Premier League 2020-21

[copkillah]

Da ne preterujemo, trener bez iskustva, nema šta da izgubi. Ako budu loši, niko neće kriviti njega. Ako klub bude kupljen - možda dobije odrešenije ruke., a možda im i krene. Nije da je baš bilo šta rizikovao.

[Jean-Luc Picard]

Jebeš mi sve ako prOliver nije poklonio dva penal West Bromu. 

[Mindaugas Žukauskas]

Deluje da će Lidsu doći glave ubitačan ritam u kojem su igrali utakmice u prvom delu sezone. Imali smo primer pre 10 sezona, kada je simpatični ofanzivni Blekpul Ijana Holoveja držao sredinu tabele u januaru, a drugi deo sezone odigrao u slobodnom padu i završio na 19. mestu.

[189-]

 

zanimljiva ekipa

[John Coltrane]

Jel se ovo renovira “zapad” Krejven Kotidza?

[189-]

parker sa 10 puta jeftinijom ekipom izuva lamparda. 

[Mindaugas Žukauskas]

Eo crveni za idiota Robinsona. Stvaraju se uslovi da zdominiraju Timo i Kai.

[John Coltrane]

Mogu jedino na klupi da izdominiraju. 
 

Sramim se da priznam, ali na momente mi je žao Debelog...

[Weenie Pooh]

9 minutes ago, John Coltrane said:

Mogu jedino na klupi da izdominiraju. 
 

Sramim se da priznam, ali na momente mi je žao Debelog...

 

A što, ko mu je zakucao Nemce za klupu? Ko mu ih je kupio?  

[John Coltrane]

3 minutes ago, Weenie Pooh said:

 

A što, ko mu je zakucao Nemce za klupu? Ko mu ih je kupio?  

Sam je kriv - ja to pišem nedeljama u nazad, vezano za Nemce pogotovu.

 

Prvu sezonu je odradio odlično sa decom, a kad je transfer ban istekao našao se kao devojčica sa bombonjerom i jeo je dok se nije usrao. 
 

 

[John Coltrane]

Fin tekst pred sutrašnji derbi.

 

Spoiler

Liverpool and Manchester United: The rivalry, the history, the stories

Daniel Taylor and Oliver Kay Jan 15, 2021

The last time Liverpool and Manchester United were in this position, Jurgen Klopp was in his first season as manager of Borussia Dortmund and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, two years after calling time on his playing career, was starting a new role in charge of Sir Alex Ferguson’s reserves.

Perhaps you remember Steven Gerrard kissing the television camera after swiping in a penalty when the two sides locked horns at Old Trafford. Maybe you recall the chasing that Fernando Torres gave Nemanja Vidic during a 4-1 win that left United’s centre-half looking in need of smelling salts.

Or maybe you recall the scenes of ecstasy at the same ground three weeks later when a 17-year-old with gelled hair and the nickname of Kiko came off the bench to turn the 2008-09 title race back in United’s favour.

Federico Macheda was too young to drink the man-of-the-match champagne that was presented to him for that dramatic stoppage-time winner against Aston Villa. His career since then has taken him to Panathinaikos on an unorthodox route featuring loan spells at Doncaster Rovers and Cardiff City. But that day in Manchester, he was a king.

It was United’s 18th title, equalling Liverpool’s number, and their supporters had never forgotten the banner that went up on the Kop – “Come back and sing Ooh-Aah Cantona when you’ve won 18” – when Ferguson won the first of his 13 championships in 1993.

Ferguson’s hair had gone from chestnut to grey in the years he spent trying to “knock Liverpool off their fucking perch” and, this being a war in schadenfreude, United’s fans took a banner of their own to Anfield after pulling level in 2009. “You told us to come back when we’ve won 18 … we are back”.

And now United are back again, taking in the view from the top of the Premier League and enjoying an apparent renaissance at a time when Liverpool might have been forgiven for thinking they had seen them off. The score in title wins is 20-19 in United’s favour and they would desperately like to believe that, rather than allowing the old enemy to pull level at 20 each, they might even go two clear by the end of the season.

It is seven years since United led the way at this stage of the season and even longer, without overlooking Manchester City’s potential to make the current title race a much wider argument, since they went head to head with Liverpool, the club they regard as their bete noire.

“They have always been our main rival,” Ferguson once said. “It’s always been our derby. Geographically, historically, the two cities, the two most successful clubs in Britain. When they get together, you expect sparks to fly.”

