The Ultimate FOOTBALL Thread (04/05)

[connackers 0]

Evening, am new here but CHELSEA CHELSEA CHELSEA!

 

Aside from that it`s the reporters with the over-inflated sense of self-importance. They just want to find something to complain about.

 

The last world-cup and euro-cup have shown how close international matches now are, so why all this hassle because we draw a game??? At the very beginning of the campaign as well.

[big-will 7]

Chelsea are buns.

 

Are you "traditional Chelsea". ie pre-last year.

Or "new Chelsea". ie. now

 

?

 

[scouser 4]

Hi connackers

 

 Quote:

why all this hassle because we draw a game???

Coz we played like a bunch of shite, and getting tired of it. Basically. Don't you agree?

[SHAG 0]

connackers - what do you expect out of this season? Anything less than the Premiership, FA Cup and Champions League not acceptable? I know a few ex-Chelsea fans, they are not happy with their lot right now, even though they effectively have more of a chance of doing anything with it.

 

That new boss sounds like he will provide a lot of entertainment though .

[connackers 0]

The new boss - class! Mourinho`s going to be a legend. He`ll outtalk Fergie and Wenger and eventually steal their crowns, but not this season. I reckon we`ll be second behind Arsenal but it`ll be VERY close, FA-Cup winners and Champions League finalists. But that`s pretty optimistic this early on.

 

I`ve supported Chelsea a few years now, back to the time Hoddle was proving his worth. Not that long really - not a die-hard blue and never had the chance to see a game but definitely not just a supportski!

 

As for England`s draw, maybe we weren`t great but f@ck it, we don`t have to play great every game. They were so pounded by the press who spend their time building them up and knocking them down. They have enough pressure on them as it is without the media overhyping everything. If we want to see them play exciting care-free football, that should be their environment. If we load them up with pressure and criticism and ridiculous expectations why are we then surprised when they play dull, unattractive, self-conscious football and loose their nerve.

 

Looking forward to the new season

[BagOfCrisps 24]

 

 Quote:

we don`t have to play great every game

I agree. But I think you're being too lenient.

 

Not playing shite every game would help the cause - when did England play anything better than average/below average?? Surely a world class team should not even be contemplating playing like they do.....

 

Chelsea - Ya new boss is gobby for sure, but give it a few weeks and the Gunners will be running away with it. Oops, already started

 

rach, giggsy - happy??

[rach 1]

No not really - what do you think? Bit of a terrible start to the season. I think we'll be a different team in a few more weeks when Ruud gets fit, Rio is back, Heinze fits in (good start!), Rooney and Saha in the team. That sounds like a good lineup. Talk about crappy luck with injuries though

[scouser 4]

A long one for you, rach:

 

Real Madrid wanted the world’s most recognisable player and were ready to pay a fortune to get their man. They couldn’t believe their luck when United named their price

Peanuts. That was the word that sprang to the mind of Jose Angel Sanchez, the director of marketing at Real Madrid. He had clinched the purchase of David Beckham for a shockingly low sum. For peanuts. No word in his own language, Spanish, expressed with more biting economy his stupefaction at Manchester United’s decision to surrender their most precious jewel so lamely.

 

Sanchez could not believe his ears when Peter Kenyon, Manchester United’s chief executive, named his price: ¤35m (£24m). It was as if United had failed to realise what they, the pioneers of merchandising and global sponsorship in the modern game, ought to have understood better than anybody. As if they had calculated Beckham’s worth in terms merely of the market rate for a footballer of his abilities, failing to add into the mix his value as the most resounding brand name in world sport.

