figure of hate, nationally. It was his fault we lost the Euros, scapegoated on the front page of the Sun for having blingy taps - in a house he bought for his mum - he eats at Gregg’s, he’s got a Michael Jackson themed room, he bought a house near a dogging site, his photo used gratuitously in a story about footballers mixing with drug dealers, anything and everything in fact to try and make him look like a nouveau riche vulgarian with more money than sense and to pile pressure on him at grounds all over the country, to make him fail purely in order to vindicate Liverpool’s self imagined position as founder members of the footballing aristocracy. Stuck in a time warp, anyone and everyone connected with Liverpool FC simply could not cope with the notion of there being better options available to modern players than walking under the “This is Anfield” sign. The result? Outrage and spite by the bucketload.

You ever read John Aldridge’s column in the Irish Independent? You fucking should. The levels of ignorance and bitterness about City regularly displayed therein are fucking comical - even allowing for the clickbait nature of modern journalism. Oil money, sovereign wealth behind us - one of the most meaningless phrases out there - no history, dodgy Arab deals to “get around” FFP (even though we’re the most scrutinised club in Europe and every FFP amendment is made purely to try and derail us), and blah, blah, blah. He’s like a living distillation of every Liverpool fan I’ve met since the takeover, churning out the same false, poisonous, rhetoric. Self-entitled to the point of parody. Newsflash. It’s 28 years since you won the league, and your “fantastic European pedigree”, that gets referenced non-stop, amounts to this. 1 European trophy in 34 years (unless you want to chuck in winning the Thursday Night Loser’s Cup in 2010, and it’s probably best not to). It’s not 1983 anymore. It’s 2018. Yeh, we needed a huge initial splurge of cash to achieve what we have in the last 9 years, but courtesy of the Chimps League having been turned into a cartel with a self-perpetuating seedings system and huge prize money, it was the only way to break the hegemony, and in doing so we were just doing what virtually all successful dynasties in football have done since the days of Shankly, Busby, Mercer, Revie and Clough, namely wielding our financial clout. Danny Friszman did it for Arsenal, the rags broke the British transfer record something like 6 times in Taggart’s first 5 years at the club, Matthew Harding and Roman the Rouble funded a Chelsea team that had hitherto won 1 league title and 1 FA Cup in over 100 years of trying, and yet when we did it there was uproar.

When you had your Hillsborough anniversary, we rightly stood in respectful silence. We got our coaches bricked as a thank you. As it goes I think you’ll beat us in the QF’s, not cos you’re better than us, not because you have some magical European power (which the press will drone on about afterwards anyway, til everyone pukes), but purely and simply because the way Guardiola’s teams play make them tailor made for Klopp’s maniacal press. You want to beat Liverpool, you can do it easily by emulating the rags. Sit deep, deny space, counter quickly. City unfortunately won’t play that way and your chances of winning what is unquestionably your cup final will be greatly enhanced as a consequence. Oh, and bearing in mind all of the above, if you’re sitting in the City end, you might want to keep your head down, cos the days of “my enemies enemy is my friend” are long gone.

Absolutely fantastic post, very well done.

 

[andyhinch]

It’s a great post but I believe EB’s glass half full nature is driving his paranoia about the result. Unless we have another big off day, Liverpool’s press could open up the park for us quite magnificently. Let’s see how they cope with Silva and De Bruyne in the space that opens up behind their press.

It could be a dream of a fixture if we keep everyone fit and get them back into their rhythm.

That's my thinking, really hope Silva and Kev start.

 

[OB1]

It’s a great post but I believe EB’s glass half full nature is driving his paranoia about the result. Unless we have another big off day, Liverpool’s press could open up the park for us quite magnificently. Let’s see how they cope with Silva and De Bruyne in the space that opens up behind their press.

It could be a dream of a fixture if we keep everyone fit and get them back into their rhythm.

Glass half full nature; bloody hell, you'd be lucky if there was a bit of foam left in the bottom.

