Posted by Colm Kavanagh
on November 5, 2009, 5:39 pm
Board Admin
From the Guardian's Fiver:
Often over the last decade the Fiver has wondered why Liverpool fans continue to flock to Anfield to suffer the constipated performances regularly served up under Zanussi-eyed mystic Ged Houllier and then Rafa Benitez. Several times, in fact, we have suspected the Kop of being the HQ of the Scandinavian Society of Self-Flaggellators. Coincidentally, Benitez is at this very moment also behaving like a masochistic cop, subjecting himself, as he surely is, to a most painful interrogation.
Questions he is likely to bawl at himself today include: can the no-fee-attached acquisition of a no-paced Ukrainian forward with a Status Quo barnet and two clubbed feet still be described as a free transfer if it costs Liverpool a place in Big Cup's Big Cash stages? If, say, some of Jamie Carragher's harder mates can convince the British Museum to return the Elgin sculptures to Athens, will the Greeks send over Sotiros Kyrgiakos's marbles? And, is there any chance of already-qualified Lyon beating Fiorentina in three weeks time to prolong Liverpool's faint hopes of creeping into the last 16? "Disgracefully it does not depend on us," harrumphed Pepe Reina by way of reply to the last query, before forgetting what he'd just said and adding irrelevantly: "but miracles happen, particularly at Liverpool."
Of course, Benitez's bosses, Waldorf and Statler, will also be asking themselves questions today, questions such as: "what is soccer?" and "can I get liberty fries with that?" But at some point somebody more savvy may quiz them, in which event the most pertinent line of inquiry would be: "If you get rid of Rafa, do you have someone better than him in mind? Jurgen Klinsmann? Why don't you bozos just sell up?" And when they do sell up to, say, a billionaire oil baron with not enough imagination to spend his money on a hover-board or inter-galactic fun cruiser rather than a football club, one big question would still remain: "Would you entrust, say, a £200m transfer kitty to Rafa Benitez?"
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