 

Sanchez, a big man bursting with entrepreneurial ideas, wanted to shout for joy. But he could not. It was important now that he restrain his natural exuberance. Kenyon was sitting across a table from him, over lunch at a restaurant in Sardinia. Sanchez had flown in that morning from Madrid in the expectation of a long, hard slog, a tough day’s bargaining. The surprise at the way things turned out only heightened his euphoria. But he had to keep himself in check, to try to preserve a poker player’s composure. He couldn’t blurt out, “Yes! Yes! I’ll take him! Yes! Thank you. Thank you!” Besides, he hadn’t spoken to his boss yet, to Madrid’s formidable president, Florentino Perez. He wasn’t authorised to agree the deal on his own. Perez had the last word.

 

So, with a heroic effort of will, Sanchez merely nodded in acknowledgment of Kenyon’s proposal, battling to ignore the fireworks going off inside his head. Then, cool as could be, he began to argue some of the finer points of a potential deal. How much money would Real pay up front? How much would be contingent on Real winning trophies with Beckham in the side? Kenyon proposed a ¤30m/¤5m breakdown. Sanchez said how about a bit less up front. After an hour Kenyon — to Sanchez’s further surprise — relented, settling for ¤25m down and ¤10m more if Real and Beckham won every trophy under the sun together. It was now four o’clock in the afternoon. Sanchez got up, left the table and phoned Perez.

 

“Peanuts, they’re asking peanuts!” he cried, this time translating the word into the Spanish cacahuetes, in case el presidente missed the point. But el presidente did miss the point. Or feigned to do so.

 

“Is that what you went to Sardinia for? You’ve got to be kidding!” Perez said.

 

“What?” replied Sanchez.

 

“I mean push them lower,” Perez said. For the one and only time since he’d worked for Perez, Sanchez lost his temper with his boss. The effort to contain his emotions in these past few euphoric minutes had been too great. Now he let go. “What are you talking about, ‘Push them lower’? Don’t you see what we’ve got here, for Christ’s sake?” Perez did see. He understood better than anybody the value of the Beckham brand. Buying Beckham had been his idea. As it had been to buy Luis Figo, Zinedine Zidane and Ronaldo. Perez was a Spanish Medici, a lavish patron of the football arts resolved to assemble at the Bernabeu a contemporary collection to rival in their way the old masterpieces on display a couple of kilometres down the Paseo de la Castellana at Madrid’s Prado Museum. But as well as patron, fan and president of Real Madrid, he was a businessman, a tycoon who had made a fortune in the construction business, and his instinct, now that he smelt blood, was to keep squeezing. He would have responded the same way had Sanchez informed him that United had agreed to let Beckham go for ¤20m, for ¤10m.

 

This time, though, Sanchez felt that Perez was letting instinct get the better of his judgment. Okay, so maybe they’d knock Manchester United down a million euros if they kept at it; but maybe, too, they’d lose their man. And that was a prospect too ghastly to contemplate. Having invested so much mental and emotional energy in an enterprise that had become the consuming obsession of Sanchez’s life, which Perez himself had identified as crucial to his strategic vision for Real Madrid, it would be sheer madness to risk scuppering everything now for a few euros more. Beckham was on offer for less money than Perez had paid for the other three superstars — the so-called galacticos — whom he had acquired since being elected club president in the summer of 2000. A lot less money. Figo had cost ¤60m from Barcelona. Zidane had cost ¤75m from Juventus. Ronaldo had cost ¤45m from Internazionale. And now here was Sanchez telling him that Manchester United were letting Beckham go for a fixed price of ¤25m plus ¤10m more, conditional on how many trophies Real Madrid won with him on the team.

 

The final amount that Madrid would have to pay out, Sanchez estimated, would be about ¤32m. Which, in purely football terms, may have been a fair reflection of his worth compared to Zidane, Figo and Ronaldo, winners between them of six of the previous seven World Footballer of the Year awards. But if you factored in what Beckham would do for the club’s bank balance, the income he would bring in from sponsorships — with or without a ball at his feet — it was the football bargain of all time. Mind- bogglingly, the price United were asking placed the sale of the global icon outside the top 15 most expensive transfers in the world up to that point.

