Liverpool F.c.

[StevieH]

here's a sight to warm the cockles.

[sharecropper]

here's a sight to warm the cockles.

What, some crocked old lag tripping over a ball?

[sharecropper]

Just watched Kenny's pre-match press conf

HAHA just brilliant, just shot down the guy interviewing him about Carrol, Gerrard and other stuff - brilliant!

Short version here the full version is better

takes no shit from anybody does he and the press are clearly bloody terrified of him as well. i absolutely love the way kenny keeps fuc_king with that soft lad vinny o'connor from sky sports by the way. from yesterday:

Kenny: "Where's Vinny?".

Journalist: "Off".

Kenny: "Ill?".

Journalist: "No, day off".

Kenny: "That's a shame. I wanted him to be ill".

That is excellent.

[StevieH]

here's a sight to warm the cockles.

What, some crocked old lag tripping over a ball?

"not guilty yer honour".

the crocked bit we'll see about. hopefully this operation has done the trick and he can enjoy an injury-free season. can't wait to see him linking up with suarez and downing in particular.

[StevieH]

rumours around that coates is going to start at stoke today. carragher to right back as johnson's not considered fit enough to start.

actually no scratch that, now seems to be: reina, skrtel, carra, agger, enrique; henderson, lucas, adam, downing; suarez, kuyt. bench is: johnson, coates, spearing, bellamy, carroll, maxi

Edited September 10, 2011 by StevieH

[Jimjim]

Makes me want to stick in a fork in my eye!

ugh, I hate losses like that where we clearly battered them. 20 shots to four, Begovic had to make 10 saves!

Can't complain about the penalty as Carra was all over him. But when was the last time Pepe saved a penalty? C'mon Pepe! Been a long while and he used to be great at it.

One of those amazingly frustrating games, but what else can you expect at Stoke?

Henderson should have scored with one of his 3 straight chances in the space of a few seconds, then Adam had two straight shots right after and he couldn't find a way in, either. But Henderson should have taken his first chance one on one with the keeper.

Bellamy had a great header chance on the back post that he put wide, and then with one minute left in injury time Suarez had an open shot at goal that he put wide.

We should have put at least one of those chances in!

I was afraid of this happening today, but with our finishing only have ourselves to blame...

[sharecropper]

Please tell me Prince Kenny isn't disputing the Stoke penalty? I'm not sure about the Liverpool shout though.

Also, this is all a bit supine isn't it, running to the owners as he's worried about saying something naughty?

Liverpool manager Kenny Dalglish: "We would like to be respectful to referees - and I'd like to think I have been - but more importantly than being respectful to the referees is having respect for my football club.

"If I feel they are suffering in any shape or form I will need to go the same route other people go and see if we can gain some benefit from that.

"The first four league games have had contentious decisions in them and every one has gone against us.

"I'll speak to the owners first and see what they say because the last thing I want to do is for my behaviour to impinge on the club's success in any way."

Edited September 10, 2011 by sharecropper

[carmine]

Welcome to the growing list of clubs persecuted by the dreadful spineless refereering of Mr Clattenburg

I remember well during last seasons fixture at Old Trafford he allowed Rio Ferdinand stand in and debate a pending decision with him and his lino. Laughable... and guess what, the decision went against us!!!

Edited September 11, 2011 by carmine

[mrbojangles]

Welcome to the growing list of clubs persecuted by the dreadful spineless refereering of Mr Clattenburg

I remember well during last seasons fixture at Old Trafford he allowed Rio Ferdinand stand in and debate a pending decision with him and his lino. Laughable... and guess what, the decision went against us!!!

Come on Carms, don't be too hard on Rio. He was only reminding the ref that SAF had insisted on more protection to the whole of the United players.

[carmine]

This is NOT a wind up but i am interested to know Andy Carroll goals per game ratio since he joined your club. I also think that Kenny is starting to agree with me that Suarez and carroll don't work together.

This is for "discussion" and i would'nt tempt fate by taking the p*ss a week before we play you in a game that is vital to us if we are to qualify for the europa next season.

[mrbojangles]

in a game that is vital to us if we are to qualify for the europa next season.

I thought you guys never wanted to play in the Europa ?

[mrtoad]

in a game that is vital to us if we are to qualify for the europa next season.

I thought you guys never wanted to play in the Europa ?

