Tasha

For what it's worth, in his new book he says he isn't really friends with Michael anymore. He doesn't even mention him here when he has to guess the club's top 20 PL scorers: if he can remember Berger there's no way he can forget Michael lol.

Have you guys seen Moneyball? In the end, someone playing John W. Henry offers Brad Pitt's character a job with the Red Sox lol.

Thing is though, can he still do it? he did it under GH because he could but hasn't Rafa beaten out that aspect of his game, the "do it all myself" part?

So Balague's thing: what have any of you guys heard, is it all rumors or is there actually some truth there?

man of the match thread pls.

hopefully this will inspire the team to win every game and then the manc's opponents will be inspired too so we'll win the league and sami will get a premiership medal.

Well, Andy wanted to flog Yossi, and then Yossi ended up scoring against Fulham... So now I think we still have a chance.

I had an argument about him with a guy who believed him. Idiot.

Billy Elliot was pretty awesome (I assume there is no difference between the West End production and Broadway).

i read somewhere it was just a cramp, nothing serious.

Can you imagine Stevie opening a private members club? Haha.

There's a new one? Here's a nice (old) write-up from Run of Play, a very excellent football blog

Clive Owen met Stevie recently and apparently got really flustered, haha. He said "I've met the biggest movie stars in the world but give me Steven Gerrard and I'm in trouble." Oh, and Maddox wants to be a Liverpool player someday.

If Stevie attacked one of us here what would we do, I wonder.

Source Apparently he's going to be a daddy, so P for Padre or Pregnancy, or 9 for 9 months.

Does it mean anything for Stevie if they're still arresting people? They've made two since then.

iverpool have denied claims that Robbie Keane will be sold in January after their former player turned television pundit Mark Lawrenson cast doubt on the £20.3m striker's Anfield future during an interview with an Irish radio station. Keane's position at Liverpool is again under scrutiny after the manager, Rafael Benítez, left the Republic of Ireland captain on the sidelines during Saturday's 2-2 draw against Hull City. Before the game Benítez and the 28-year-old had insisted he had a long-term future at Anfield following reports he could be sold back to Tottenham Hotspur. Benítez's decision to introduce Nabil El Zhar, Ryan Babel and Lucas ahead of the striker against Hull, however, illustrated the difficulties facing Keane at Anfield. Speaking on The Last Word on Today FM, Lawrenson said he discussed Keane's predicament with Steven Gerrard after the game and claimed the Liverpool captain suspects his team-mate could be sold in the forthcoming transfer window. "I hate to name drop," said Lawrenson, "but I was having a drink with Gerrard on Saturday and we talked about Keane. They share the same agent [struan Marshall] and quite honestly he thinks something is going to happen with Keane in January. Sounds like he could be moved on." While Marshall declined to comment Liverpool last night denied the pundit's version of events. A club spokesman said: "Mark Lawrenson's remarks are his interpretation of a private chat between the two of them. They do not accurately reflect Steven's opinion of Robbie Keane and they certainly do not tally with Steven's recollection of the conversation itself." Lawrenson's assessment of Keane's time at Liverpool did not end with predictions for January, with the former Anfield defender casting doubt on Benítez's wisdom in signing the striker to begin with. He added: "He [benítez] got it wrong. If Liverpool were playing a Champions League final, FA Cup final or a massive game that they had to win tomorrow, you know Keane wouldn't start. He'd not get in the team. Why pay £20m for a player who doesn't suit the formation or system? He's not going to improve at 28. You just wonder if Tottenham will come back and do a bit of a deal and Liverpool would go for someone else." Source

Can I c&p the article from goal.com because it's quite an entertaining article. It's just that I think it uses the translations from the rag, so I'm hesitant to post it.

You all always deny wanting him back but in about two days this thread will reach 22+ pages. The story of every MO thread here, haha.