 

Never mind that football was humanity’s great unifying religion. Never mind that Beckham was one of the idols of the world game. Beyond that, beyond everything, he had become possibly the most famous man alive. Who else was there? The Pope? Maybe, although John Paul II cuts less of a figure than Beckham in the Muslim world. The president of the United States? Perhaps, but his identity would have been less well-known in large swathes of the Third World, and his popularity significantly lower everywhere outside the United States.

 

As for pop stars — Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, Madonna — or Hollywood actors — Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise — none reached an audience as deep and as wide. Household names they might have been in London, Paris or New York, but Beckham played on a bigger stage and his fame had spread — with the exception of parts of the US — to every corner of the planet. What couldn’t you sell, with Beckham on your team? “Okay,” Perez asked Sanchez. “So how much is Beckham worth to you?” “Five hundred million euros,” Sanchez shot back. Perez pondered that for a moment. A ratio of one to 15. A 1,500% return on his investment. Sanchez might have been exaggerating; but maybe he wasn’t. Beckham, as Sanchez would say, was an industry.

 

Beckham, the richest footballer alive (Zidane and Ronaldo were the next richest), was a one-man global brand whose full money-making potential had yet to be fully tapped. Especially in the great booming market of the world, Asia, which was in the grip of football mania, especially Beckham-mania.

 

Five hundred million, thought Perez, might not be wildly off the mark. Not at all. So what was that again? Twenty-five million euros plus a maximum of 10m more? That’s right, said Sanchez, calming down. The pair had calculated, before Sanchez set off for Sardinia, that they might, if they were lucky, get away with paying ¤40m for Beckham. They were prepared to pay ¤50m if absolutely necessary. And if it really came to it, more. So it wasn’t that difficult a decision to decide to go for Manchester United’s offer. Sanchez knew, once he had got over his momentary panic, that his president would come around. But it was still with relief that he heard Perez say at the other end of the phone line the sweet, magic words, “All right, then. We’ll have to take that.” And that, almost, was that. The date was Friday, June 13, 2003. What remained was to deal with the player and his agent. But Perez and Sanchez had established lines of communication with them already, and they were confident they’d wrap things up fairly briskly. What was certain, at any rate, was that the hard part was over. Manchester United had been persuaded, like Shakespeare’s Othello, to throw away a pearl richer than all their tribe. And more easily and for much less than Perez would have imagined possible when he first formed the idea, nearly a year earlier, of adding Beckham to his collection of superstars. Which was why, a couple of hours after that heated conversation with Sanchez, Perez surprised his right-hand man by calling him on his mobile telephone, catching him as he was about to board his private plane back to Madrid. He did not say hello. He did not introduce himself. He just said two words: “Congratulations, sunshine!”

 

SO WHY had it all been so easy? Why so much cheaper than Figo, Zidane and Ronaldo? Six months after Beckham joined, I put those questions separately to four of the top Real Madrid executives. Their first response was, in each case, to shrug. They hadn’t believed it at the time. They couldn’t quite fully believe it now. But once they began examining the possible factors involved, all roads led to one conclusion: that while the first three galacticos had had to be prised away from their clubs in operations requiring all of Perez’s tenacity and accumulated business cunning, as well as lots of cash, Beckham had been almost given away. Manchester United’s position had been, “Here, take him! We don’t want him any more.” It had not been Kenyon’s position. Through little fault of his own, he found himself in a predicament in which he had little choice but to hand over Beckham for a song, or at least for much less than he had originally estimated the selling price would be.

 

Kenyon, while nominally chief executive, was not the real power at United. Somebody else had the power to trump his initiatives, exercising almost godlike authority over the club’s affairs. Somebody else who was Real Madrid’s secret weapon in the Beckham transfer, their unwitting ally, without whom United had no intention whatsoever of letting Beckham go. In the late summer of 2002, when Beckham’s last season at Manchester United began, neither the United fans nor the players nor the directors of what was then the world’s richest club, had any inkling that the England captain would ever leave them. They would have reacted to the suggestion with protective rage. All, that is, except Perez’s ally, the most powerful individual in Manchester United’s history, the club’s manager, living legend and knight of the realm, Sir Alex Ferguson.