[carmine]

in a game that is vital to us if we are to qualify for the europa next season.

I thought you guys never wanted to play in the Europa ?

Thats true...but our chairman does unfortunately. I really don't give a toss either way as long as we play the promising youngsters. Well, those that we still have that is. The really good ones harry has chosen to loan out, the stupid turd.

My europa gripe is that i don't like the thursday/sunday fixture thing. It really does'nt help.

[Devil]

Makes me want to stick in a fork in my eye!

ugh, I hate losses like that where we clearly battered them. 20 shots to four, Begovic had to make 10 saves!

Can't complain about the penalty as Carra was all over him. But when was the last time Pepe saved a penalty? C'mon Pepe! Been a long while and he used to be great at it.

One of those amazingly frustrating games, but what else can you expect at Stoke?

Henderson should have scored with one of his 3 straight chances in the space of a few seconds, then Adam had two straight shots right after and he couldn't find a way in, either. But Henderson should have taken his first chance one on one with the keeper.

Bellamy had a great header chance on the back post that he put wide, and then with one minute left in injury time Suarez had an open shot at goal that he put wide.

We should have put at least one of those chances in!

I was afraid of this happening today, but with our finishing only have ourselves to blame...

Can't complain about the penalty as Carra was all over him. But when was the last time Pepe saved a penalty? C'mon Pepe! Been a long while and he used to be great at it.

Have to disagree with you on the penalty Jimbo, not a penalty in my book and wouldn't of been given on any other day.

Not sure about expecting Pepe to be saving them? its more about the penalty taker to be honest.

Edited September 11, 2011 by Devil

[smokie36]

This is NOT a wind up but i am interested to know Andy Carroll goals per game ratio since he joined your club. I also think that Kenny is starting to agree with me that Suarez and carroll don't work together.

This is for "discussion" and i would'nt tempt fate by taking the p*ss a week before we play you in a game that is vital to us if we are to qualify for the europa next season.

Probably starting to believe that Suarez and Carroll don't belong at the same club. There's always wet spam for your unwanted expensive dross though....

[StevieH]

christ that was frustrating. we'll play plenty worse than that this season and win. bloody ref had a pisspoor one for us again - gave them their debatable penalty and denied us one stonewall and a couple of maybes. annoying.

[Penkoprod]

Methinks Kenny is showing all the classic early symptoms of a cross between Fergieitis, and Wengeritis.

There was enough quality (on paper) for us to have beaten the likes of Stoke, flakey and dubious refereeing decisions notwithstanding.

Put the ball in the back of the net and there is no argument. We didnt do that on Saturday.

Penkoprod

[Abrak]

I thought the penalty was harsh. But at the end of the day Carragher shouldnt be wrapping himself around an opponent in the penalty area.

I would like to think that Liverpool had reached the stage that Carra was no longer a first team certainty. However our back line seems so injury prone. I see that Johnson has pulled his hamstring again and he was only on the pitch ten minutes.

[fredflintstone]

christ that was frustrating. we'll play plenty worse than that this season and win. bloody ref had a pisspoor one for us again - gave them their debatable penalty and denied us one stonewall and a couple of maybes. annoying.

Debatable ?

Stonewall ?

You need to get rid of delglish & get a desent manager that won't buy crap like Carrol

[StevieH]

christ that was frustrating. we'll play plenty worse than that this season and win. bloody ref had a pisspoor one for us again - gave them their debatable penalty and denied us one stonewall and a couple of maybes. annoying.

Debatable ?

Stonewall ?

You need to get rid of delglish & get a desent manager that won't buy crap like Carrol

i don't know who delglish is. but dalglish is pretty decent.

[Abrak]

Sport by Numbers

Tim Adams, Esquire Sep 2011

How a book about baseball statistics chagned the way we think about football forever.

Along with the Prime Minister and Prince William, I'm a fan of Aston Villa. For most of the first 20 years that fact involved me standing on the Holte End at Villa Park once a fortnight from autumn to spring and evaluating, in the most robust and single-minded terms, the merits of various players. Mostly, this being Birmingham, that discussion centred around assessing with my old man or my mates the particular way that things were going wrong this week; moaning about our one-footed wingers and one-paced defenders, the players who were overpaid or underrated or lazy or restless or drinkers or worse. There is no football fan who does not believe that he holds privileged inside knowledge about how his team performs, what makes it fail to tick. Mostly that knowledge is based on nothing more scientific than obsession, arrogance and instinct.