STEVEN Gerrard, the heartbeat of Liverpool’s pursuit of glory, marks the 10th anniversary of his Anfield debut this weekend with this promise: “The Premier League title is my priority – everyone here wants it so badly.” The Premier League is the holy grail for Anfield players of Gerrard’s generation, as Liverpool have never won the trophy and have not won a league title since 1990. Last night Gerrard, who made his league bow as a late substitute in a 2-0 win over Blackburn at Anfield, exclusively told the Daily Express: “My priority is to win the Premier League. We believe we are good enough to challenge. Everyone wants it so badly here. I want it because I have never won it – and I don’t want to finish my career without one.” Those hopes were dealt a blow when Fernando Torres was ruled out for up to three weeks after injuring his hamstring for the third time this season in the win against Marseille. Take a trip down memory lane with Steven Gerrard as he reflects on his life and times and simpler days at Liverpool.... Steven Gerrard had just played his first minutes in a Liverpool shirt, his head was in a whirl and his mind racing as he clambered inside his dad’s car for a lift home. “That’s it,” said Paul Gerrard, turning to his son. “Whatever happens now, you can always say you have played for Liverpool.” Silence ensued, time for this to sink in, before he added: “But you’ve got to push on now, be the best you can be.” Gerrard remembers the conversation with crystal clarity, the message as fresh today as it was 10 years ago tomorrow, when he replaced Norwegian defender Vegard Heggem with 60 seconds left in an otherwise unremarkable 2-0 win over Blackburn at Anfield. The Kop had been given their first glimpse of a new hero. It is a sentiment that has underpinned all he has tried to achieve in the decade of dizzy highs and gut-wrenching lows that have followed. Of course, living the dream comes with the proviso attached that Liverpool must always prevail. He admits it is not since his days as a YTS trainee that he has been able to run out on to a football pitch and simply enjoy himself. “You used to have 20 apprentices in one changing room and 20 young pros in another and the banter was unbelievable,” said Gerrard. “To leave school and know you were coming to play football every day, those were the best two years of my life. “I was on the least money at the time – £47.50p a week – but I used to love getting up in the morning, getting on one or two buses and getting to Melwood. “For two years I loved every single day – win, lose or draw. Nowadays, I still love it – but only when we win.” It is the fear of coming up short on the pitch that has resulted in Gerrard tempering his outlook, the need to deliver excellence for the red hordes who await his every bone-shuddering tackle, breathtaking pass and blockbusting goal in breathless anticipation. “I wouldn’t change anything for the world. I am captain of the club and doing what I always wanted,” he said, fresh from his goalscoring cameo in the win over Marseille. “It’s only as you get older though that you realise how important playing for Liverpool is. You cannot grasp that when you are setting out, so maybe that is why I look at things a bit differently. It’s only when you play you realise how many people follow the club, how many people you have the ability to make happy that you know you have to win. Nothing else. “But I don’t think the pressure gets to the stage where you think, ‘I can’t handle this’. “The pros outweigh the cons by a million miles. When you come off the pitch having beaten Everton, Manchester United or Chelsea, or you win a semi-final to reach a final, you cannot beat those buzzes.” Istanbul remains the biggest adrenaline shot to have coursed through Gerrard’s veins, the header he cushioned into the corner to spark football’s greatest comeback is regarded by him as the best of the 104 goals he has scored for Liverpool, simply because it was the most important. With FA Cup, Uefa Cup and League Cup gongs, 70 England caps, recognition across the globe and an MBE, he has already far exceeded all of his teenage expectations. So when does that no longer become enough? “As soon as they are won,” he says bluntly. “When you play in a big game and win it, a final for example, you can enjoy it for a couple weeks. A month maybe if it is the end of the season. But then you have to start again. I think that’s the amazing thing about football; if you don’t learn to move on from what you have won – or failed in – you won’t be any good in the future. It goes back to what my dad said.” Gerrard adds mention of failure unprompted. The biggest misconception about him, other than that he never smiles, is that his career has been one long fairytale. And yet, for every trophy he has hoisted above his head, there is another image stored away of despair and dejection. “My career certainly hasn’t gone up, up, up, up. It has been up, up, up, down, down. Up, down. Up, up,” he said. “I cannot think of any footballer around the world whose career has been up, up, up. “I don’t want to finish my career and people to look at me as a failure. “Looking back, I’m pleased how I have reacted. From the bad tackles and sending offs, to all the talk of a Chelsea move, which I regret getting involved in, and the own-goal in the cup final. Without the setbacks, I don’t think I’d have achieved as much as I have.” To the future. In Rafa Benitez and Fabio Capello, Gerrard has two managers intent upon pushing him to new heights and, he hopes, expanding that medal haul. “Getting involved in the title race and staying in it is a completely different challenge to what we are used to at Liverpool,” he added. “To finish in the top four you can have a defeat and it does not hit you that bad. Two successive defeats in the title race and it could be over. But we are in there and everyone wants to make sure that’s the case at the end of the season. “I’m coming up to 10 years and it doesn’t feel like that. It’s flown. I’m sure the next five or six will be exactly the same, that’s why I have to make the most of every minute I’ve got.” He knows no other way. http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/73252/...s-my-holy-grail Amazing man.