 

Kenyon knew Beckham was worth more to the club in marketing terms than all the rest of the United players combined. Kenyon did not want him to leave. In his heart of hearts, he would rather have let Ferguson go than Beckham. Kenyon was privately of the opinion that Ferguson had got far too big for his boots, that he had come to see himself as bigger not just than the players but than the club itself. But the successes of the previous decade had made Ferguson’s position unassailable among the fans.

 

So how did Perez set about capturing Beckham? At first, by doing nothing. Like a hunter in the forest, an image he liked, he hid in the undergrowth and lay in wait, eyes peeled, ears alert, believing that sooner or later, if he showed enough perseverance and patience, opportunity would come his way. He suspected from the start that his best chance of landing Beckham would come from what he described as the looming bust-up between Beckham and Ferguson. But it was not until February and the Flying Boot incident that Perez became aware of how favourably things were turning out for him. He also knew that the more badly, and more visibly, United wanted to let go of Beckham, the lower the price would be. A seller who makes no secret of his desire to sell is every buyer’s dream.

 

BECKHAM is a football nut. Given how cruelly short a player’s professional life is, he was not going to resign himself to spending his few remaining years in misery, cringing in the shadow of the bully who had made him great. Obviously what to do next was the main subject of conversation at the time with his agent, Tony Stephens. (The Manchester United boss could never stand the sight of Stephens — a grave, soft-spoken man utterly different in style from Ferguson — of whose relationship with Beckham he was wary and jealous.) Real Madrid were the club whom Stephens’s business brain would have judged to be best suited to enhance the Beckham brand. It was crystal clear what Stephens had to do: get in touch, via the agents’ bush telegraph, with Real Madrid. So what did the message from the Beckham camp to the Bernabeu say? Simply this: might Real be interested at some point in signing David Beckham? Back came the unequivocal reply: Yes.

 

Perez quietly thrilled to the news. The ice had been broken, the final chapter of Beckham’s career at Manchester United had begun to be written, and if things went according to past form, Perez would once again get his man. The two big transfers of the previous two years had also been initiated by the players themselves. Zidane and Ronaldo, again through the agents’ network, had been the ones to make the first move. That is the way Real Madrid like it. For reasons of dignity and pride, but also because it makes good business sense. The more a player wants to come to your club, and your club alone, the lower the price you’re going to pay.

 

Perez understood this better than anybody. He is a proud Spaniard and an even more proud Real Madrid fan. He venerates the club over which he presides, like a cardinal his cathedral. That is why it is important to him that prospective players show the club its due respect, why they should — in an attitude of proper deference — make the first contact. But he is dreamy only up to a point. He possesses in abundance what the American author Saul Bellow describes as “ the cheating imagination of the successful businessman”. He schemes, he plots and he is invariably several moves ahead of his rivals. There were still a couple of months to go, but already he had the endgame in mind. On May 4 Manchester United won the English League championship. Four days later, Perez confided that the crunch was coming: “Ferguson wants him to go, Beckham wants to go, we would like to have him, and so, therefore, let’s make everybody happy.” Sanchez, his eyes glowing, told me that same day why landing Beckham was an absolute must. “Today Real Madrid and Manchester United represent the South and the North, the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon,” he said. “To get Beckham would allow us to cross over to the North, to get the Anglo-Saxons too. Real Madrid would be the United Nations.”

