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Henry and Carragher and the FA cup are a few of the Liverpool topics floating around the intertubes today, and since it's Monday and I'm sure we're all in an awesome mood after yesterday's disappointing result, let's skip the frivolities and get right to it...
* It's a long article, and it covers ground that most Liverpool supporters will already have a fair handle on, but a new Newsweek piece on NESV and John Henry taking over the club is a worthwhile, even handed, and well researched look at the club from
a bit of an outsider's perspective. As much as anything you could call it a bit of a "Liverpool 101," and as such it's an enjoyable enough read on its own merits, but perhaps also the sort of thing to pass along to those who still don't quite understand your peculiar obsession. It bounces all over the place, from the Boer War to Tom Hicks, though there is generally an effort to place the club into topical context by using the Red Sox as a handy comparison:
Liverpool followers make their counterparts in Boston seem like dilettantes, and Fenway sound like Wimbledon. Red Sox fans don’t generally follow the team en masse to Cleveland or Detroit, the way thousands of Liverpool partisans do to Manchester, London, or even Rome or Istanbul. Nor—like Chris Gladman, who prepared for the Chelsea game at the Flat Iron—do many name their only sons after their favorite players. For Red Sox fans, “tragedy” consists of a few fabled miscues on the field and in the front office, like selling Babe Ruth and failing (egregiously) to sign black ballplayers. Liverpool, by contrast, experienced genuine tragedy when 96 of its fans were crushed at a game in Hillsborough in 1989. Outside the stadium, next to an eternal flame, a plaque lists all the names; always, there are fresh flowers beneath it. Charges (unfair, it turned out) in the British tabloid The Sun that hooliganism rather than police ineptitude was to blame only intensified local resentment; Hicks’s apparent friendliness with Rupert Murdoch, the Sun’s owner, was yet another strike against him.
Certainly worth a read if you're looking for something to pass a bit of time with on a Monday.
* In more immediate news, the draw for the third round of the FA Cup--the more prestigious of England's two top flight cup competitions--took place to determine pairings as Premier League and Championship sides join the competition against survivors from League One and Two, and with 64 teams scheduled to face off across 32 matches only one of the games will involve two sides from the top flight. And that match will be the one that Liverpool plays against United at Old Trafford on either the eighth or ninth of January. I'd complain about getting the hardest draw in the round, but we all saw what happened when Liverpool got one of the easiest draws in the Carling Cup so perhaps it's best just to sit back and let things play out.
* Meanwhile in player news, Jamie Carragher came away from yesterday's match with a dislocated shoulder. It's unclear how long he will miss with the injury, though Hodgson suspects that "it will be quite long because it's a serious injury," and various news outlets are speculating that means up to six weeks. Here's hoping Agger can find his way back to fitness quickly, though Hodgson's talk of a lack of center back depth is unfortunate considering the generally positive performances of Kyrgiakos so far this year as well as the presence of Wilson and Kelly on the squad, not to mention that Daniel Ayala has been Hull's player of the season so far and is on a loan that would allow him to be recalled if the club truly felt it was short on options.
Ed or I will be back later in the day, but in the meantime--in honour of the Eureka! moment that was yesterday's attacking display against a top-half opponent on the road even if the result wasn't what we all would have hoped for--here's something to help pass the time...