STOKE CITY 2 - 0 Liverpool FC [Fuller 56', Jones 90'+1], EPL Gameweek 13

[mcgillianaire]

I think the only way Torres, Reina and Gerrard will stay at the end of the season is if John Henry fires Roy Hodgson before Christmas and brings in a big name like Hiddink. The new owners will also probably have to demonstrate their ambition by splashing the dough in January on at least one major signing. Otherwise we're toast. It's probably too late already. What a disaster the last eighteen months have been. YNWA

Comments

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

I just can't imagine that John Henry has a clue. How his experience at Boston has any relevance to Liverpool is absolutely beyond me. I was totally baffled by that decision.

[mcgillianaire.livejournal.com]

He doesn't and he's admitted as much. Hopefully the new Chief Executive he's currently looking for will have a couple extra grey cells over his precessor, Christian Purslow. The man responsible for ending the Rafalucion. As bad as things were last season, it's gotten worse under Hodgson.

Reckon Spurs will qualify for another edition of Champions League?

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

Probably not, but maybe. I mean, it's possible - that fourth spot could be anybody, and there's enough talent in the team - but while they're a lot of fun to watch, the sheer naivete of the tactics have left them wildly inconsistent. But I'm a bit of a Redknapp skeptic - it's not clear to me his management is one for long-term or consistent success. It's like he's never heard of the counterattack.

Though it's good they're at least not some dour lot grinding out awful draws and narrow wins by packing in fourteen or fifteen defensive players. That would not be the Spurs way. I definitely prefer an inconsistent but entertaining and positive side to that. I'm glad for many reasons that Tottenham are not Man City.

[mcgillianaire.livejournal.com]

I think most of us are glad most clubs are not Man City. I'm also a fan of Big 'Arry. If it ain't broke, don't fix it comes to mind. I liked Jol a lot and after the Ramos debacle, Spurs have a lot to be thankful for not slipping back into the mid-table oblivion that characterised the 90s and early 00s. I'm really enjoying the way the game's being played, not sure if you know but on the back of Barclays ATM receipts you can enter into a draw for weekly tickets. I've been entering myself for tickets at WHL dutifully for the past couple seasons without much luck. Previously it was just because it was my nearest EPL ground, now it would be for the exciting fare on offer. It's certainly looks like the gap has closed down between all the teams, compared to about 5-6 seasons ago. It'll make life tough for Spurs but it'll hopefully make for one helluva exciting season.

Any particular reason why you support Spurs?

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

I sort of just picked them. I always liked football, it's the sport I played, but I started following it more seriously after the 1998 World Cup, which was a blast (funnily I couldn't be bothered even to notice the 1994 World Cup was happening, and had I cared I surely could have gone to some games).

I recognize that's not really a valid way to go about it - I should support my local club, but of course there isn't one, at any level. (When I lived in Nashville I followed the local A-league side, but that's not much different than following a pub team on the Hackney Marshes - the 'ground' is a flat place in the local park.)

It felt just as foolish following a distant MLS team (though I do, to a degree, support Chivas USA, because they are the local rival to the LA Galaxy, ugh ugh ugh) with not much tradition. So I started reading books about football, which is the way I prefer to interact with anything. I figured definitely not Manchester United, because, you know, bleah, that's like some Midwesterner supporting the Yankees instead of the Reds or the Indians. I thought maybe a London club because I'd been there, though I almost picked Newcastle because I was last in London during one of Newcastle's unsuccessful visits to the FA Cup final, and they were everywhere, and I thought them rather fun, all singing their songs and wearing their referee's shirts). I'd have preferred a club with at least an old tradition of coherently left-wing support - I'm a romantic that way - but it didn't seem like there were any. Ultimately it came down to a bunch of Arsenal fans making anti-semitic taunts against Spurs supporters on a blog I was reading. I'm Jewish; that gave me a partisan feeling. So I followed the course Pascal recommends if you feel like making the Wager - you go through the motions until belief 'catches.' When I started feeling bad when Spurs lost I knew it had worked. (By that criterion the other side I'm passionate about is the Indiana U. NCAA basketball team, and the Milwaukee Brewers.)

Oh, also, I dislike the writing of Nick Hornby. That was the other thing.

In a way it's too bad; Arsenal are the better run club, and they do some things I like that Spurs don't, like operating a women's side. Or I should have picked Liverpool, what with all the Militant Tendency history and so on, but for some reason I didn't. I certainly don't actively dislike them the way I do Arsenal, Man U and Chelsea. But there are all kinds of dimensions of being a supporter that I simply don't know and can't participate in. It's all a bit artificial, really. Probably just a way of expressing my feeling of in some ways not fitting well into the United States, and my disdain for gridiron football, chosen sporting poison of the South. Southern American football fans almost to an individual think that soccer is gay.