 

On May 19, at a meeting of the G14 clubs in Manchester, Sanchez asked Kenyon’s permission to talk to Beckham’s agent. Kenyon thought about it for a moment, then said yes. That was the green light Sanchez had been waiting for. He travelled to Nice, where Stephens was with the Beckham family. His purpose was to establish whether Beckham did indeed wish to come to Real Madrid; whether there was any doubt in his mind. Stephens told him what he wanted to hear: after Manchester United, the only possible club for Beckham had to be Real Madrid. Anything else would be a come-down. Then Sanchez put the basic outlines of a financial offer on the table. Before going any further, there were two things Beckham should know, he said. The salary he would receive at Real would be non-negotiable. He would be paid no more, no less, than the other four galacticos, Ronaldo, Zidane, Figo and Raul — which was ¤5.5m a year. And, like the other galacticos, he would have to cede 50% of his image rights — meaning money he made from endorsing brand names such as Pepsi-Cola and adidas — to the club.

 

It was a delicate moment for Sanchez. Scary. He knew this was an awful lot to ask of a one-man multinational such as Beckham. Kenyon had, in fact, warned him in a private chat that there was no way Beckham would accept such a deal. But whatever Beckham said, Real Madrid were not going to make an exception for him; they were not going to risk the whole galactico edifice coming down for one man. To Sanchez’s boundless relief and surprise, Stephens told him not to worry. “

 

 

In the end, David’s decision will not be based on economics; it will be made with the heart,” he said.

 

Then, out of the blue, calamity struck for Perez. On June 9, Manchester United plc issued a statement saying they had accepted an offer of ¤45m from Joan Laporta. In the event of him winning the Barcelona presidency that coming weekend, Beckham would be sold to the big Catalan club. Neither Beckham nor Stephens had even been consulted.

 

Beckham received the news with dismay. He felt angry and betrayed. Perez saw that his big chance had come. He let Beckham know that now at last was the time for him to put his cards on the table. Beckham needed little encouragement. The last line of his short statement from California — “David’s advisers have no plans to meet Mr Laporta or his representatives” — was a polite way of saying, “Barça, get lost!” If Beckham didn’t want to go there, that was that. The decisive meeting between Real Madrid and Manchester United was then held in Sardinia, over that long lunch during which Kenyon gave Beckham away for “peanuts”. But before the deal was sealed, Beckham had to talk to Perez personally and give him his “password”, Perez’s term for what others might have described as the kissing of the papal ring. Perez had a thing about hearing the players themselves issue a pledge of allegiance to the club. He had insisted that Zidane and Ronaldo do it. Now he wanted Beckham to do the same.

 

The telephone conversation took place on June 15. That night Real played Atletico Madrid at Atletico’s stadium, the Vicente Calderon. The directors of Real and Atletico got together at a restaurant for lunch. Halfway through the meal, Sanchez, mobile in hand, came running over to Perez in a state of intense excitement. He had Beckham on the line.

 

Perez got up and scanned the restaurant for a quiet place to talk. Nothing. He went outside, but the area around the entrance to the restaurant was also milling with people. Perez was a man of steady nerves, but he was beginning to lose his cool. He had David Beckham at the end of the line, and there he was, the president of Real Madrid, scrambling around for a place where he could talk.

 

He tried the kitchen: hopeless. He tried the corridor outside the toilets: no good either. The gents’ toilet: it too was teeming. There was only one possibility left. The ladies’ toilet. He dived in. There was nobody there. Peace at last! Popping his head out, he instructed his bodyguard to stand at the door and not to let anybody in. Beckham, evidently well prepared by Sanchez, did not deviate from the expected script. “My dream,” he told Perez, “is to play for Real Madrid.”

 

 

“I am delighted to hear it,” replied Perez. “You will never regret it. We are a family. We will look after you well here. You are a great player. Here we will make you an even better player.”

 

Beckham thanked Perez for those kind words and then promised him that he would be watching the Atletico-Real game that night. He wished his soon-to-be new team good luck. Perez then emerged — not without a little circumspection — from the ladies’ toilets, went over to Sanchez and told him to meet Stephens the next day to finalise arrangements.