---

It is a windswept scene on one of the more exposed pitches at Liverpool’s academy. It is an under-18s’ game and, as a gauge of the mood, the match report in the Liverpool Echo uses the word “feisty”. There is one goal separating the teams when, in the closing minutes, a player from each side chases after a loose ball.

Neco Williams gets there first for Liverpool but one of his opponents is coming in at full speed and, in that split second, you know it isn’t going to be pretty.

Brandon Williams was brought up in Harpurhey, a part of north Manchester where it is fair to say footballers are taught not to hold back when it comes to 50-50 tackles. Nobby Stiles, who was once hit by a dart in a game at Anfield, was from just down the road in Collyhurst, as was Brian Kidd, another of United’s former European Cup winners. Brandon’s mum, Lisa, runs a greasy-spoon cafe in Harpurhey’s indoor market and round these parts, they never shirk a challenge.

This one is X-rated. A cameraman is filming from the side of the pitch and, no matter how many times you watch the video, the collision of boot, ball and bone can still make you wince. As red cards go, it feels like it should be the darkest shade of crimson. Nor is it the only occasion when United’s left-back has been culpable of succumbing to Manchester-Liverpool hostilities.

In the modern era, when fewer homegrown players make it to Premier League level, it is often in the younger age groups that sparks are more likely to fly. The under-23s’ fixture in September, finishing 5-3 to Liverpool, was a case in point. Both teams finished with 10 players after more feistiness. Leighton Clarkson was sent off for Liverpool, Shola Shoretire for United.

For some, it doesn’t even have to be a Liverpool-United clash. Brandon Williams also introduced himself to Accrington Stanley’s captain, Sean McConville, during a pre-season fixture in 2019. McConville, who is from Liverpool, swung a punch. Williams, 12 years younger, came back with a headbutt and was sent off again.

Gary Neville did likewise once on Steve McManaman in a Manchester derby, butting a City player who will always be associated with Liverpool. Neville has had to adopt a less aggressive mindset in his television role with Sky Sports, but don’t think for a second that he was exaggerating the antipathy that led to Old Trafford coming up with a song to celebrate the fact “he hates Scousers”.

Neville was fined £5,000 by the Football Association for making up his own version of the haka in one game, directly in front of the Liverpool end, after a last-minute winner for his team at Old Trafford in 2006. His relationship with Liverpool was shaped by the misery they inflicted on him as a boyhood United fan. Grudges fester. Emotions run high.

Things have changed, though. In the 1-1 draw at Old Trafford last season, there was only one booking in the entire match. When Liverpool won 2-0 at Anfield, there were four, including one for Mohamed Salah for taking off his shirt to celebrate the second goal in stoppage time. It was certainly a far cry from the days of Souness vs Robson, McMahon vs Whiteside or Gerrard vs Keane.

“It was always high-energy, adrenalin flowing — and that was just the crowd,” John O’Shea, the former United player, tells The Athletic. “They were never spectacular games because there were so many fouls early on and there wasn’t much free-flowing football. It generally took until the second half for the game to settle down and open up a bit, but the atmosphere was always great — and rightly so, because we were top at the time they were trying to get back at us.

“I always got a few cuts from those games. I’ve still got a few scars now. It’s purely down to the history. The two most successful teams in England. That was always in the background, never mind where both teams were in the table. The manager (Ferguson) always used to make sure we were up for it. But he would also talk about controlling the emotions when we were playing at Anfield because he knew it was such a hostile environment that things would go against us at various times. He always said we mustn’t react to it.”

Wayne Rooney, by his own admission, was guilty sometimes of letting the atmosphere get to him – so much so that Ferguson left him out for one visit to Anfield in 2011.

He did score one goal in front of the Kop, though, and deliberately goaded the home supporters with his celebration. Among the missiles thrown his way, there was an old Nokia phone. A half-eaten burger was chucked at Neville in another match and the physio, Dave Fevre, had to suffer his own indignities.

“I went on the pitch at Anfield and somebody in the crowd started shouting, ‘Physio! Physio!’,” Fevre says. “I looked around and this guy shouted, ‘Is that a helicopter pad on your head?’. I was going bald at the time. All the Liverpool fans were laughing. There wasn’t much I could do other than smile and give him a thumbs-up. It was a decent line, in fairness.”