Just do one of his rap songs: It's the B to the A to the B-E-L and then: Scoring is his hobby He don't want no trouble He's the Liverpool-star the Kop are giving him Love and etc.

I've noticed that when Rafa has instructions to give on the pitch, he gives it to Alvaro now. Maybe it's because it's what the camera shows, so perhaps it's different when you're actually in the stadium and you can see everything, or maybe it's just the cameras picking that up in coincidence. But I've seen him do that twice now. Is it just me or has everyone seen it too? Did Paco leaving really split the camp?

He cried when he got off, apparently.

Jamie Carragher's club passion Jamie Carragher explains his love for Liverpool and why he thinks about winning the Premier League title every single day Jonathan Northcroft He’s in the main part of his restaurant, in the city centre, amid the lunch time crowd. Jamie Carragher is not being flash, the opposite applies. Liverpool is different. Flash would entail a private dining room. In few places is football so much part of life, and being seen to be part of the place’s life is important. “Go on, lad,” smiles Carragher when a customer wants a photograph. A favourite motto comes from the former Anfield chairman Sir John Smith: “We’re a very, very modest club at Liverpool. We don’t talk. We don’t boast. But we’re very professional.” Carragher’s personal translation? “Actions speak louder than words.” Accordingly, his actions characterise him. Extra-time in Istanbul, when he threw a body burning with cramp into tackle after block, tells of the sportsman; paying £1,700 to fly home a supporter who lost his passport attending the Club World Championship in Tokyo tells of the man. But his words are also worth experiencing. Carragher has just written one of the best player autobiographies you could read, typically a product of honesty and dedication, every chapter redrafted “four or five times”. The Kop dreams of a “team of Carraghers”. Journalists – providing they understand Scouse – wouldn’t mind a game full of them. The Book of Carragher, Part I: Roots Today will end in Blundellsands, by Crosby Beach, where Carragher, his wife Nicola and their children James and Mia live. It is an exclusive location but not far from Bootle, where he grew up and might still be found on (nowadays rare) nights out. The interview is running on and when his dad calls, Carragher asks if he can walk the kids home from school. There was hardly any media at his book launch, just family and friends. “People say, ‘You don’t forget where you’re from’ but to be honest it’s not a conscious thing. If I preferred something else I’d do that instead, but the way I am I’d rather mix with people I know and in a place I know,” Carragher says. “It’s not done deliberately, for praise.” Now retired from international football, a controversial revelation in the autobiography was that after missing a World Cup penalty his consolation was thinking at least it wasn’t for Liverpool. “One of the reasons I came out with the stuff about England was . . . in Liverpool we probably see ourselves as an island,” he begins. “It’s hard to explain but we want to fight the world and stuff like that. I know we get criticism for that ‘self-pity’ thing but we’re just a very close community, you fight for your own and families are very important.” Even when watching England play on television, the Mersey streams in front of his eyes. “I wouldn’t say we like the negative image others give Liverpool but it gives us something to rally against,” he says. “People here have got a bit of life, haven’t they? That’s what I think when I look at the England team. The two best players are Wayne Rooney and Steven Gerrard. They can put in a tackle and look after themselves but also have the creative spark. People from Liverpool can be . . . in the nicest possible way . . . little f****** and Stevie and Wayne have that devilment.” Mersey pride is at the heart of a major concern. Carragher and Gerrard, heart and soul of the team, preserve Liverpool’s Scouse personality on the pitch but no lad from the club’s academy has established himself since Gerrard’s emergence a decade ago. Now there are 30 overseas youngsters on Liverpool’s books. “The foreign player issue has to be addressed. At all clubs,” says Carragher. “Don’t get me wrong, good foreigners are great for the Premiership but what worries me is when we get foreign kids in