UK News

from Reuters Soccer Blog:

Everton and Moyes running out of options

By James Illingworth

Sympathy for the plight of their rivals may be kept to an absolute minimum by the red and blue halves of Liverpool but even the staunchest of Kopites should spare a thought for David Moyes.

Having seen his side claim partial revenge for their 2009 FA Cup final defeat by knocking Chelsea out on penalties last month, Moyes could not prevent first division Reading ending Everton's cup run in the fifth round on Tuesday.

Forced to operate a sell-before-you-buy policy and with the club failing to attract investment, the 47-year-old Scot is beginning to cut an increasingly frustrated figure.

"We let the supporters down tonight, we didn't play well enough and we got what we deserved," Moyes told Everton's website. "We didn't have enough, enough craft, enough guile to break them down. I thought we did try to take the initiative but we weren't good enough."

Without star performers Tim Cahill and Marouane Fellani, whose ankle injury will keep him out for the rest of the season, the Blues' limited squad was exposed against Reading.

They remain a team capable of matching any side on their day, but without significant investment, Everton will surely stay on the fringes of the Premier League's top teams.

from Reuters Soccer Blog:

Torres is a one-goal striker and a steal for Chelsea

Will Fernando Torres ever recapture that heady mix of fearlessness, ruthlessness and irresistible skill he showed in his first 24-goal season at Anfield?

Is £50 million enough to buy you a strike rate of a goal every 1.375 games?

You know what? It doesn't matter.

Liverpool needed a 24-goals-a-season striker but Chelsea don't. Chelsea have spent so much money for a player who can score one goal rather than 24, or to put it another way, the goal.

Chelsea would love to win a Premier League and FA Cup double every season, I'm sure, but domestic dominance is not the target for Roman Abramovich and hasn't been for a while. It is no secret that the trophy Abramovich and everyone else at the club really want is the Champions League and in Torres they have acquired a player to take them over the line.

Forget the forlorn figure who limped his way around the World Cup in South Africa and recall the man whose pace and touch left Germany's Philipp Lahm for dead and produced the winning goal for Spain in the final of Euro 2008.

If Torres scores one Chelsea goal all season he will be judged a success, as long as that goal is the one that edges his new club past Barcelona in the semi-finals, say, or clatters past Edwin van der Sar and in off the post in the final at Wembley.

from Reuters Soccer Blog:

Liverpool sign Suarez but will he play with Torres?

UPDATE: Liverpool have confirmed that Torres put in a written transfer request on Friday night. The club have rejected it. Read the statement here.

Liverpool and Ajax have just announced that Luis Suarez is joining the Premier League club in a deal worth up to 26.5 million euros.

The question is, will he play alongside Fernando Torres in the Liverpool side or in place of him?

Many will wonder if the decision of the new Liverpool owners to pay such a large fee has anything to do with the bid for Torres from Chelsea. Liverpool flatly rejected the offer when Chelsea approached them with 35 million quid but could another, improved offer tempt them before the closure of the transfer window?

Alternatively, could this signing be the sort of statement of intent Torres needs to convince him to stay?

One of the outstanding players at the 2010 World Cup, Suarez will now undergo a medical and assuming he can reach agreement on personal terms he will become a Liverpool player pretty quickly.

When he will actually play for them, I'm not quite sure, as picked up a seven-match banned for biting PSV Eindhoven's Otman Bakkal back in November. How's that for hunger?

from Reuters Soccer Blog:

Dalglish needs a quick fix to hint at hope for future

Kenny Dalglish may not be a long-term solution as Liverpool manager but his appointment will give hope to disgruntled fans and provide a fillip to the club’s underperforming players.

The Liverpool hero has been thrust back into the limelight after 10 years out of management and will lead the club out at Old Trafford for an FA Cup clash against Manchester United on Sunday after replacing Roy Hodgson at the helm.

Hodgson’s position at the club had become untenable as results began badly and never picked up with the likes of Wolverhampton Wanderers, Stoke City, Blackburn Rovers and Blackpool all inflicting embarrassing defeats.