Fevre was part of Ferguson’s backroom staff during the period that culminated in United winning the treble.

“To begin with, I didn’t really understand the significance of playing Liverpool,” he says. “Then I remember going to Anfield for the first time. We lost and at half-time, the gaffer went ballistic. I was treating Lee Sharpe because his calf was tight and suddenly the gaffer just erupted.

“He was so angry he picked up a water bottle and threw it against the wall. It burst – and went all over me. Sharpey was trying not to laugh because I was dripping with water. I just kept my head down. That was my first introduction to a Liverpool game and I thought, ‘Wow, this is a different level’.”

The bus journey into Anfield was another experience. “One of my jobs was to play cards with Peter Schmeichel on the bus to help keep him calm,” Fevre says. “We were driving into Anfield and, approaching the stadium, there were all the guys selling T-shirts outside. Peter stopped the game of cards. He reached into his inside pocket and pulled out maybe £200 in £10 notes. Then he started waving it through the window to antagonise the Liverpool fans.

“I was thinking, ‘Oh, Peter, don’t do that’. As soon as he did it, there were bottles and all sorts coming against the bus.

“The following year, we were on the bus to Anfield again and I said to him, ‘Whatever you do, don’t pull that stupid stunt again’. But he wasn’t going to listen to me.

“We got to the ground and he pulled out another wad of notes. The same guys were there with the T-shirts and this time they were ready for us. One of them put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a wad 10 times the size of Peter’s. It must have been at least a grand. The lads on the bus were loving it and Peter actually stopped to clap this guy.”

---

Between them, Liverpool and United boast 39 league titles, 19 FA Cups, 13 League Cups, nine European Cups/Champions Leagues, one European Cup Winners’ Cup and four UEFA Cup/Europa League triumphs. Rarely, though, have they found themselves in direct competition for supremacy. They have contested just two FA Cup finals (both won by United) and two League Cup finals (both won by Liverpool). There was a Liverpool-United-Liverpool-United title-winning sequence from 1963-64 to 1966-67, but remarkably those are the only times the league title has been passed between English football’s two most successful clubs.

Even title races involving both clubs have been a rarity. United have finished runners-up to Liverpool on four occasions — and the reverse just once in 2008-09, when Rafael Benitez’s team lost only one game all season but finished four points adrift. It is almost as if for one to become dominant, the other needs to be in a period of self-inflicted struggle.

And yet both clubs, at their most dominant, have suffered frustration at the hands of arch-rivals raising their game. Over a five-year spell in the mid-1980s, Liverpool beat United just once in 14 meetings. By contrast, they beat a dominant United team six times out of seven between December 2000 and March 2003.

Another stat: Ian Rush (above) scored 277 goals for Liverpool before he finally got one against United. That was the day in April 1992 when, after threatening to win their first league title in a quarter of a century, United lost to a soundtrack of gloating and jubilation at Anfield, confirming Leeds United as champions. Liverpool had fallen into a sharp decline that season, but that afternoon it didn’t matter.

It was also the day a Liverpool supporter asked a young Ryan Giggs for his autograph outside the stadium. Giggs signed his name on a piece of paper and the fan tore it up in front of his face. The following season, Ferguson pinned a photograph — Dante’s Inferno, he called it — on the wall of the home dressing room at Old Trafford, showing all the distraught faces on the bench. It was there, he explained, to “make sure it never happens again”.

Everyone knows what happened next as Ferguson got his knighthood, United won 13 league titles in 20 years and Liverpool entered their own barren period. There were cup successes and occasional victories over United, but John Scales, who played for Liverpool in the 1990s, admits, “We lacked that ruthless streak, that relentless pursuit of excellence week in, week out.”

As the club’s former captain Phil Thompson, assistant manager to Gerard Houllier between 1998 and 2004, puts it, “We always seemed to be chasing Man United.”

---

The games rarely come close to living up to the hype — certainly not for the neutral anyway. A typical example came in March 2007, when United, chasing their first league title in four years, struggled to get going at Anfield against a Liverpool team who were fired up but lacking precision. “We were hanging on at 0-0,” O’Shea says, “especially because we had had Scholesy (Paul Scholes) sent off.”

And then, in stoppage time, Cristiano Ronaldo’s free kick bounced up in front of Pepe Reina, who spilt the ball into the path of a grateful O’Shea for a dramatic winner. “It was an amazing moment for me, especially for what it meant in the title race,” he says. “Even now, that’s the first thing people — not just United fans but Liverpool fans back home — bring up when they see me.”