 

Beckham, who was back home in Hertfordshire having a barbecue with his family, had a conversation with his wife. At the end of it they both agreed once and for all that, yes indeed, Real Madrid it would be. And then he sat down to watch the game. Real Madrid were 3-0 up within half an hour. They won 4-0. The negotiations between Stephens and Sanchez began the next day, a Monday, and ended on the Tuesday afternoon. After all the pain and uncertainty of the previous six months at Manchester United, Beckham had finally found refuge in a safe, magical place, a football heaven where they played football like angels, and everybody wore white.

[grungy-gonads 54]

Thats all well and good, but missing a few other important points if I remember correctly.

 

Sir Becks wasn't performing. (Sounds familiar that one hey?)

 

Sir Becks wasn't into signing a long-term contract.

 

Sir Fergie decided that he was best out and sell him before the price went down.

[rach 1]

They tapped him up early.

He refused to go anywhere else.

Fergie wanted shot since - apart from his football which was not getting better shall we say - he was an increasingly divisive and distracting influence at Utd.

 

It was a good decision.

 

Nothing to do with the nightmare injury crap thats going on now. Latest one is Gaz Nevs is out for a month.

[connackers 0]

 Quote:

Originally posted by BagOfCrisps:

Not playing shite every game would help the cause - when did England play anything better than average/below average?? Surely a world class team should not even be contemplating playing like they do.....

Chelsea - Ya new boss is gobby for sure, but give it a few weeks and the Gunners will be running away with it. Oops, already started
[/QB]

I don`t think we do that bad. People have a habit of remembering the crap games more than the good ones. The Croatia game for example. In any case on the last two tournaments we`ve done better than anyone else in Europe. Definitely better than France, Italy or Spain the supposedly world class teams of Europe. Our game`s built on fight and work, while it`s not as pretty to watch as the more skillful teams and there`s certainly a lot of those, when it comes together it`s still pretty special. I honestly think we`re still on an upwards curve. Especially considering our best players are the ones absent or playing like sh:te i.e. Ferdinand, Beckham, Owen, Gerrard.

As for Chelsea - the chase is on!

[scouser 4]

Offside law may be changed

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/3656092.stm

 

[scouser 4]

Good start to the C/L

[rach 1]

Maybe for you Good to see Ruud back though......

[connackers 0]

sounds like liverpool had a good one scouser! how`s Benitez looking so far?

[giggsy 0]

I see Owen is getting some good time on the bench over at those losers in Spain.

 

Rio, Ruud and Rooney with us soon - things will get better rach. I'm worried about Howard most, he's looking like he's having a confidence crisis and his twitching is getting worse.

 

And I just wish Fergie would drop Silvestre. He needs to be dropped RIGHT NOW. Heinze looking worth the wait.

[scouser 4]

connackers...... jury is still out on the new boss --- we shall see.

 

As long as they keep winning..... Monday against MancU is going to be interesting. I wonder if Rio will appear.

[rach 1]

I think he will - even if it's from the bench.

 

Rumour has it Wazzer might be on the bench as well.

[rach 1]

 

At last - a decent performance.

[scouser 4]

We played really badly in the first half especially, lucky it wasn't a more embarrassing goal total to be honest.

 

Whats more worrying though is Stevie G's injury.

[big-will 7]

Good one about Real here, complete with some crazy funky characters mid text I watched their latest game last night and it was very very average.

 

Real need to take a reality check

 

Kevin McCarra

Tuesday September 21, 2004

The Guardian

 

The most memorable achievement of Jos・Antonio Camacho's four months at the Bernab騏 was to keep Ronaldo's waistline in trim. Anyone who can get the self-indulgent Brazilian to knuckle down has to be saluted but the Real Madrid head coach resigned after deciding that he could not bring any such sense of proportion to the club itself.

 

Real have been bloated for too long, puffed up by their own boastfulness and by the credulous way in which others have parroted their claims. Reality should have been good enough. Over the past few years there have been exciting and artful performances to be relished in Europe and beyond.

 

This club, however, could not settle for that. They pretended that with commercial genius and a brash transfer market policy they had somehow broken new ground in football history. It is purely Real's self-presentation that has been miraculous.