The fans had turned from silent sceptics to voicing loud concerns from the terraces while some high-profile players looked poor imitations of the ones who took Liverpool to within a whisker of the Premier League title less than two years ago.

Dalglish, at 59, does not fit the profile of the young and hungry technocrat, the club’s American owners, Fenway Sports Group, were reportedly keen to appoint.

But FSG will hope the stop-gap appointment will lift the club out of their current malaise and maybe persuade the likes of Pepe Reina, Fernando Torres and Steven Gerrard that a brighter future lies around the corner.

from Reuters Soccer Blog:

Hodgson calls for fan support as decisions loom for Henry

When New England Sports Ventures finally bought Liverpool in October new owner John W Henry did not have to wait long to understand the enormity of the challenge he faces to turn around the fortunes of England’s most successful club.

Just days after the deal was clinched and a wave of optimism swept through Anfield, Liverpool’s inadequacies on the pitch were laid bare in a 2-0 defeat at Merseyside rivals Everton.

More than two months later manager Roy Hodgson, recruited by the former regime, has managed no semblance of an improvement on the pitch and his call for the Anfield faithful to show his team their "famous support" is likely to be seen as a backhanded compliment at best. 

So as the transfer window starts to creak open, the so far quiet Henry will find himself in the spotlight with some important decisions to make.

The Boston Red Sox owner was careful not to raise expectations too high when he took charge of the Anfield club, stating that there was much hard work to be done and no quick fixes, but he must be alarmed at quite how far Liverpool have slid.

Manager Roy Hodgson’s verdict after losing 1-0 at home to bottom club Wolves on Wednesday was damning in its honesty. “We probably didn’t deserve to lose,” Hodgson told the BBC with no hint of irony. “Probably 0-0 would have been fair.”

Goalless draws at home to clubs like Wolves are not what fans of Liverpool have come to expect and there are clear indications that the Kop has run out of patience with the experienced Englishman who appears bereft of ideas at present.

from Reuters Soccer Blog:

Lucas hints at brighter Anfield future

Lucas Leiva has often been dismissed as a mediocre battler with little or no star quality, but the much-maligned midfielder’s performance against Chelsea marked him out as an influential part of Liverpool’s recent recovery.

Few players have attracted as much ire as the combative Brazilian who was reportedly close to strolling out the Anfield exit door during the summer with a host of European also-rans touted as a possible destination.

But his performance in the 2-0 victory, for which he would have been a certainty for man-of-the-match unless a certain Fernando Torres had not bagged both goals, would have underlined his importance to manager Roy Hodgson.

He was everything that Liverpool fans expected when he first arrived from Brazilian side Gremio with a burgeoning reputation as an all-action, box-to-box player.

He was aggressive, snapping into tackles and driving menacingly forward, while guarding possession with a string of accurate passes.

It was all the more impressive for the contrast it presented with the player who was the focal point for so much of the antipathy directed at former manager Rafael Benitez’s team.

The Spaniard, who paid seven million pounds for Lucas’s services, persistently defended his under-performing player, but never escaped the accusations that he had signed a dud.

from Reuters Soccer Blog:

Liverpool board leads 2-1 in court cases with end now in sight

Here we go again. After another legal victory in the High Court for the Liverpool board and main creditor RBS, all eyes turn to Dallas, where a new hearing on the ownership battle is underway.

Wednesday's original ruling had, it seemed, paved the way for Liverpool to be sold for 300 million pounds ($479.8 million) to New England Sports Ventures (NESV) -- owners of the Boston Red Sox -- but that was before George Gillett and Tom Hicks obtained a temporary block in a Texas district court.

Lawyers for Royal Bank of Scotland went back before the same judge in London Thursday and he granted an injunction to restrain the Dallas court ruling, saying the case had no connection to Texas.