The former Republic of Ireland defender, now a coach at Reading, also knows what it is like to watch one of these fixtures from the away end, namely the FA Cup fifth-round tie in 2006.

“It was myself and Rio (Ferdinand) and a lad called Milly, who was one of Wes Brown’s good friends,” O’Shea says. “I was injured at the time and we decided we would do it for a bit of an adventure. We got to the car park and thankfully no one saw us pull up. Milly went to get the tickets from reception. We left it as late as possible to walk up to the stadium and we had our hoods pulled up so no one could see us. But because it was such an intense rivalry, there were riot police all the way down the street.

“They clocked us with our hoods up and they were shouting at us, ‘Get your hoods down’. Milly was like, ‘They can’t’. We took our hoods down and they shouted, ‘Put your hoods back up!’. It was an amazing atmosphere. Unfortunately, the game didn’t go so well.”

Liverpool won 1-0, but the match is remembered mostly for United’s Alan Smith suffering a broken leg and fractured ankle as he tried to block John Arne Riise’s free kick.

It was also one of those days when, sitting in the stands, you could not escape the vitriol between both sets of supporters, including taunts about the disasters at Munich, Heysel and Hillsborough — lives lost being used as ammunition in what, at times, has felt like an anything-goes mentality.

On occasions, the atmosphere and the intensity have seemed to get to some players. Vidic was sent off four times in matches against Liverpool — and contrary to the popular myth, it was not always because Torres had given him the runaround (below). Javier Mascherano, the former Liverpool midfielder, received two red cards in the fixture. Scholes was sent off for swinging a punch at Xabi Alonso. Jamie Carragher somehow escaped a dismissal when his studs punctured Nani’s leg in 2011, and the only red card of Michael Owen’s club career came as an 18-year-old against United at Old Trafford in 1998 for lunges at Peter Schmeichel and Ronny Johnsen.

The red mist descended again in 2015 when Gerrard, straining at the leash before coming on as a half-time substitute for his final experience of the rivalry, was sent off after only 38 seconds for stamping on Ander Herrera.

It was the first time United had played at Anfield since his infamous slip against Chelsea towards the end of the 2013-14 season. Gerrard had spent the first half listening to chants of “You nearly won the league” from United’s fans and took out his frustration on Herrera almost immediately. He called it “38 seconds defined by anger and a kind of madness”.

In recent years, the temperature has dropped a little. Both teams have had a makeover since Luis Suarez’s spiteful words to Patrice Evra brought a new wave of toxicity and bad feeling in 2011. And the identity of the men in the dugouts makes a difference, too. Solskjaer, in particular, tends to avoid the press-conference sniping that Ferguson and Jose Mourinho used to regard as part of the fun.

To adapt Benitez’s line of attack from 2009, it is also just a “fact” that Liverpool’s priority has been catching, and overhauling, Manchester City rather than having to worry too much about the club from the other side of Mancunian Way.

For Liverpool, the rivalry had gravitated towards City. The headlines were about Klopp vs Pep Guardiola. Solskjaer and his erratic team were lagging a long way behind when Liverpool became the champions of England, Europe and, indeed, the world.

That doesn’t change the fact that United will probably always be the club against whom Liverpool measure themselves first, and vice versa. “No wonder you hate us,” reads one of the banners that is often seen at Liverpool’s away fixtures (showing six stars to signify their superior number of European Cup wins) and James Milner clearly did not realise one of his team-mates was filming his conversation with Adam Lallana when Klopp’s players lifted the Premier League trophy in July.

Milner was brought up in Leeds, another city that tends to look at the red half of Manchester through hard, suspicious eyes. “First time I’ve ever wanted a red ribbon,” he said, looking at the trophy. “It’s always been United before… fucking wankers.”

---

Can you believe there was once a time when United’s supporters serenaded Liverpool’s players to sympathise with beating them in a Wembley final?

It might sound implausible to the modern generation but there are plenty of witnesses from the 1977 FA Cup final who can provide first-hand evidence about the scenes when Bob Paisley’s team, beaten 2-1, passed the United end on a losers’ lap of honour.

Nicky Welsh, who was on United’s books in the 1980s, was one. Welsh, a staunch United fan, has a book coming out, My United Road, and one of its stories takes in that game at Wembley.