at 16, 17. There has to be something to stop that, to help clubs keep their identities. I think about when I was that age. If I’d been 18 and Liverpool had brought the Spain Under18 captain into my position it would have been deflating. I always thank my stars I came in just as the foreign invasion was starting. I wasn’t Stevie at 18. I was a very good player and would have always had the mental strength to take my opportunity, but I wonder whether I’d have been given it. “I don’t know when the next Liverpool lad will break into our first team and I don’t think the academy system is what it should be. The kids don’t have jobs now, don’t play Sunday boys’ football, and those things toughen you up. I don’t see as many little f****** as in my day. There’s a lot of nice lads but football’s not for nice lads.” He loves local players, one-club men, everywhere. “It’s why I was made up that Stevie stayed,” he says. “He’s the symbol of Liverpool. You think of AC Milan and Maldini; Real Madrid and Raul; Juventus and Del Piero; Scholes and Giggs, who deep down every Liverpool fan respects. Tony Adams – he only played for Arsenal – I love that. For someone to ask, ‘Who did you play for?’ and to be able to answer a single name, ‘Liverpool’, that would be brilliant. I don’t think I’ll ever leave . . . though to be honest I’ve never picked up the Sunday papers and seen, ‘Jamie Carragher is wanted by X’. That’d be nice, you know, just for a little ego boost . . . could it be arranged? I see other players, ‘Real Madrid want so and so’ and you think, ‘He’s f****** crap! Him?!” The Book of Carragher, Part II: Rafa Today featured a lecture from the gaffer on a technical point of defending. Though Carragher believes the Liverpool reigns of Roy Evans and Gerard Houllier are underrated, Rafael Benitez is “the biggest influence on my career. Even this morning he took me aside after training. Robbie Keane was saying, ‘Jeez, he talked to you like you’re a YTS player . . .’ You get used to it. Rafa is always on your back. Some players can’t handle that. Me, I don’t like it but I’m the sort of person who responds. You’ve always got that thing in the back of your mind with Rafa, ‘Does he actually think I’m any good?’ You’re always wanting to prove yourself. He hasn’t got much good to say about anyone, Rafa. . . even other managers.” He and his mentor had a false start. At Euro 2004 Benitez, newly appointed by Liverpool, visited the England camp to meet Carragher, Gerrard and Michael Owen. The trio thought it was nice he would go to such lengths. The ego-stroking they expected did not materialise. Benitez sketched out an XI that, to Carragher’s dismay, had him at right-back and told Gerrard he should stop running about so much “and said to Michael you’ve got to get back to the way you were in 2001!” In his book, Carragher jokes that Benitez is like a pub bore. “I hope people understood I was being light-hearted,” he says. “I meant that he’s always got to have the last word. Whatever your opinion is, he always has a better one. He’s the person who always thinks he knows best for you – and is usually right. There are times you want to tell him to . . . but later you think, ‘That was good for me’. “The job he’s done is sometimes overlooked. Don’t forget that within a week of walking in the door he lost Michael [Owen] and had just been given Djibril Cisse. He stayed with the team in Tokyo when his dad had just died, which was an unbelievable gesture towards the players and the club. He’s taken defence to another level. He goes into every detail, tiny little things like body positions, how to react when the opposition use different formations. Basically, he’s trying to copy the AC Milan of Franco Baresi. He can change systems five times in a game. In Robbie’s first match he ended up on the left wing because Rafa noticed something about Lazio which made him want three in the middle – and that was just a friendly. "To be honest, British players find that [flexibility] more difficult than foreign ones and maybe that’s why some he’s bought did not do so well. But another strength is he recognises his transfer mistakes. Every manager makes them and there’s nothing worse than the manager playing players to justify himself. That’s disrespectful to the rest of the squad. When Rafa picks you, it’s because you’re in the best XI to play that game.” There’s a surprising someone else Carragher admires. “I don’t have