Well over a decade ago, for me, the primary source of that blunt ongoing conversation about human physical performance was removed. I was living in London, I had two daughters and I stopped going to watch football live. Thes days I hardly ever go to see Villa matches. I don't even always watch them on TV - but strangely the urgency of those old conversations persist more strongly than ever, as if there are various Villa-based neural pathways in my head that still need to be trodden. The old sociable obsession has narrowed to an appetite for information, transfer gossip and scraps of player facts scoured from the sadder reaches of the Internet when I am supposed to be writing articles like this one. Recently, this cache of areana has been supplemented by a Twitter feed from the statistics centre Opta. On an hourly basis, a new imponderable piece of data will reveal itself to me. "Stewart Downing has provided 8 PL assists since August 2009, one fewer than Theo Walcott in the same period." it will say. Or: "Aston Villa dropped more points from winning positions than any otehr team in the 2010-11 Premier League." Such facts seem to have the power to invoke the kind of stubborn interrogation that pharaonic scholars were faced with in first coming across the hieroglyphics of the Rosetta Stone: what can they possibly mean?

Given the 100,000-plus followers of @OptaJoe, I guess that I am not the only one with this need to know. The possibility of football fandom without wtching football is one of the more time-eating by-products of technology. If youw ere trying to date the advetn of this kind of virtual obsession with football-by-number you might look back to 2003. This was the year Opta entered the male consciousness; it was the year that Fantasy Football was established as a suitable pursuit for grown men; and it was the year that Michael Lewis published perhaps the most influential sports book of all time, Moneyball, which has been made into a film, to be released in the autumn, starring Brad Pitt.

Moneyball was concerned with baseball but at its heart it overturned a belief system that was fundamental to all sports and all sports fans. The belief system was this: that opinion and instinct and emotion were the values on which sporting success was built; that the great managers and coaches were just higher-grade versions of fans on the terraces or in the box-seat: they watched players and made up their minds about them. Lewis's book introduced a revolutionary idea: that sport was an arena for scientific fact, and that numbers were more important than emotions.

It grew from a single observation. Lewis, who had made his name as a journalist esposing some of the nonsense and corruption of Wall Street in Liar's Poker, had become intrigued, as you do, by a simple oddity to do with a relatively unfashionable baseball team in California. And that oddity was this: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball - the Oakland Athletics - win so many games?

For many years, as in Premier League football, it had been widely understood that in major league American sports money would buy success. The Oakland A's however, from the mid-Nineties, had performed consistently way beyond their means. It seemed that they had found a new way to be successful. When Lewis looked into some of the reasons for this, he realised that a good deal of that success lay in the philosophy of one man, the general manager Billy Beane. And Beane was successful it seemed not because he possessed any particular inspirational skills, or any special gut feel for what was right and what was wrong in his team, but rather he put his faith almost entirely in the application of science. He ran his recruitment and coaching based on objective rather than subjective opinion. And it worked.

The reasons that Beane became fascinated by these things were rooted in his biography. As a boy Beane had been the standout athlete of his generation. He could have become professional in almost any sport he wanted. He opted for baseball, and was drafted by the New York Mets as a first-round pick in their annual college recruitment in 1980. The script was written for him to earn millions stealing bases and hitting home runs. Somehow, however, in Beane's case, despite all of his rich promise, this script did not work out. He may have had all the physical attributes to succeed, but when it came to stepping up to the plate in the Major Legue, well, he didn't step up to the plate. Over the course of a long career Beane hit precisely three home runs. All of the youthful promise that he had shown - the certain sense that he would become a legend in his sport - came to almost nothing.

For Beane though, that failure was just the beginning. As well as being a sportsman he was also a first rate student - he had turned down a Stanford scholarship to pursue his baseball career - and when he was contemplating the ways in which that career had gone wrong he came to a radical conclusion: the fact that he had failed was not just a fact about him but it pointed to a wider fault. He decided that the way in which young players were understood and evaluated were deeply flawed. In his own case, he decided, a lot of his success came down to the fact that he looked the part: he was quick, assured, a hand-eye natural, everything came easy to him. The scouts and coaches that worked with him as a young man marvelled at him not least because in some sense they wanted to be him. What he lacked though, he guessed, was something that had been absent all along; it was just that the coaches, relying on instinct like fans, did not know how to look.

