Magic8Ball

thanks - we need to get Torres 4 Goals then

yes, yes,yes ! ooooh good for you too ?

So where is he ? 4 goals with 2 games to go for the record ?

Liverpool's £20m buying cap revealed in club report Benitez must work with limited transfer and wages budget for next five years By Ian Herbert, Deputy Football Correspondent Thursday, 24 September 2009 Rafael Benitez will have to sell players if he is ever to be able to afford another Fernando Torres, who cost Liverpool £26.5m Rafael Benitez's struggle to keep pace with the Premier League elite is revealed in documents which suggest Liverpool's net summer spending will be locked at £20m until 2014 – a figure which will also include wage increases accruing from contract renewals. The figures, which suggest the manager must continue to sell before he can buy, are contained in a prospectus published in March by investment banks Rothschild and Merrill Lynch to attract potential investors in the club. The prospectus, which provides a sense of how desperately Liverpool's owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett need new finance, reveal the Americans were considering increasing the average ticket price by eight per cent to help ease the club's debt problems. They were also seeking to raise £100m from investors and loans as pressure built to refinance a debt of £290m. Gillett and Hicks paid £50m four months later, in July, to get a year's extension to the debt facility they have used to purchase and run the club since their takeover in February 2007. This season they have secured a new £20m-a-year sponsorship deal with Standard Chartered Bank, a major improvement on the previous £14.6m Carlsberg deal and hope to retain a role for Carlsberg, commercial director Ian Ayre revealed yesterday. Yet the underlying lack of finance for Benitez remains a problem. It might not be as dire a position for the club as suggested by the banner unveiled by Liverpool fans before the Carling Cup tie with Leeds at Elland Road on Tuesday – "We are the new Leeds," it read – but Benitez is clearly limited in his options in the transfer market. The section of the Rothschild/Merrill Lynch document relating to "player transfer payments" states: "Management believes that the normalised long-run level of new net player capital expenditure is £20m." The accompanying data suggests "long run" means the next five years. This figure "will grow together with increases in media broadcasting revenues," the bankers promise. Though revenues from British broadcasters are expected to drop, overseas rights should grow before 2014. This summer the £30m sale of Xabi Alonso to Real Madrid helped offset the outlay on Glen Johnson and Alberto Aquilani. The need to generate cash to finance future purchases next summer may make it more difficult to resist selling Javier Mascherano. Meanwhile, the Liverpool managing director, Christian Purslow, indicated, in a recent meeting with the Spirit of Shankly supporters' organisation, the minutes of which are published on its website, that money spent on improved contracts for players is considered part of the transfer budget. Hicks and Gillett eventually decided against an increase in ticket price, which would have come as the majority of the 20 Premier League clubs decided to freeze or reduce prices of some tickets for this season. But other details of Hicks and Gillett's future commercial strategy for Liverpool, outlined in the document obtained by Bloomberg News, include plans to convert 1,000 regular seats at Anfield into corporate seats and the creation of Liverpool-branded academies. New secondary sponsors will be targeted and catering facilities improved to help realise ambitions to increase commercial revenue from £59m to £111.4m in the next five years – a lofty target. The Football Association has decided it will not charge Mascherano with violent conduct over the incident in which he appeared to swing a forearm at Leeds' Jermaine Beckford during Liverpool's 1-0 victory at Elland Road. 20 The amount in millions Liverpool will get each year from new sponsors Standard Chartered. http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/footbal...rt-1792189.html

Psychologists reveal why England miss penalties England football players may miss penalties because they are suffering from “self regulatory breakdown”, claim scientists. By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent Published: 2:51PM BST 23 Sep 2009 Psychologists claim that the condition could be why footballers “choke” and rush their penalties. The researchers came up with the findings after analysing penalty shoot-outs from previous World Cups, European Championships and the UEFA Champions League. They found those players who respond fastest to the referee’s whistle are much more likely to miss than players who pause briefly before starting their run up. They say the findings, published in the journal Psychology of Sport and Exercise, confirm that many gifted footballers simply choke under the pressure of a spot kick. To work out why some players miss, researchers from the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences studied the time it took them to complete a kick. They found those who started their run up less than two milliseconds after the referees’s whistle scored only around 57 per cent of the time. A millisecond is one thousandth of a second. But those who took more than a second to respond hit the back of the net more than 80 per cent of the time. Psychologists believe the unsuccessful players are suffereing from a phenomenon known as "self-regulatory breakdown". It is a natural form of human behaviour, where someone feels such intense distress from a situation that they do whatever they possibly can to end it – even if it is harmful to their performance. Researchers also found players who take longer to place the ball have a higher success rate, probably because they are more relaxed and in control. But they are more likely to miss if it is the referee that delays the penalty, rather than themselves. England’s penalty nightmare began at the 1990 World Cup in Italy, when they crashed out to West Germany in the semi-final after penalty misses by left back Stuart Pearce and winger Chris Waddle. The curse struck again at the euro 96 championships, when defender Gareth Southgate missed a spot kick that again signalled defeat to the Germans, and more recently when blunders against Portugal by Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard and Jamie Carragher cost England a place in the 2006 World Cup semi-finals. England boss Fabio Capello insists his team is already practising penalties ahead of next year’s World Cup in South Africa. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6223083...-penalties.html

who plays on the left then ?

