Welcome to best-selling football author Paul Tomkins’ subscription-based website on Liverpool FC, with exclusive articles and a community for like-minded LFC fans (including several authors and bloggers).
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Well, if Liverpool didn’t know they were in a battle for 4th, they do now; indeed, too literally so this weekend. After the utter nonsense last season, the Blackburn game was always going to be a bigger deal than usual. Add that the Reds took to the field only after Manchester City and Spurs had already won, and it was a fixture on a knife-edge.
It has come to my attention that one of football’s most prominent television personalities, in a seriously high-profile position, continually refers to Rafa Benítez as “the fat Spanish waiter” when off camera. Perhaps even more alarmingly, editorial decisions have been made to purposely show Benítez in a bad light, in a way that would definitely not be done with other managers.
A dual award in The Tomkins Times’ inaugural Media Muppet of the Week. Week one: a right pair of muppets.
How will Sam Allardyce cope with Rafa’s rude and ruthless gestures? Will Big Sam be able to hide his tears this time, as he waits for the Liverpool manager in a place that he acknowledges you don’t usually find him?
Looking back over our 25 years at the real summit of the game – say between 1965 and 1990 – may give us a clue as to how we might broaden our search for players. There was another factor at work, probably as important as the home-produced talent and the big name signings, and a real cornerstone of our success. All current wisdom declares this ‘third way’ dead and buried, but you wonder whether it could soon come back into fashion. It may have to.
A look back at all of Liverpool’s European fixtures that finished 1-0 after the first leg, by Graeme Riley. In European football history, there have been over 800 instances where the home team in the first leg has travelled with a 1-0 advantage to the away tie.
If you go to a club that is in the top four; that has an unbeaten home record (including victories in various competitions against Man United, Chelsea and Arsenal – twice); that has had an extra 48 hours rest; and that has a starting XI that cost twice as much to assemble, and get a draw, then that, by any stretch of the imagination, is a good result.
It’s interesting to me that a manager with a world-class CV could be described as ‘lucky’ by his critics. If these naysayers were confined to cranks on the internet, it’d be one thing; that the accusation has been made on national TV by commentators is quite another.
Subscribers to The Tomkins Times can download free eBooks of my four of my five main titles: “Golden Past, Red Future”, “Red Revival”, “Above Us Only Sky” and “Red Race: A New Bastion” (PDF format).
Usual pack-drill, Subscribers can discuss all aspects of the game below. Will fielding a strong team in the Europa League backfire on Sunday? Or was the game against Unirea little more than a glorified training session, with attack against stubborn, crowded, well-drilled defence?
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