Mainestander
Well-Known Member
By Dion Fanning
Sunday September 20 2009
The bullish noises coming from Anfield last week that Liverpool is now on course to be the richest, most popular club in the world were tempered a little bit by their timing.
Having worked so hard to seal one of the most lucrative sponsorship deals around, Liverpool's owners would surely have been eager to have announced it a few weeks ago when Rafael Benitez might have been able to find some way to spend some money.
Instead, to the dismay of everyone at the club, Benitez was left with £1.5m to spend at the end of the summer when he had again shown his mastery of the transfer market by selling Xabi Alonso for £30m. Then, amazingly, a few weeks later, Liverpool announce they will be bringing in £80m over the next four years in a deal with Standard Chartered, which, appropriately given the club's financial situation, is a bank.
Of course, it came too late for Benitez to strengthen his squad but there is always January, by which time Liverpool may need to strengthen given their unpromising start to the season. Benitez will, of course, be blamed for this, even by those who should know better like Ronnie Whelan, who claimed on RTE last week that the side facing Debrecen had cost £250m and wondered why the manager had replaced Alonso with Alberto Aquilani who, as far as anyone can tell, has always been injured. The man he should ask is Tom Hicks.
With the transfer window closed, Hicks showed up last week to purr optimistically in his soothing Texan drawl.
If the Liverpool credo used to be that the club "exists to be a source of pride to its supporters -- It has no other purpose," Hicks has modernised that too.
"Our goal is to have less debt than any of the top clubs and that's a commitment we have made and will continue to make," Hicks said last week, an interesting statement considering the club was saddled with their current massive debt when he and George Gillett took over.
But Tom reappeared last week to make some new promises. With some reports questioning if Liverpool's new stadium would be built by 2018, Hicks made the right noises but pointed out that the "global financial markets" were not conducive to building anything right now.
When Tom Hicks took over Liverpool, the global financial markets were in love with guys like Tom Hicks and the new owners promised that the stadium would begin almost immediately, before deciding that they needed some new and impressive plans before anything could happen.
As they were working on those plans, the global financial markets that had been so kind to Tom Hicks imploded, thanks to men like Tom Hicks.
Tom now says he "doesn't know about the dates", a departure from a previous statement when he was able to give the date when the stadium would be built but not when it would be started.
Most of us would have assumed things worked the other way where a start date is set with a rough idea following of when the thing could be finished.
But then again most of us had no idea of the world of Tom Hicks until he came along, swiftly followed by the sub-prime credit crunch and the collapse of everything that was built on the highly leveraged philosophy. We would have assumed that to buy a club like Liverpool, you had to have a lot of money and we would have been wrong about that too. So we should say nothing.
We thought clubs were bought by people like the men who bought Manchester City, but Tom now says their plans to buy every good player they can is "unsustainable". When it comes to things being unsustainable, we should probably listen to Tom Hicks.
City seem sustainable enough at the moment, despite being robbed of every one of their thousands of forwards for today's Manchester derby.
Alex Ferguson's comments that if Emmanuel Adebayor had been one of his players he would have "taken him to a dark room" after last week's display against Arsenal perfectly captures the unusual attraction of this Manchester City team.
There is a sense that Manchester City will be engaging in more acts of provocation over the season. They have assembled a cast that even Sam Peckinpah might have viewed as strangely unsympathetic.
Adebayor was rightly suspended for his stamp on Robin van Persie but has outraged public opinion with his goal celebration which has been viewed as provocation. It seems that few were prepared to view it as the actions of a madman and move on.
Some of the pictures from last Saturday's game showed Arsenal fans laughing as Adebayor ran towards them, but action must be taken because others felt it was incitement to riot. Those who found it provocation to enjoy themselves were ignored.
In fact, the City-Arsenal game was one of those great incendiary occasions which make the Premier League riveting.
Much of this was down to City and their desperadoes. Mark Hughes has defied convention by assembling this collection. They are a team that will always live in interesting times. Today they will be relying on the great Craig Bellamy, who appears to be an outlaw but has also set up a football foundation in Sierra Leone. At lunchtime today, Bellers will be giving something different back.
They will be without Adebayor but they will need more deprivation before City are given sympathy. They have talent and they have men who look like they are bad to the bon
Nobody, not even Alex Ferguson, ever doubted that you couldn't win anything with kids. Today we will get a better idea if City can win anything with c***s.
dionfanning@gmail.com
- Dion Fanning
How is this even allowed to go to press?????