To be fair, while Silva has talent I've not seen enough product for he price asked

Nice to know we're still scouting for "united"

Football players who rush penalty kicks are less likely to score Taking a penalty in an international football competition must be one of the most tense moments an athlete can face. Even though the odds are stacked against the goal-keeper, the world's best attacking stars often under-perform. In psychological jargon - they choke. According to a new analysis of all the penalty shoot-outs held in previous World Cups, European Championships and the UEFA Champions League, issues of timing appear to be crucial to the success or not of a penalty kick. Sports psychologist Geir Jordet and his colleagues have found that, on average, the less time a player takes to respond to the referee's whistle before running towards the ball to take the penalty, the more likely they are to fail to score. The researchers say the finding is consistent with the idea that choking is a form of "self-regulatory breakdown". In other words, an intense threat to our reputation can cause so much distress that we do whatever we can to end the situation as quickly as possible, even if taking this action is harmful to our performance. A snap-shot of the results reveals that players who took less than 200ms to respond to the ref's whistle scored, on average, just under 57 per cent of the time. By contrast, players who took more than a second to respond, tended to hit the back of the net just over 80 per cent of the time, on average. It was a similar story for placement of the ball on the penalty spot, with the players who spent longer placing the ball also tending to be more likely to score, although this trend didn't reach statistical significance. The researchers also looked at aspects of timing imposed by the referee. In this case, the pattern of results went in the other direction. For example, players were less likely to score if the penalty was delayed by the referee instructing them to reposition the ball. So whereas a player rushing is detrimental to performance, a referee slowing down the situation also seems to be harmful. This certainly chimes with Steven Gerrard's account in his autobiography of his penalty miss at the 2006 World Cup: "I was ready. Elizondo [the referee] wasn't. Blow the whistle! F***ing get a move on, ref! ... Those extra couple of seconds ... definitely put me off". The researchers said their findings should be treated with caution given that some of the sample sizes for some of the conditions were small, and given that this was a retrospective analysis and interpretation of past events, rather than a controlled experiment. However, they concluded that: "short self-imposed times and long externally imposed waiting times accompany low performance" and that referees [should] therefore "make sure that they offer equal temporal conditions for all shooters, by giving the ready signal at the same points in time for everyone". http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/20...alty-kicks.html

Referees could be helped to spot a footballer making a false dive by psychologists who have come up with a four-point guide of tell-tale signs of cheating. By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent Published: 7:00AM BST 16 Sep 2009 A footballer demonstrating the archer's bow Photo: PA Dr Paul Morris, of the University of Portsmouth, has found that footballers use a series of distinct actions when faking a fall during a match. These include clutching their body where they have not been hit, taking an extra roll when they hit the ground and taking fully controlled strides after being tackled but before falling. However the biggest giveaway is when they hold up both arms in the air, with open palms, chest thrust out, legs bent at the knee in an "archer's bow" position. Dr Morris, who specialises in how people show emotions and intentions, said: "Referees have a very difficult job and given the demands of the task, they do it remarkably well. "We think even experienced professionals could enhance their decision-making by studying the categories of deceptive behaviour we have identified." Dr Morris said that the "archer's bow" was one of the most revealing as it would not occur in a natural fall. He explained: "In most dishonest tackles the behaviour itself does not indicate dishonesty, the deception is revealed in the timing and co-ordination of the behaviours. "But one action is unique to a faked fall - the archer's bow. "This occurs in many dives but biomechanically it does not occur in a natural fall. "Instead, instinctively the arms either go down in an attempt to cushion the fall or out to the side for balance. "Although this behaviour is absurd, the fraudulent footballer does it to try to deceive the referee into believing that the tackle was illegal, and the histrionics are necessary to get the referee's attention in the first place. "This behaviour has no national boundaries, everyone does it, it even occurred unprompted during our research trials." Dr Morris said that a player who positioned his body into this "peculiar" shape to show that he had been fouled as a result of a tackle looked "quite bizarre". He said: "Moving the body like this is completely controlled behaviour so it clearly doesn't show a genuine fall. "The moment both arms go above the shoulder is a clear indication of deception." Dr Morris said that during his research, which included three different studies, a footballer's deceptive intentions were easy to spot. For the first study, he showed four-second clips of tackles from televised games to more than 300 people. The participants were only allowed to see the clip twice in real-time before they were asked to spot the fakers. The results showed that the participants were almost always in agreement on when a player was faking a fall or when it was genuine, and they also agreed when the intentions appeared ambiguous. In the second study, Dr Morris wanted to check whether the observers' judgment was correct and could be trusted. He employed more than 30 experienced amateur footballers to stage a scenario taken from a Football Association coaching manual. Attackers were instructed to dribble the ball past approaching defenders and then deceptively exaggerate the effects of a tackle to varying degrees. Nearly 50 observers were asked to judge if the attackers were faking and the level of exaggeration, if any. He found that the observers consistently judged the level of exaggeration correctly. And for the third study, he carefully examined footage of dishonest and legitimate tackles frame-by-frame to produce a comprehensive list of deceptive behaviours. The research, co-authored by David Lewis, is published in the Springer Journal of Nonverbal Behaviour. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6193679...n-football.html

presumably he has strength and pace ? - hopefully an eye for goal too

Purslow reminds me of the civil servant from Torchwood's children of the earth

Don't tell Rafa that, he may change his " it's more important not to lose" philosophy...

good to know, what's he like at bringing the ball out of defense ?

what track record ? - They sold to G & H for the extra cash. So it was done the family silver was sold, not to someone who would love and cherish it, but to two American Pawn Brokers.