I think confidence and concentration are key for City and judging when to play through the press and when to hit some longer balls.

We need to make sure the pitch is small when they have the ball.

 

[Exeter Blue I am here]

Bloody hell they have really rattled your cage lol!

That is a fantastic post though and echoes what many of us think. I fear it will be wasted though on the dippers. I try as hard as possible not to discuss football with the rags or dippers as they are probably the most embittered, biased and deluded bunch out of the old top four. There is a cigarette paper between who is worse but the dippers probably shade it.

Unfortunately you are probably right about the result as you say our style of play suits them perfectly. If Pep tweaked it a bit, especially away, we could have the game won after the first leg, but I doubt he will.

They haven’t really rattled my cage as such, honest! I just find them (as I do the rags) utterly tedious. To be fair, much of the animosity is stage managed by the media. Bar one or two journalists like Samuels, Winter and Holt, the profession is dead in the sense that I knew it as a young man in the 70’s and 80’s, and it exists now solely to make profit from clicks (and the associated sale of advertising space). If you take a paper like the Fail, which regrettably is the most widely read online English language publication in the world I believe, every single story therein comes with a narrative aimed at the largest demographic possible (which on the sports pages means the rags and the dippers) and a comments section. And even stories that are ostensibly about City attract more comments from armchair rags than they do Blues, and so the tone is invariably skewed to what the paper imagines they might like (Martin Samuel said as much himself on Sunday Supplement a couple of months ago).

Anyway, we knew what to expect as soon as the tie came out of the hat, and in that regard the media hasn’t disappointed. I must have seen Mo Salah’s 40 yard chip into an empty City net at least 20 times on Sky Sports News so far, yet not once have I seen Leroy curling in our 5th at the Etihad. The lie that City were “struggling” to sell out the 2nd leg, despite the game being a full 2 weeks away, was entirely predictable as well, because we saw the same MO employed last season for the FA Cup Semi against Arsenal. Never mind that any team with 50000 Norwegians and Indians in reserve to take up the slack and/or stimulate demand, is bound to sell out faster than a team relatively lacking in terms of global support and whose traditional fanbase was ranked 2nd bottom (to Wigan) in a 2013 Deloitte Touché survey about disposable income per head in the Premier League, the media simply view it as an opportunity to get the armchairs all excited about what a “small” club we are and how we’d be in the Championship if it weren’t for Sheikh Mansour (even though we finished 9th in the Prem the year before he showed up). The “small” shtick and the “20 times” shtick actually make me laugh, they’re so ridiculous. The idea of going to say The Hawthorns and taunting West Brom fans for having only won 1 league title to our 4 would never cross my mind, but it’s a raison d’être for your average dipper, even though it becomes less meaningful with every passing year as they continue their quest to become the new Preston North End by 2035.
Whomever the instigator though, the fact is the masses lap it up and it then becomes manifest in the deluded belief that they are “special”, that Klanfield has a “unique atmosphere” and that we will tremble and quake before it (as if we hadn’t just scored 8 goals in Napoli and Rotterdam).

Ultimately I want to beat them so badly it hurts. I’m far from convinced we will for the reason stated in my last post - we come gift wrapped the way we play - and I’ve no doubt that if we do lose, not one Scouser nor any of their media lickspittles will attribute it to anything other than our inability to cope mentally with a “famous European Night at Anfield”. After you with the sick bucket.......

 

[Exeter Blue I am here]

It’s a great post but I believe EB’s glass half full nature is driving his paranoia about the result. Unless we have another big off day, Liverpool’s press could open up the park for us quite magnificently. Let’s see how they cope with Silva and De Bruyne in the space that opens up behind their press.

It could be a dream of a fixture if we keep everyone fit and get them back into their rhythm.

You’re probably right mate.....and good to see you back on here by the way.....and believe it or not I can see City winning the tie. However, I do still think that our possession based game high up the pitch plays right into their hands and they were the only team I actively didn’t want in the draw.