Grimes

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It might make Being Liverpool a bit more interesting, episode 7 "You'll Never Tweet Again"

The general lowering of expectations and the devaluing of the cups while in no ways welcome, could be a help to the kids too. They can go into these away games in particular without having the added pressure of people expecting wins regardless of the opposition. If things had gone badly wrong last night nobody would have moaned too much about it. The way Shelvey took his two goals seemed very relaxed. He might not have even gambled to get in the box for the first if the pressure was on to just get a result. Even aside from his goal, I thought Wisdom was quite impressive.

Well done to all involved in TAW podcasts, they have been a real breath of fresh air over the last year and a bit. I really enjoyed the Rafa interview and it got me thinking about the anti Rafa faction. I can never understand the level of animosity people have towards the man. Has TAW ever approached Steven Kelly from the old Through the Wind and The Rain to come on the Monday podcast for some arlarse perspective? Not somebody I would agree with a lot but he is always articulate and interesting in his Irish Examiner stuff.

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Steven Gerrard is one of the most talented players to have graced our team. He has provided me with some of the happiest moments of my life, hope in the darkness of mediocrity and eventually that most enjoyable of all, actual success. He has also cost me many a sleepness night when his frustrations with the predicament of our club matched my own and manifested itself with his attempts to walk away. His emotional commitment to LFC is unquestionable so I now just wish he got laid about 5 mintues before every game and went out on the pitch without the weight of his own sense of responsibilty. If he was a w***** he wouldnt give a damn and would be scoring hat tricks when the going was easy and the press would be offering him get out of jail cards in the form of looking for the manager to "build a team" around him. For all those people who think he would benefit from a great "man" manager, cop yourselves on, Steven Gerrard is not some 12 year old that needs a hand around the shoulder. He is a man burdened by the responsibilty of being both a fan and the best player at Liverpool Football Club which he has loved all his life. How many of us could carry that load? He is not f***in Churcill.

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Whatever about the ref and his view, the linesman missed two French players off side when the kick is taken, what looked like a foul on Dunne to stop him getting a jump and he also seemed to be best placed to see the double handball. From a human perspective you'd wonder if he mentally froze after allowing the off sides.

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sorry about that!

Pre match article from yesterday by Dion Fanning http://www.independent.ie/sport/soccer/one...me-1749410.html One for sorrow sees Magpie Owen playing a mug punter's game There was a time when to get in Michael Owen's way was to put yourself in danger. He was driven with what seemed like a sociopathic urge to score goals. He was clear-eyed and boyish and nothing could go wrong. Last week, Newcastle had to deny that Owen was planning to retire from football in order to pursue a career in horse racing. The career he was said to have in mind was running a stable, although a man who has spent much of his sporting life in daily contact with Kieren Fallon, in search of gambling tips and general sporting banter, can be said to have already developed a keen and maybe mystical devotion. No sooner had the Daily Express printed their story which said that Owen was considering quitting than they had to rewrite it. Later editions instead stated that he had no intention of retiring; Owen's people had done a good job of quickly stamping on the story, no doubt pointing out that it was untrue. They may even have hinted it was libellous and if they had, it would have been worth asking how the man who was England's centre-forward, but is now behind Mark Viduka in the fight for a place in Newcastle United's team, could have his standing lowered by a story that he was going to pack it in? When people think of the caricature of the Premier League footballer they never think of Owen. He has never been involved in the more sordid pursuits of the breed; he has never been caught up in a roasting scandal. At first glance, he looks as impish now as he did on the evening he ran through the Argentinean defence in St Etienne 11 years ago. He peaked that night. At his best at 18 when his hamstrings hadn't popped and he hadn't been driven mad by playing for several years in the same Liverpool side as Salif Diao or Igor Biscan or whatever stooge Gerard Houllier believed fitted the prototype of the modern footballer. Owen put up with that and became unpopular with the Liverpool supporters who believed he cared more about playing for England than his club. Of course he did. For England he got to play with Paul Scholes and David Beckham and for Liverpool, Bruno Cheyrou and El-Hadji Diouf. Driven by that demented desire to win, there was only one place he was going to view with fondness. He had affection for Liverpool and he had friends there but he was driven by his own restlessness, not one he shared with the wider community. He is, despite the image, as eccentric a man as there is playing in the Premier League. He has only been to the cinema three times in his life. When I went to see the movie Seabiscuit, a woman sitting in front of me sat up in an imaginary saddle and rode along during every racing scene. I imagined Owen doing something similar or calling his bookie and trying to place a bet on what he would have seen as a sure thing. Instead when he saw it he fell asleep. He joked once that his top five favourite films are "Rocky, Rocky II, Rocky III, Rocky IV and Rocky V" -- with an honourable mention for Cool Runnings, the movie he saw when he was 10 and which left an indelible mark because he stayed right to the end. There was too much to be done to sit still in the cinema, too much to win but too much to lose. Gambling has destroyed his career, not through betting but through the decisions he made. He gambled on a move to Real Madrid when staying at Liverpool would have brought a European Cup and he gambled on a return to England with Newcastle. He was too competitive, driven in a way that made the ability to resist the temptations of women and drink almost meaningless. Now he trains most days with Joey Barton, a man of questionable temperament. Owen must sometimes question his own. He was eternally restless but seemed to have perfect stillness on a football field. When he burst by Lee Dixon to score the second goal in the 2001 Cup final, television replays showed a close up of his face and it had contorted into a brutal mess. He wasn't boyish. He was ready to kill. Stories have surfaced from time to time about his gambling. There were stories about card schools and a report suggesting that he had fallen out with Wayne Rooney after Rooney ran up debts with a private bookie who was also an "associate" of Owen's was denied. He is part of a different circus now, belonging to the cast of a show where the producers never grow tired of hare-brained schemes. His arrival at Newcastle was one of them, conclusive proof that he has a compulsive inability to sit still. Real Madrid wanted him out. He said he would either return to Liverpool or join Newcastle on loan for the season. He should then have taken himself off to the cinema or disappeared to the beach for a few days. Instead he looked around the table, couldn't see the sucker and jumped up, waving his hands in the air. Newcastle had bid £17 million for him and he signed to scenes of hysteria in Newcastle and bewilderment everywhere else. But those were the glory days, today is the reality. There used to be apocalyptic warnings about the money Premier League footballers could lose if their punting got out of control and they found themselves spending their spare time in the casino. As a brand ambassador for Allen Stanford, Owen knows that savings and wise investments can turn out to be a mug's game as well. Those warnings never considered one thing: a player might do alright at the roulette tables, tame the horses, despite the daily texts from Kieren Fallon, to an extent that he runs his own stables and still be doomed by his desires. A player might just gamble with his career, trust his instincts which have never let him down and find that they have. He will probably be sitting on the Newcastle bench today, powerless over their survival. Just another mug punter looking for a break.