Other accounts recall chants of “good luck Liverpool” because Paisley’s men had the European Cup final coming up four days later. It was, Welsh recalls, probably the last time there was any conviviality between the two clubs before mutual hatred set in. And, to be clear, he wasn’t too fond of Liverpool himself, then or now.

“Whenever we played them, even at youth and junior level, the contests were no-holds-barred clashes,” he says. “You daren’t lose or not perform well. It was also known for both clubs to move players across or down a notch to strengthen their teams. All that mattered was to win. Win, at any cost.”

It certainly tells us something that it was 1964 when Phil Chisnall became the last player to transfer between the two clubs, signing for Liverpool for a £25,000 fee — and that when Gabriel Heinze stunned Ferguson by trying to do likewise 43 years later, United went to a Premier League arbitration hearing to stop it happening.

Yet the history can be confusing if you have followed the common narrative that the two clubs have detested each other since the year dot.

Not many people realise that Liverpool, then in the Second Division, offered two of their players to help tide United over after the Munich air disaster in 1958.

Or you could go back even further to their formative years when the two clubs were close enough to put together a joint motion, submitted to the Football League, that every team should wear a red home strip and a white away one. Not the greatest idea, perhaps, but more evidence of the alliance between the clubs.

Did you also know that Frank O’Farrell’s first “home” match as United manager, having taken over from Matt Busby, took place at Anfield (below)? The year was 1971 and United had been banned from Old Trafford because of several outbreaks of hooliganism. Again, it was Liverpool who offered to help.

There have certainly been trigger points in modern times, such as the furores surrounding Heinze in 2007 and the Suarez affair four years later, but the generally strong relationship at boardroom level has moved to a new level in recent years.

In 2017, photographs were published of Liverpool’s principal owner, John W Henry, dining with United’s co-chairmen, Avram and Joel Glazer, and executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward in New York. Then last October details emerged of the two clubs’ collaboration on “Project Big Picture”, which was proposed as a strategic review of English club football.

The reality is that Henry and Tom Werner, the Liverpool chairman, initiated discussions with the Glazers around the time they bought the Merseyside club in 2010, seeking to tap into the United owners’ experience of the English football business.

Since then, their common interest in various issues — financial fair play, the future shape of European club football, the distribution of commercial and television revenue in the Premier League — has led to an air of solidarity and working together. There are WhatsApp groups and regular Zoom calls between executives at all of the Premier League’s “big six” clubs but, in terms of individual relationships, those between Liverpool and United appear more established and certainly more influential.

It comes down to a simple fact: in terms of background, ambitions and commercial interests, the American owners of English football’s two most successful clubs have far more in common than with each other than with their counterparts at Chelsea and Manchester City and with many of the most powerful clubs in Europe.

On the pitch and in the stands, Liverpool and United are sworn enemies. But the boardroom has always been a different matter — and these days, rather than short-lived ideas about standardising kit colours, it is about changing the voting structure and the distribution of wealth within English and European football. It is easy to understand why some of their rivals look at these two arch-rivals through suspicious eyes.

---

In 2013, when Solskjaer was managing Norwegian club Molde in a Champions League qualifier against Sligo Rovers, an Irish journalist called JJ Devaney approached him afterwards and put his lifelong allegiance to one side to tell the former United forward, “Listen, I thought you were a fantastic, a brilliant player. Even though I’m a Liverpool fan, I just wanted to shake your hand.”

The way Devaney described it on the Caught Offside podcast, Solskjaer “didn’t move a muscle in that face. His eyes fixed on me and said, straight up, with no jocularity, ‘If I’d known you were a Liverpool fan, I wouldn’t have shaken your hand’”.

Perhaps Solskjaer protests too much. He did, after all, grow up as a Liverpool fan himself. There are unconfirmed suggestions that a newspaper in Kristiansund, Norway, has photographs of a boyhood Solskjaer in a Liverpool shirt but has chosen never to publish or distribute them, out of respect to the town’s favourite son.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a succession of United managers, including Ferguson initially, were judged by their failure to break Liverpool’s supremacy. It was the same for successive Liverpool managers in the 1990s and 2000s once Ferguson had turned the tables decisively in United’s favour. Solskjaer’s return to United as manager in December 2018 came at a time when United had fallen under Manchester City’s shadow — and when Liverpool were just about to re-establish themselves as a trophy-winning force.

