Poolfrog

Rooney's a decent footballer but as a STRIKER he's very average. 12 league goals this season and only just over 50 league goals in his entire career says it all. It's all Emperor's new clothes as far as he's concerned

Exactly. What's usually overlooked is that we actually lost fewer games in the league than Man Utd who, by the way, were pretty crap yesterday for what it's worth. We were very much the dominant team in at least 75% of the games we drew, so it was only the inability to kill teams off in many games that has cost us dear.

It's called the Premier League nowadays

The Mancs went 26 - or was it 27? - years after winning the league in 1967 before winning it again and even managed to get relegated too, so things could be a lot worse

We finished third the previous two seasons although your post implies we're always fighting for fourth

Well that means they'll have two win two more championships and four more Champions' Leagues and that's not going to happen any time soon

Football has always been money-obsessed and to say otherwise is to be in denial. What's more, Liverpool have usually been in the vanguard of buying success, which many on here use as a criticism of the likes of Chelsea and Man Utd. We were the first to pay £100K for a teenager as long ago as 1968, I think it was, when we signed Alun Evans and when Paisley was asked once why Liverpool were so successful, his reply was simply "we buy the best players". And I don't know about you, but I haven't actually ever met anybody who thinks fourth place is acceptable.

He also omits to mention that under Shankly we didn't win so much as a League Cup in the 7 years after we won the league in '66 until we won it again (and the UEFA Cup) in 1973. A very barren trophy-less period which those harking back to the Shankly era as some sort of golden age always conveniently overlook

Well, I'm older than him and I haven't changed my views on football in general or Liverpool in particular. His comments show that, as an individual, he's a bit of a whinger. I didn't choose to support Liverpool; it just crept up on me in the 50s and is now part of the fabric of my being. Irrespective of who owns the club or how much managers have to spend on players compared with the "good old days" (which never existed) a true fan - or "a staunch red" as you put it - sticks with the club come what may. "Staunch red" he clearly is not.

It's a stupid idea on any level you care to mention really. But I have one particular bugbear about these "AFCs" - Wimbledon, Bournemouth, Mancs etc - and that is the use of the word Association in the name of the club. The game is not Association Football, it's simply football. The rugby fraternity dubbed it thus as they seem to think their silly game is a sort of football (ditto the laughable USA game where the feet are basically just for standing on and the ball is propelled by the foot only a handdful of times per game). A contraction of the word "association" by the same rugby public school types foisted the ghastly word "soccer" on to the beautiful game. Any club adopting AFC as a prefix is just legitimising the nomenclature spawned by these chinless wonders

The fact that he rates Rooney - a "striker" who rarely scores goals, particularly at the highest level - says it all really

It's only a bloody shirt number at the end of the day. Any player that is weighed down by a number on his back or, for that matter, plays better because of it, is precisely the sort of player we'd be better off without

If they're good enough they'll eventually get in - and I'd rather trust Rafa's view on when that time will be than yours frankly

What's all this about the Mancs being "the benchmark", with their "age and talent"?? Remove Ronaldo and Rooney from that lot and they look very mediocre, such as Bolton away when they lost and played like a mid-table side. In their last few games against Middlesbrough, Blackburn, Barcelona and Chelsea they've generally struggled. They're fortunate in that they picked up points early in the season when only Arsenal were consistently doing the same. It's worth pointing out that we've lost FEWER games than they have in the league and if we'd converted just half the draws we've had into wins - and we were the better team in the great majority of those games - we'd be right up there. Also I think I'm right in saying that we've also scored more goals than them - or Arsenal and Chelsea - in all competitions. So let's keep a sense of perspective please. We're definitely making progress throughout the club season on season and I expect us to move up a notch next season, with the inevitable new signings in the summer

A pedant writes: Roger Hunt was in fact our No.8. St John was No.9 in the team at the time

I saw Clemence from his first-team debut. They are completey different types. Clemence was top-drawer and suffered from being around at the same time as Peter Shilton as far as his international career goes. Indeed, Shilton's amazing haul of caps would have been even higher if England didn't alternate him and Clemence as was the case for a while. Becasue their styles were different it's not easy to make a case for one over the other. I would mainly have Clemence over Reina right now because he did it consistently at the highest level for many years, whereas Reina's a relative newcomer I would say that Reina's better as a shot-stopper perhapsthan Clemence and better at distribution setting up quick attacks, but Clemence was more athletic and better at coming for crosses. But his kicking was hopeless. He invariably sliced one or two drop kicks into the stands in every game

