The La

It's the club that's handling this badly though, isn't it? I'd guess that a sizable majority of Liverpool fans wanted the manager replaced after Stoke. If the club disagree then they need to give him some sort of cover, otherwise stuff like "Rodgers sacked his own coaching staff to save his own skin" and "they want him to resign so they can avoid a pay off" will continue to foment. Club are perfectly happy to leak selective tidbits when it suits them. Something like "the club believe that Rodgers' job was made exponentially harder last season by a number of factors and there is acknowledgement that, in retrospect, they didn't do enough to ensure he had enough off field support. Current moves are with this in mind and the belief in Boston is that with an improved backroom team Rodgers can return Liverpool to the heights seen the season before." Even if it's not true, it gives the guy some cover. Everything right now suggests that they are pissed off with him but just not quite to the point of sacking him. No point in that - if they believe he is the man to lead us next season then they need to back him publicly and own some of the f*** up. With the fixture list the way it is things could get ugly very quickly. It just looks like they're setting him up to fail.

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I very much enjoyed Tony's medical quiz show "Tibs and Fibs," the jewel of Channel 5's launch schedule

Tell us the the one about your "friend" who bummed Tony Slattery

I'm with you most of the way on this. Not that I don't think he's a good player or that he'd be a big improvement on Aspas, but this is the sort of transfer I'd prefer to see wait until closer to deadline day when we know where we are with other, more fundamental targets. One thing people often forget about the Keane / Barry / Jovetic disaster of a summer is that we paid a fair bit early in the window for Cavilieri. Whether that money would have made any difference or not on Rafa's missed targets I don't know but signing backup players early because they're easier to get doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. Having said that, backup strikers (like backup keepers) are unstable entities - the only ones who are willing to do the role tend to be either: a) very young (with expectations of playing time raised if they do well) b) extremely overpaid c) s*** I suppose it counts for something when you get that rare alignment of the stars and a good player like Lambert will come in knowingly to warm the bench, but this needs to be like the fifth or sixth most exciting transfer we make this summer

Eine Pendel schreibt: "Ich nichtEN lichtEN

Best leave it, then. Off to the pub - inner chimp fully managed.

I would add that I really WANT to believe in FSG. There seems to be a real dearth of intelligence in the boardrooms of English football, with the same ex-players getting short-term managerial gigs (Giggs?) again and again. Most teams who box above their weight (financially speaking) still do so with the Charles Reep "dogs of war" approach (obviously there are exceptions like Swansea and Southampton and even Everton). I think really clever owners who know when to stick and when to twist and have a long-term strategic plan would be a really good thing for Liverpool. So I'm eager to equate coincidence with causality with these lads because I want to believe they didn't just stumble on Rodgers (and, to a lesser degree, Sturridge and Coutinho). But then they do nothing for six months and seemingly leave Ian Ayre with the keys to the gaff and I gets me a little frustrated.....

Yes. I'm completely bipolar about them, to be honest. The big test has always been (and remains) the stadium issue but the appointment of Rodgers, the interest in Martinez etc. is sort of proving that there was a greater degree of sober thought in Boston that I had given them credit for. Also holding the line on Suarez in the summer - I think many clubs would have been spooked by the presence of a potentially disruptive and declining asset on the books and rolled over. I think much of the winter transfer debacle can be explained by the financial results that came out later. This summer is going to be a big test, though.

Absolutely. Such a good all round footballer as well I can see him still being fantastic when the pace has gone Incidentally, what Rodgers has done with the players he's got has been nothing short of miraculous. It's like when the A-Team used to make a tank out of some welding equipment, a forklift truck and some cabbages but with footballers instead. Lot of work to be done on the transfer front in the summer, but I don['t think they're going to have difficulty selling players on "the vision" so to speak. Who wouldn't want to be part of this?