 

Whether putting himself or the team on display, Florentino P駻ez has been a publicist of genius and he swept to re-election as president this summer despite a trophy-less season. It takes strong nerves to remember that it is actually Valencia, with two of the last three La Liga titles, who have dominated the Spanish scene.

 

There has been too little scorn of Real's beautifully projected image as the club whose wealth brooks no resistance. The spectacle of the David Beckham signing a year ago was so absorbing that it almost went unnoticed that the deal was offset by the sale, release or loaning out of a dozen players.

 

Sport, however, exposes the truth sooner or later. Real had been left with so hopelessly meagre a squad that an unprepared footballer could be humiliated. During a 4-1 pounding at Sevilla the young defender Rub駭 Gonz疝ez had to be substituted after 26 minutes and was then seen sobbing on the bench.

 

There would be more tears to be shed by others before the close of a season in which defeat in the Champions League quarter-final pointed the way to five consecutive losses at the close of the La Liga programme. Only when the club folds away its finely embroidered myths about itself can it start to recover.

 

In simple sporting terms the situation is not irredeemable. Last week's 3-0 defeat at Bayer Leverkusen, shaming as it was, merely marked the start of a Champions League group. Nor is it such a disgrace to go down 1-0 at Espanyol, as they did on Saturday, when Zin馘ine Zidane and Luis Figo were joined on the injury list by Iker Casillas, who dislocated a finger in the warm-up.

 

After falling to bruising defeats Real ought to realise, however, that it is time to give up the high-wire act. Virtuosity did hold them safe above all contenders for a while and it was epitomised by the contortionist's volley from Zidane that delivered the astounding winner over Leverkusen in the 2002 Champions League final.

 

The Frenchman, however, is now old enough to have retired from international football and Figo is detaching himself from Portugal's cause. Ronaldo is younger but no one can be sure that he can still deliver the sort of hat-trick that inspired a standing ovation from a superbly sportsmanlike Old Trafford in 2003.

 

The gal當ticos are waning and no new ones exist for P駻ez to summon. There has been a rethink at the Bernab騏, with Emilio Butrague replacing Jorge Valdano as technical director, but it has a fair distance yet to go. Jonathan Woodgate and Walter Samuel, the two costly centre-halves, will not by themselves give adequate depth to the squad.

 

Recognising the intractable egos on the playing staff and a shortage of challengers for their pegs in the dressing room, Camacho abandoned his post. Real have not seen silverware since Vicente Del Bosque, who had already supplied two Champions League honours, landed the La Liga trophy in 2003. The immediate sacking of that low-key figure snapped the last link with reality.

 

Now Real have to re-establish contact with humility. The side, with Zidane at his peak, was a joy but it never deserved to be ranked with, say, the Milan of the early 1990s, who could complement Frank Rijkaard, Ruud Gullit and Marco van Basten with native sons such as Franco Baresi and Paolo Maldini to produce extraordinary all-round strength.

 

When the current consternation fades, P駻ez should change tack and dedicate himself to giving us a team that is cherished more than any of the great stars it might happen to contain.

[BagOfCrisps 24]

Decent game to watch, Liverpool were pretty crap in the first half. I like the way Rio was there munching on jaffas while playing... I thought there'd be some crappy rule about not eating when you're on the pitch?

[2pints-mate 0]

BoC - must disagree. Not being a fan of either the Scousers or the Mancs, it wasn't much of a game to watch. Scousers were awful in the first half, at least it was a bit more level in the 2nd. Nothing special.

 

I care about Gerrard though (England implications...)

[maoriboy 0]

Well whadda ya know. guess who's got himself in the poo.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/3677740.stm

 

I was wondering when he would do something stupid like this.

[rach 1]

Easy to jump to conclusions. Apparently he was walking his dog and some scouse idiot went up to him and gave him and his dog hasssle. The facts are not yet know, let's wait shall we....