Baseball had always been a game of statistics. But what if the statistics - for home runs and hitting percentages and so on - were not the best ones to understand what made a team successful? Since the eighties, Beane had been a devotee of a pre-Internet newsletter by a man called Bill James, a baseball obsessive, who had adopted a very different approach to understanding success in the sport. Inspired by technology and mathematical models, in 1977 Hames proposed the idea that there might be ways of understanding what made teams and individuals effective that went beyond simply watching them play and arguing about the conclusions. James fed into a computer various data on performance and sought to correlate them with winning. HE discovered that certain overlooked statistics had a far greater bearing on whether a player was likely to succeed than the headline-grabbing home runs and so on. James called his technique sabermetrics, and by the time Billy Beane became head coach of the Oakland A's in the late Nineties, he decided to place his faith in a version of James's methods. He employed computer analysts alongside his gnarled coachign staff and decided to base his entire recruitment strategy and coaching philosophy on their science. That was about where Michael Lewis and Moneyball came in.

Much of Lewis's book is concerned with the conflict and comedy of Beane trying to impose his system on coaches who would rather have trusted their own judgement than that of a computer technician. Lewis was allowed to observe the annual drafting process to see how Beane's bean-counters elevated players that coaches had long dismissed out of hand to the status of first round possibilities. Beane is still the general manager of the Oakland A's and still engaged in a version of that conflict, though the argument has now been won in broad terms and its implications have sprad to almost every baseball team and even to the Premier League and beyond. When I spoke to Beane recently at his office in California about some of this history, he described to me his philosophy in these terms: "What we did," he said, "was comparable to what was happening or had recently happened in other businesses at the time. On Wall Street it had occurred with the arrival of quantitative analysts, or quants." The transition, he suggested, had been similarly seismic. "In the Eighties on Wall Street, there was still a group of 'gut feel' trders and there was this collision with these people who were using complex mathematics. In sports it was exactly the same thing. In baseball that collision maybe happened most dramatically a few years ago, in other sports, including soccer, it is still happening now."

The fundamental fact of the matter, Beane suggests, is that "there is a big diference between stats and metrics. Metrics in sports are what drives achievement and metrics are not just stats". Stats are what I get from my Opta Twitter feed; metrics is what happens when they are systematically analysed. "People will say stats don't mean anything," Beane says. "Possession, or corner kicks or whatever, and they might be right about those things. But the application of metrics is enhanced by the growth of technology, which allows you to measure performance more accurately. And that measurement allows you to ferret out the secret of victory. Or hope to."

Since Moneyball came out, Beane's methods have long since ceased being a secret, though. Having lost some of his competitive advantage in this way, I wonder if he had any regrets about letting the journalist in?

To be honest, Beane suggests, with a laugh, "we didn't have any clue Michael was going to write a book. We are close friends now, but I still give him a hard time about it - it was going to be a little newspaper article, but then, he says, it grew."

The forthcoming film will no doubt give the ideas behind the book an extra push. For a couple of years, from time to time, Brad Pitt has been at the Oakland A's observing Beane, whose part he will play. I guess there are worse actors to have taking your part in a movie?

Well, Beane says, "Zero Mostel was not available."

After Moneyball came out, Beane was much in demand to speak and consult with coaches and managers in other sports. In 2003, he came to London on holiday with his wife and immediately became obsessed with English football.

"I read all the tabloids," he recalls, "and all the newspapers and I was just amazed at the kind of tribal emotion that was involved." To Beane, that was fighting talk. "My first thought was: if there is this much emotion involved there are probably a lot of emotional mistakes being made." He began to watch Premier League games at odd hours of the day in California, and he became a friend and mentor to some of the people who were trying to bring metrics into football. He remains closest to Damien Comolli, formerly the head of player recruitment at Spurs, and now performing that role at Kenny Dalglish's Liverpool. Though he would not say as much, it is perhaps easy to trace Beane's influence in that particular move. Beane's philosophy, sabermetrics, is also a motivating factor for John W Henry, the chief executive of the Fenway Sports Group, which now owns Liverpool. Henry knows all about he application of quantitative analysis from his days as a hugely successful Wall Street trader. He once tried to recruit Beane for many millions of dollars to the Boston Red Sox, one of his other "franchises". Comolli, no doubt, comes with recommendations.