In a second exclusive extract from his upcoming book “The Lighter Side of Jose Mourinho” Patrick Barclay describes the crucible of Mourinho’s final season in Madrid and the sunshine he tried to bring to a divided dressing room Football history is littered with tales of managers who believed laughter was important to their players’ morale. Whenever his swashbuckling Southampton team of the 1980s were losing at half time, Lawrie McMenemy would famously give his team talks with the aid of a ventriloquist’s dummy. “Get it in the gox! Get it in the gox!” he would shout, much to the mirth of his troops. However, there can be none who have suffered for their art as much as the great Jose Mourinho, and none, since that balmy Friday that first Easter whose noble agonies have been more viciously mocked than in Jose’s final days at Madrid. Truth to tell, the injuries Mourinho suffered during the Granero / air duster incident were far from superficial. Ruptured blood vessels across his abdomen and pelvic area had left him hospitalized and in constant pain. When he returned to work, some days later, colleagues were shocked at the strain the great man appeared to be under. “His face was purple and one eye constantly bulged” recalls one member of the training staff. However, the courage he showed in adversity was noted by all. “He had to wear a surgical dressing, which was like pair of paper underpants. The sort of thing a new mother might be given after a complex vaginal delivery. He stopped wearing trousers to work – he wanted everyone to see this dressing all the time, it was like a badge of honour or something. He decorated it with pictures of racing cars he’d cut out of magazines. Press conferences were a nightmare – Perez had to insist the cameras only focused on his top half. After a few days stuff started seeping like in one of those Rorschach blots.” Players began murmuring behind his back – the hero was derided as a clown and crucial allies were absent. Granero, who Mourinho once hailed as “his only friend in the dressing room” was on bereavement leave. “His pet ptarmigan had disappeared. Mourinho had only a few days earlier denounced ptarmigans as satanic birds and ‘enemies of Salazar’, but insisted he had nothing to do with the bird’s disappearance. It was a horrible time, Granero was distraught. The poor ptarmigan’s butchered remains were later found on a pig farm outside Bridgend.” Even at board level there was pitifully little sympathy, as anonymous suits began to whisper lies in the ear of Florentino Pérez. One board member recalls: “he was beginning to alienate people. The previous year he had signed Hamit Altıntop but never played him. People were beginning to wonder what that deal was all about. When he was confronted about why he never played this player he had agitated aggressively for, he became defensive and when pressed he mumbled something about not signing him to play football but signing him to teach CDT to the other players. A furious Butragueño stormed down to the dressing room to find an embarrassed looking Altintrop dressed in a tweed jacket trying to teach Alonso how to put a chamfer on a bit of wood. Altintrop was a bemused as anyone else – he had no woodworking skills and had been given to believe that he had been signed to play midfield.” Altintrop’s woes did not end there. As soon as Butragueño departed, Mourinho and trusted assistant Rui Faria decided that the rest of the squad would consider it uplifting to see the hapless Turk “hazed” in an amusing initiation rite. A senior player recalls “They stripped him and whipped him with a string of raw sausages. He was crying on the ground and they kept hitting him until the sausages burst and bits of meat flew everywhere. Mourinho only stopped when his paper dressing began to disintegrate with perspiration and the racing cars started to fall off. They later found Altintrop sobbing uncontrollably in the showers with a picture of Alain Prost in a McLaren stuck to his face with a sort of meaty glue. He left for Galatasaray soon after.”

Coutinho Sterling Gerrard

Yep - he's staying with a squeeze he has in Tuebrook while her husband's out of town

That's not what winners like Sir David do.

Dunno mate - I think he's supposed to be a football journalist with Chelsea connections

Patrick Barclay - I think its an excerpt from his upcoming book called "The Lighter Side of Jose Mourinho" that is about to hit the shelves

In an extract from the explosive new book “The Lighter Side of Jose Mourinho” Patrick Barclay provides a poignant counterpoint to the false polemic and jealous slander leveled against the Chelsea manager from his time at Real Madrid “Even at the nadir of his turbulent (but, as history will ultimately fondly record, successful), spell at Real Madrid, as moles were multiplying like rabbits and a thick fog clung to the banks of the Manzanares, reeking with the stench of treason, Mourinho understood the need to reach out to his players, as a father to his brood, to protect, to nurture and to nourish. While at times, the stern, Victorian patriarch was seen justifiably wielding a rod of iron, more frequently (but, alas, seldom reported), Jose saw his role to provide jollity and merriment and to shield his players from the horrors of the outside world as his “little donkeys” or “burritos” (as he would call them) struggled against the behemothic resources at Barcelona and Zaragoza; at Osasuna and Getafe. Traitors, however, know not joy in their souls, nor levity in their hearts and his affections were frequently spurned and misrepresented. One member of the dressing room said “He would come into work dressed only in a cardboard cutout of a Dalek and walk around training shouting ‘Ve must exterrrrrrrrminat ze spies!’ People just thought it was odd.” During one team lunch, when players were becoming paranoid about who was leaking information to the press, Mourinho created a teachable moment when he satirized their paranoia, although the lesson was learned by few. “He kept looking suspiciously at the omelet that Ronaldo was eating. After a minute or two he jumped to feet, seized the omelet and accused it of being a Catalan spy and a trade unionist. He then dressed as a high court judge and held a mock trial of the omelet in front of his dumbfounded players. The trial lasted deep into the night until he delivered his verdict upon which the omelet was hanged from a miniature gallows he had fashioned. There were bits of egg everywhere – it was disgusting.” However, the most sensational moment of Mourinho’s Madrid tenure came when he tried to mentor Granero through persona tragedy. “Granero had spilled a cup of tea on his pet ptarmigan while it was preening on a bag of cement. The poor bird became stuck. They were able to save its life but not its legs and it was fitted with little prostheses.” Mourinho had a great love of wildlife and of gamefowl in particular and he created a cunning ruse to distract Granero and his colleagues from this unfortunate incident. “He dropped his keks in the dressing room, pulled out one of those aerosol duster things they use to clean computers and rammed the nozzle of it right up his own a***. As he squeezed the trigger, his penis swelled momentarily as the air passed through his meatus, before making a loose farting noise as his member returned to its previous flaccidity. It was quite a funny trick, I suppose but a bit minging. The effect created a sort of mist like someone blowing a raspberry after drinking a glass of milk. Granero just cried.”

I think I'm still growing. Was about 5-8 at 21. Now just shy of 6ft at 37. John Lydon is another that just kept growing, supposedly

I've tried working it out and I think he means that Redknapp's goal against Blackburn could have done them a favour if they had not f***ed it up themselves?

So, this new set of financial results provides proper context to the January transfer fiasco, particularly with the "not much money now, more in summer" stories that circulated. The relative caution of FSG seems a lot more understandable, I suppose. I should probably have listened to RP

Undeniably. Look at the questions he gets in the post match interview here. Groveling My link

Bingo.

I was listening on the radio, like, so second hand, but they were saying that he was fantastic when he came on

Gleichfalls. Feels like Vladi against Chelsea, that penalty. Momentum!