Over the past seven years, there has been resentment among some at Old Trafford because of the praise afforded to Manchester City for the way they have progressed with a coherent football vision and a modern, sophisticated plan to deliver it — in stark contrast, it has often been said, with the methods at United in the post-Ferguson era.

When that praise was extended to Liverpool, as they were re-emerging under Klopp, it caused even greater bitterness. If it wasn’t Jose Mourinho’s withering comments in 2016 about how Klopp’s team were “not the last wonder of the world like you (the media) say they are”, it was umbrage at praise for the Merseyside club’s transfer strategy. “Do you honestly think they’re doing anything we’re not doing?” one figure at United asked journalists a couple of years ago.

More recently, though, United have made concerted moves towards the sort of collegiate, data-driven approach to transfer strategy that has served Liverpool so well. Their ongoing search for a new data scientist was explained with reference to Liverpool’s success in establishing their own research unit under Dr Ian Graham, who has a Cambridge degree in theoretical physics. Much like Liverpool in the late 1990s, United have had to recognise that, to overhaul their rivals, they must first learn from them.

Klopp was interviewed for the United job once and, as Raphael Honigstein explains in his biography of the former Borussia Dortmund coach, he was bemused to hear Woodward describing Old Trafford as “an adult version of Disneyland”.

Ferguson admitted shortly after Liverpool appointed Klopp in 2015 that he was concerned that the German’s “personality, drive and knowledge” were exactly what they needed. “Things are looking up there,” he said. And that is exactly how it has transpired.

Ferguson sent Klopp a message of congratulation when Liverpool were confirmed as Premier League champions last June — and he didn’t seem to mind too much when Klopp woke him with a reply at 3.30am.

The Liverpool manager has talked about the first time that he met Ferguson feeling like an audience with the Pope. Both men have just taken part in a charity event to raise money for the Alzheimer’s Society charity. Kenny Dalglish was also involved and, again, there are a lot of misconceptions about his relationship with Ferguson. The two old managerial adversaries could probably fall out over a game of Poohsticks — overall, however, they get on far better than is widely assumed.

Klopp will always defend his team’s interests, but he has little of Ferguson’s — or indeed Mourinho’s — antagonistic streak. Neither does Solskjaer, even when playing the anti-Liverpool card. The only needle between him and Klopp has been about the number of penalties awarded to United.

It all feels rather tame compared to the days of Ferguson-Dalglish, Ferguson-Benitez or even Mourinho-Klopp and is it hard to see that changing unless the stakes continue to be raised in the months ahead.

---

Sunday afternoon will see a different kind of Liverpool-United encounter. The intense atmosphere will be absent. Since lockdown last March, it has become the norm to seeing matches played behind closed doors, but in this fixture, more than most, it will take some getting used to.

On the pitch, however, there will be far more at stake than usual. The prospect of Solskjaer’s team going into this fixture three points clear of Liverpool seemed implausible not too long ago. Now both teams have realistic title aspirations.

“As a kid from Manchester who supports United, there is no bigger game,” Marcus Rashford, who is likely to be the only Mancunian in United’s line-up, said when he collected the Football Writers’ Association’s tribute award this week. “We’re still improving, we’re in a good run of form, so we just have to try to keep focusing on ourselves and do the best we can. As long as we do that, you walk off the pitch with no regrets.”

Rashford is not the type to crank up hostilities and, as Joe Blott told The Athletic recently in his role as chairman of the Spirit of Shankly supporters’ group, there are many Liverpool fans who want to thank him for his work to stop children going hungry. Rashford’s campaigning goes nationwide and few areas have benefited as much as Merseyside. “I sincerely hope we meet him at the coach, not just to welcome the coach but literally to carry him off the coach,” said Blott, speaking before the latest lockdown was announced.

As for Trent Alexander-Arnold, Liverpool’s most established homegrown player, the quirk here is that his uncle, John Alexander, had seven years as United’s club secretary, taking in Ferguson’s last two titles.

Alexander, who retired in 2017, was a Liverpool fan who would often go to Anfield as a guest. He didn’t do media interviews and that meant he could take his seat without many people recognising him. All of which made it a lot easier for an Old Trafford employee to rise to his feet, on what was supposed to be enemy territory, and join in with You’ll Never Walk Alone.