Although I'm one of the old guard I was just too young to have seen Liddell play, but my old man raved about him - except that apparently we were such a one-man team then that he said Liddell would take all the corners, free-kicks and throw-ins if he could get away with it. But I saw 90% of Ian Callaghan's career and if we were picking an orthodox old-fashioned outside-right there'd be no contest. But if we were picking a modern right-side midfielder there are more obvious candidates

Us older fans would consider Chris Lawler a prime candidate at right-back for any best XI. He was vastly superior to Phil Neal in every way. His positional play and reading of the game was superb, he had a great touch on the ball - makes Phil Neal look like he was playing on roller skates - was an excellent footballer who would pass his way out of defence rather than hoof it. But apart from his excellent overall skill and defensive qualities he was a phenomenal scorer for a defender, particularly as - unlike Neal - he didn't take penalties. He was superb in the air and a constant threat at set-pieces, but also had an attacker's instinct when the ball was on the deck. As he was a former schoolboy striker before reverting to defence you could see that he had all the attributes of a centre-forward. I remember him scoring a brilliant overhead kick against Everton at the Kop end. I can't think of any of our full-backs since who would have even attempted it I haven't seen any right-back since in any of our teams that could hold a candle to him. Anyone who thinks Neal was a better player obviously never saw Lawler play. It's no contest at all

As someone who was born and raised in inner city Liverpool in the sixties it amuses me to see that Rooney was apparently born in the inner city according to the journo. Unless Croxteth has moved several miles since I was a kid it's nowhere near the inner city. Croxteth and Huyton were areas that we aspired to as they were considerably less rough and crime-ridden than where we lived. O tempora, o mores - as someone once said!

I don't know what people expected it to be or what it would show. You're hardly going to get re-runs of 24 on a channel dedicated to one football club! Clearly they can't show live first team games so it follows the same formula of the other football club channels really, all of which are only relevant to fans of the particular clubs. But it's not as if you have to pay separately for it like the chav and scum channels. I would anyway have gladly paid the Setanta £9.99 a month on top of my Sky subscription just to see the additional live premier league games, so getting the LFC channel thrown in as part of the package is a very welcome bonus - not to mention, as a racing man, extras like Racing UK as part of the deal and all the other Setanta channels At least the Liverpool channel is on most of the time. Just checked now and Arsenal's isn't on again until Monday, ditto Rangers. Celtic's says it starts at 12 pm, but not what day! Our channel's off because of the Fulham game but is back on at 6.30

I was in the seating above the terracing in the Leppings Lane end. The strange thing is, there was no communication in the ground about what was going on. We saw people trying to climb the fences below and also helped people clamber up into the area where we were sitting, but we thought that it was just the sort of congestion we'd seen many times at Anfield for big games. It was extremely commonplace in the sixties to see people passed down to the front of the Kop over the heads of standing supporters having passed out from the crush (26,000 people were crammed into the Kop at capacity), so everybody by me thought it was the same sort of thing going on. We had absolutely no idea whatsoever that anyone had died and we were sitting a few feet from where it happened. As it was also in the pre-mobile phone area, we weren't told about it as we trudged the three miles or so to Sheffield station. Having moved to London at that time it was mid-evening when I got home that I first heard that anyone had died. Seems hard to imagine now but we were just told eventually that the match had been abandoned - but not why. The lack of communication was shocking really.

As I said above, someone always says this about potential penalty kicks. It is totally irrelevant. If a player is fouled anywhere in the box, the relevant law says that it's a pen irrespective of where the ball is on the field of play. A player could be in the box, facing his own goal and indeed running towards his own goal and be fouled within the 18-yard box and it's a penalty. If he's already passed the ball or had a shot and he's tripped, pulled back etc it's still a pen. He doesn't have to be in close control of the ball in the box for it to be a pen, so if he's lost the ball or it was running out of play and he's fouled then it's still a pen

100% correct

In fact the relevant law says that a direct free-kick (and, hence, a penalty kick within the area) should be given for, amongst other things, incidents where a player trips, or attempts to trip another player and, for what it's worth (because somebody always says that the ball was going out of play, the player had lost control of the ball, was running away from the goal etc) it also says that for a penalty the kick should be awarded irrespective of where the ball is on the field of play. The laws as they stand now remove the former need for the ref to consider whether there was intent behind a challenge. If Gerrard was tripped - as he indeed was by the goalie's knee on his trailing leg - then a penalty could indeed be awarded. In yesterday's case the ref simply decided not to award one.

Let's not forget that Arsenal are only 5 points ahead of us and seem to be in free-fall, so it's best not to make rash statements at this stage