Beane was, while Comolli was there, a fan of Spurs, but "underneath," he says, "I'm really a closet Arsenal fan because I just love the way that [Arsene] Wenger operates. His concentration on improving young players, the need to make the business work, to add value... one of the things I read from afar is the continued press criticism of Arsenal. I look at it in a different way. Every year they put themselves in a position to win, and every year they balance the books. As we have seen recently, having an unhealthy business can be a big problem in the longer term."

Beane shares with Wenger a single-minded almost religious faith in his own methods, what he calls "a full-on belief system". Like all prophets he has always been beset by doubters: "The challenge is to ignore the noise."

For all Beane's applicance of science, sport remains for him, in essence, an exercise in ongoing frustration. His teams have punched way above their weight, have come close to numerous play-off triumphs and World Series, but often they have fallen short. In that, too, he can sympathise with the professional torments of Wenger. "There are so many random events that happen in sports," he says with grudging acceptance that life is not susceptible to formulae, "that all you can do is put yourself in the best position to benefit from the randomness. The first thing that always comes to my mind in this respect is Chelsea's Champions League final and the moment when John Terry slipped. If you look at all the extraordinary events that have happened since then at that club in order to get to that position once more - and this time not slip - it is just incredible."

---

When Aidan Cooney first read Moneyball in 2003 he sent it to every one of the 20 managers of Premier League clubs. He did not get one response. Cooney is the chief executive of Opta, and in 2002 he set out to transform the way we understood our national game with a team of one. When they first went to newspapers with the suggestion that football analysis might be a little more scientifically rigorous, selling stats, they were told in no uncertain terms that there was no desire "to Americanise sport" in Britain. Opta now employs 100 staff across Europe analysing data on matches. It supplies most of the Premier League clubs and nearly all of the bookies in the land with statistics. The newspaper editors were wrong.

Opta tailors a service to the needs of all the Premier League clubs who use their information in different, secretive ways. There is for a start "a digital blueprint of every game", Cooney tells me, and clubs might ask for specific data on a number of individuals who may or may not be transfer targets, but the requests are always opaque - Champions League slip or not. "Chelsea would not want us, for example, to have an idea that they were drawing up a list of replacements for John Terry."

Cooney has been fascinated, as his obsessive business has spread across Europe, to discover that in other countries the game is analysed very differently. "A tackle is very important in the UK," he says, "but the concept of the tackle does not exist at all for the Italians". There they just want to know if Maldini or whoever was in the right channel to make an interception. In Germany, meanwhile, they place emphasis on the concept of a challenge when two players are in the vicinity of the ball without being contact as a key statistic."

Moneyball is based on the idea of discovering objective value in players where others might not see it. Though clubs are extremely protective about their transfer policies it is compelling how closely the summer's big transfer targets correlate with those perceived to be "outliers", statistical anomalies, in odd recesses of Opta's data. Ashley Young, transferred to Manchester United from Villa, not only has spent more minutes on the pitch than any other Premier League player (apart from Sylvain Distin) in the last five years, but has also won the most penalties (a fact that will no doubt be enhanced by playing at Old Trafford).

The three players with the best chance-creation statistics of the last three years have all been - somewhat surprisingly to the naked eye - elevated to recent status as the most valuable commodities: Jordan Henderson, Luka Modric and Samir Nasri have all created 110 PL goalscoring chances since August 2009.

Cooney, of Opta, points to the best performance directors at clubs as being Mike Forde at Chelsea, the team at Man City, and Damien Comolli at Liverpool. Comolli in particular, under Beane's influence, seems to pursue the Moneyball approach. Henderson's fee of £16m, like that of Andy Carroll last season, raised a few eyebrows among back-page readers, but perhaps Comolli was seeing something that fans didn't: sabermetrics.

As Cooney points out, "When Liverpool bought Carroll, Glenn Hoddle said it took the striker six attempts to score a goal. He used the stat as a negative... in fact, if he'd bothered to study it, that gave Carroll one of the best ratios in the Premier League." At Spurs, of course, Comolli recruited Gareth Bale, which could be proof of the genius of his methods (but then he also bought David Bentley).