Sunday September 20 2009
The bullish noises coming from Anfield last week that Liverpool is now on course to be the richest, most popular club in the world were tempered a little bit by their timing.
Having worked so hard to seal one of the most lucrative sponsorship deals around, Liverpool's owners would surely have been eager to have announced it a few weeks ago when Rafael Benitez might have been able to find some way to spend some money.
Instead, to the dismay of everyone at the club, Benitez was left with £1.5m to spend at the end of the summer when he had again shown his mastery of the transfer market by selling Xabi Alonso for £30m. Then, amazingly, a few weeks later, Liverpool announce they will be bringing in £80m over the next four years in a deal with Standard Chartered, which, appropriately given the club's financial situation, is a bank.
Of course, it came too late for Benitez to strengthen his squad but there is always January, by which time Liverpool may need to strengthen given their unpromising start to the season. Benitez will, of course, be blamed for this, even by those who should know better like Ronnie Whelan, who claimed on RTE last week that the side facing Debrecen had cost £250m and wondered why the manager had replaced Alonso with Alberto Aquilani who, as far as anyone can tell, has always been injured. The man he should ask is Tom Hicks.
With the transfer window closed, Hicks showed up last week to purr optimistically in his soothing Texan drawl.
If the Liverpool credo used to be that the club "exists to be a source of pride to its supporters -- It has no other purpose," Hicks has modernised that too.
"Our goal is to have less debt than any of the top clubs and that's a commitment we have made and will continue to make," Hicks said last week, an interesting statement considering the club was saddled with their current massive debt when he and George Gillett took over.
But Tom reappeared last week to make some new promises. With some reports questioning if Liverpool's new stadium would be built by 2018, Hicks made the right noises but pointed out that the "global financial markets" were not conducive to building anything right now.
When Tom Hicks took over Liverpool, the global financial markets were in love with guys like Tom Hicks and the new owners promised that the stadium would begin almost immediately, before deciding that they needed some new and impressive plans before anything could happen.
As they were working on those plans, the global financial markets that had been so kind to Tom Hicks imploded, thanks to men like Tom Hicks.
Tom now says he "doesn't know about the dates", a departure from a previous statement when he was able to give the date when the stadium would be built but not when it would be started.
Most of us would have assumed things worked the other way where a start date is set with a rough idea following of when the thing could be finished.
But then again most of us had no idea of the world of Tom Hicks until he came along, swiftly followed by the sub-prime credit crunch and the collapse of everything that was built on the highly leveraged philosophy. We would have assumed that to buy a club like Liverpool, you had to have a lot of money and we would have been wrong about that too. So we should say nothing.
We thought clubs were bought by people like the men who bought Manchester City, but Tom now says their plans to buy every good player they can is "unsustainable". When it comes to things being unsustainable, we should probably listen to Tom Hicks.
City seem sustainable enough at the moment, despite being robbed of every one of their thousands of forwards for today's Manchester derby.
Alex Ferguson's comments that if Emmanuel Adebayor had been one of his players he would have "taken him to a dark room" after last week's display against Arsenal perfectly captures the unusual attraction of this Manchester City team.
There is a sense that Manchester City will be engaging in more acts of provocation over the season. They have assembled a cast that even Sam Peckinpah might have viewed as strangely unsympathetic.
Adebayor was rightly suspended for his stamp on Robin van Persie but has outraged public opinion with his goal celebration which has been viewed as provocation. It seems that few were prepared to view it as the actions of a madman and move on.
Some of the pictures from last Saturday's game showed Arsenal fans laughing as Adebayor ran towards them, but action must be taken because others felt it was incitement to riot. Those who found it provocation to enjoy themselves were ignored.
In fact, the City-Arsenal game was one of those great incendiary occasions which make the Premier League riveting.
Much of this was down to City and their desperadoes. Mark Hughes has defied convention by assembling this collection. They are a team that will always live in interesting times. Today they will be relying on the great Craig Bellamy, who appears to be an outlaw but has also set up a football foundation in Sierra Leone. At lunchtime today, Bellers will be giving something different back.
They will be without Adebayor but they will need more deprivation before City are given sympathy. They have talent and they have men who look like they are bad to the bon
Nobody, not even Alex Ferguson, ever doubted that you couldn't win anything with kids. Today we will get a better idea if City can win anything with c***s.
dionfanning@gmail.com
- Dion Fanning
How is this even allowed to go to press?????