What is beyond doubt is that in recent years most of the fun in this relationship has been had in Liverpool. Mourinho lost his job after a defeat at Anfield, played out to the soundtrack of “you’re not special any more”. Liverpool put United out of the Europa League during Louis van Gaal’s tenure. For David Moyes, there was the nadir of a 3-0 home defeat.

Manchester City had entered the scene and, as Liverpool re-emerged as a major force, a new rivalry formed. There was even a book — Fine Margins: How Manchester City and Liverpool Forged Football’s Ultimate Rivalry — written about the deteriorating relations between two clubs who had started to see United as a bit of an afterthought.

That position has changed over recent weeks. “United are like a zombie corpse that refuses to die,” says Richard Buxton, the Liverpool-based author. “No matter how many times you see them off, they keep coming back. It’s typical of them to start threatening a resurgence just as City and Liverpool have finally reclaimed ownership of the league after countless years living under their shadow.”

To put that into context, the odds on United winning the title were 219-1 after Tottenham Hotspur put six past them at Old Trafford in October. The same kind of odds, in other words, that the bookmakers are currently offering on Barnsley winning the FA Cup.

“Since Ferguson retired, it’s been like watching the demise of Liverpool in the 1990s,” Buxton says. “United have continued to cling to nostalgia instead of chasing progress. But if anything sums up the anomaly that is this season, it’s the fact they somehow manage to find themselves in the conversation for the title.”

An anomaly? Or the resumption of normal service? Perhaps Sunday will give us a clearer indication. “Credit where due, Liverpool have done brilliantly over the last couple of seasons, winning the Champions League and the Premier League,” O’Shea says. “They’ve raised the bar and that’s the challenge now for United.

“It has slipped a bit for United over recent years, but thankfully, Ole has got them back up where they need to be at the minute. They’re facing that challenge and doing well. Sunday will be a big test. A lot of the characters have changed — no Steven Gerrard and Roy Keane in central midfield — but nothing changes. And if you score the winning goal… well, people won’t forget it.”

 

 

[kipo]

Verner 

[Jean-Luc Picard]

Par crtica vezanih za "ove moje"

 

-Benrahma za sad deluje mnogo bliže promašaju nego nabodu. Trudi se, ali mu slabo šta ide od ruke. Kad treba da šutira on solira. Kad treba da proba sam on proba da asistira, uglavnom neprecizno. Kad treba da dodaje on šutira i tako u krug.

-S druge strane Dawson deluje kao nabod u rangu Souček/Bowen. Četvrti nastup i četvrti clean sheet . Ne znam šta mu se desilo pošto su navijači Votforda jedva dočekali da mu vdie leđa jer je navodno bio očajan, ali kod nas u paru sa Ogbonom dominira. Ima otprilike po jedan polukiks po utakmici, ali ako to prođe kako treba stvarno je sjajan. Šteta što je samo pozajmica do kraja sezone. 

-Neverovatno je koliko opasnije delujemo sa Antoniom nego sa Halerom. Pitanje je koliko će  njegov hamstring izdržati.  Ako ne izdrži, bukvalno nemamo drugog napadača osim nekih članova U21 ekipe. 

-Kako smo samo uspeli da od ovog mrtvog Čelzija primimo tri komada da mi je samo znati. 

[Weenie Pooh]

30 minutes ago, John Coltrane said:

The bus journey into Anfield was another experience. “One of my jobs was to play cards with Peter Schmeichel on the bus to help keep him calm,” Fevre says. “We were driving into Anfield and, approaching the stadium, there were all the guys selling T-shirts outside. Peter stopped the game of cards. He reached into his inside pocket and pulled out maybe £200 in £10 notes. Then he started waving it through the window to antagonise the Liverpool fans.

 

“I was thinking, ‘Oh, Peter, don’t do that’. As soon as he did it, there were bottles and all sorts coming against the bus.

 

“The following year, we were on the bus to Anfield again and I said to him, ‘Whatever you do, don’t pull that stupid stunt again’. But he wasn’t going to listen to me.

 

“We got to the ground and he pulled out another wad of notes. The same guys were there with the T-shirts and this time they were ready for us. One of them put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a wad 10 times the size of Peter’s. It must have been at least a grand. The lads on the bus were loving it and Peter actually stopped to clap this guy.”

 

Šmajhel, govnar bio i ostao  

[John Coltrane]

2 minutes ago, Weenie Pooh said:

 

Šmajhel, govnar bio i ostao  

Jeste seljoberska scena, ali moćno su mu i “odgovorili”