"The owners' behavior conclusively demonstrates just how incorrigible they are," he said. "They are absolutely determined to stop this transaction in its tracks and they have no lawful justification for behaving in this way."

Liverpool's independent directors issued a statement on the club website (www.liverpoolfc.tv) saying: "We are glad to have taken another important step toward completing the sale process."

Whether this really is the green light to sell depends on what happens in the 160th civil district court in Dallas, after a judge adjourned Thursday's hearing.

We will have to wait until Friday, then, to find out whether Liverpool will have new owners by the time they play the Merseyside derby against Everton Sunday.

from Reuters Soccer Blog:

Liverpool board wins right to sell but another court battle looms

Updates at 0029 GMT, Thursday after Texas court injunction and Liverpool statement.

Liverpool were given the go-ahead to sell the club when a High Court judge backed the club's board but another court battle could be on the cards after current co-owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett obtained an injunction in Texas to block the sale.

The High Court ruling on Wednesday morning suggested the agreed 300 million pound ($477.2 million) sale to New England Sports Ventures, the owners of the Boston Red Sox would go through and that feeling was strengthened at around 8pm when John Henry, owner of the Red Sox, arrived for a Liverpool FC board meeting.

However, there were more doubts raised a few hours later after Hicks said a Texas court had granted a temporary restraining order prohibiting the sale of the club to NESV.

Liverpool issued the following statement after the latest extraordinary twist:

"The independent directors consider the restraining order to be unwarranted and damaging and will move as swiftly as possible to seek to have it removed."

from Reuters Soccer Blog:

Mixed reactions for Liverpool fans over possible sale

Liverpool supporters will be glad to be possibly getting rid of their current U.S. owners but probably did not envisage another set of Americans taking over.

The board of have agreed the sale of the club to New England Sports Ventures (NESV), the owners of Major League Baseball’s Boston Red Sox.

However, like everything with Liverpool at the moment, the sale may not be straightforward as the club will first have to resolve a legal dispute with the current owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett who had sought to sack members of the board in a final bid to keep control of the club on Tuesday.

Manager Roy Hodgson must be tearing his hair out with all this coming on top of the team enduring its worst start on the pitch for more than half a century.

He wanted the issue resolved but if the sale does go through, will the new owners keep Hodgson on?

Neutrals will be looking out for any baseball quirks they might try to bring in at Liverpool, like that famous organ music or supersized hotdogs and foam hands.

Being a Liverpool fan is never dull.

from Left field:

Things may get worse before they get better at Liverpool … but there is a glimmer of hope

A damp squib of a performance from Liverpool in their League Cup defeat by Northampton Town was described by The Telegraph today as one of the most humiliating nights in the club’s history.

Given the (lack of) status the League Cup now enjoys that is probably stretching it a bit far – I don’t think it gets close to the FA Cup defeat by Bristol City , for example – but the whole dismal episode did add weight to the theory that things are likely to get worse before they get better for a club that once prided itself on striving for excellence in everything.

The problems at Anfield have been endlessly discussed. Hodgson is the first new Liverpool manager I can remember not to have significant transfer funds at his disposal and even when money was, apparently, made available by the sale of Javier Mascherano he was unable to find the forward he so obviously needed.

There is no immediate prospect of wealthy new owners coming in and solving the personnel problem, or getting the new stadium plan moving again.

Meanwhile, Fernando Torres looks less and less like the player who regularly made lives miserable for Premier League defenders and those who have come in to the first team – Milan Jovanovic, Christian Poulsen and the like – seem unlikely to win places in Anfield folklore, shall we say. Hodgson, inevitably, is coming in for criticism for a lack of panache on the field.

One fan, iandman, wrote the following on the official site forum after the Northampton game: “I've been a Liverpool fan for 30yrs and that's not going to change, however I felt I must write to express my absolute anger at the gutless, clueless performance put on last night against a team several divisions below us.”

"This is going to be a long season,” wrote yusuf, another supporter. “We are a mid table side, it really pains me to say it.”