heroes outside football and my family,” he says. “If I had to pick a nonLiverpool or nonEverton person . . . to be honest I just love them managers. Alex Ferguson’s brilliant. I know it’s mad because he’s the Man U manager but if you asked who I’d like to spend two hours with, have a meal with and talk about football, it would have to be him. I love the way he tells everyone to f*** off.” The Book of Carragher, Part III: Realising the dream Today began with an odd breakfast conversation with James Carragher Jr, aged five. “I’ve been obsessed with football since I was three or four and my son’s getting worryingly like that. He remembers things from the Euros, games, goals. He was talking about last year’s Champions League semi-final, just brought it up, ‘Dad, did John Terry play in the game you lost 3-2?’ And I was thinking, ‘What made you think of that?’” Carragher says “it’s very likely” he’ll end up a manager but worries that the difficulty he already has in switching off from the game would be exacerbated. He remembers a squad meal after losing a Merseyside derby when Gerrard, from the other end of the table, was texting him to cheer up “because my face was in my bowl of soup”. Liverpool’s comeback at Manchester City stirred every red, except one. “We conceded two goals and even now it’s nagging at the back of my mind.” This brings Carragher to his biggest obsession. “I think about the title every day, more than once. Easily. To do it with Liverpool would mean so much more, that was my argument with Stevie when Chelsea wanted him.” In the City game, Liverpool looked like contenders. “We scored the winning goal after Martin Skrtel went off and it was 10 v 10. We had no centre-back, it was just me. We could easily have dropped Xabi Alonso back but a few lads – it wasn’t even the manager – said, ‘No, we’ll keep men forward and go for it. We’re aware, now, you’ve got to go for wins in this league. Draws kill you. “People should stop saying we’ve made a great start, though. I’m thinking, ‘We’ve only played seven games and we’re Liverpool. Shouldn’t we be up there? Am I missing something?’ We’re not Hull. If we’re still up there in March we can talk about it, until then focus on doing our best in every game. Actions speak louder than words.” Win a signed copy of Carra We have 10 signed copies of Jamie Carragher’s entertaining and insightful autobiography, Carra, to give away to readers of The Sunday Times. Raw, funny and down-to-earth, Carra takes you behind the scenes of Liverpool and England’s greatest triumphs and disasters in the company of a player who never fails to be intelligent, controversial or downright hilarious. For your chance to win a copy answer correctly this question: which team did Carragher support as a child? Email your answer, with ‘Carragher book’ in the subject field, to sporttickets@sunday-times.co.uk with your name, address and phone details. The competition closes at midday on Thursday, October 16. Carra: My Autobiography, BantamPress, £18.99 Three questions for Carragher Who is the best player you’ve played against? ‘Thierry Henry. He was probably the best player in the world and I was playing at right-back when I started playing against him. Everyone knows that playing at full-back against Arsenal in those days was tough, what with Robert Pires going inside, Henry coming wide, Ashley Cole bombing on. Henry gave me a few good chasings over the years. Sheer class and pace’ What is your favourite place in the world? ‘Apart from Istanbul? Probably Marsh Lane. It’s where it all started for me. In Bootle. The Brunny [brunswick] boys’ club, my dad owned the pub along the road, my wife comes from a street just opposite the Brunny. ‘When I see that little road sign I get a real lift inside. When I finish playing I’ll try and do things for the area. There’s the boxing club, my junior school, the boys’ clubs and so many problems going on . . . it’s very important to me’ You say that Liverpool is a ‘village’ and mention its hyperactive rumour mill. There was one going round that you were having elocution lessons. Is that true? ‘Me?! I tell you what lessons I’m getting. I am having computer lessons. I go to the local Apple shop for a couple of hours a week. It might sound a bit shabby but I’ve never really been on the internet, I’ve only just learnt how to download music and put pictures on my computer. You talk the way you talk. Elocution? F*** off’ source