Billy Beane remains a strong admirer of his disciple. "I have emails from Damien all the time," he says. "He will be over here in September and we will catch up about things then. And Mike Forde who works at Chelsea is a friend."

Do they come to him for specific wisdom? I wonder. Can Beane see his influence in the (old) premiership?

"I've always viewed myself not as the creator of the ideas but the facilitator. I didn't invent all this stuff; I just decided I was going to have some faith in it. Getting up on a podium and defending it is the challenge. But if you see the emphasis on young players in the Premier League, that is some evidence. At last the desire to pay for future performance has eclipsed the desire to pay for past performance."

The fact remains though that you could have plotted the finishing positions of last year's Premier League aganist the wage bills of the clubs and with a couple of exceptions found a pretty exact correlation (on this basis West Brom were last year's star performers finishing nice places above where hteir wage bill predicted; West Ham were the biggest under-performers, eight places below their expected level). Does this mean that clubs are not using Moneyball methods or that they all are?

"That's one of the problems," Beane suggests, "The people with all the money have also caught up with all this. So the low-hanging fruit is no longer there."

Does he never despair that - for all the science and the luck - the infamous rub of the green and the tragically unlevel playing field always get in the way of the ideal?

Beane sighs about this prospect. "You are never going to get perfection. All you are trying to do is create an arbitrage in your decision-making. If you do one thing one way and get a 20 per cent hit rate, then you change that and get a 25 per cent hit rate you have created a 5 per cent arbitrage. That is the goal."

Though that was never quite how we used to describe it on the Holte End, you see his point. Are there other ways you might compete?

"Well yes," he says, "though I have also come to the scientific conclusion as a manager that eventually your best objective decision might well be to go windsurf in St Barts."

The film of Moneyball is out on 4 November.

[Abrak]

From LFCTV an interview with Comolli......

First of all Damien, you've had time to reflect on your work in the transfer window - how pleased are you in terms of the movement of players both in and out of the club?

Well, we are very happy, but what we do during the season will decide how well we did in the transfer window. A lot of people are asking me the question 'are you happy with what you've done', I always say yes, but let's see where we are at the end of May and how well we have done in the league and in the cups.

Also, it's not a work for one season, it's a work for two, three, four seasons, especially when you are investing in young players, as we've done. It's this season and then the next one and then he next one, and hopefully we'll reflect back on the summer of 2011 - which was crucial, we knew that - and then we'll be happy with the work we've done.

How successful were we in signing the transfer targets we pinpointed at the start of the summer?

I would say very successful. Most of the players we got were our priorities, or were our top two priorities. Obviously I don't to get into individual cases but we've done what we wanted to do and almost more important than players, it's the positions, and we strengthened the positions we had to strengthen. Sometimes it was more difficult, like the left-back position - I think it's difficult for every club to find left full-backs - but we were very happy to get Jose the day before the first game of the season.

The two most difficult positions to fill in football are left full back and central defender because there is a shortage of talent worldwide, and that's why we're delighted to get the two we got in Sebastian Coates and Jose Enrique.

How many people from within the club are involved in the process of a transfer from start to finish and what are their different roles??

That's a short question but a very long answer.

It starts with the scouts who work on the ground to identify players for a year, or even two years, following the players, sometimes longer. Once the scouts have done the work it comes to me and then to Kenny, and then we decide if it's the right player. Kenny can say 'I like him', 'I don't like him', 'he can fit into my team', 'he can't fit into my team', 'he's what we need', 'he's not what we need', and then once the football decision has been made I will explain to the owners why we want to go after this player and what the financial consequences are.

We then start negotiating with the club and with the player, and sometimes that's the easy bit. It sounds very long and it is a long process but once we are negotiating with the club it can take days to sort out the paperwork. We are lucky enough to have a very, very good team on the administrative side of the football club, with Zoe Ward, the club secretary, and her team who have done a fantastic job during this transfer window. We had some difficult deals. We had a very difficult deal with Ajax back in January and getting Sebastian Coates from Nacional was very complicated and we had some late nights towards the end of the window. It's a long and complicated process.

Sometimes the negotiations can be very frustrating when you are stuck for several days on a small point, and suddenly it goes very quickly and you do a deal very quickly. I don't enjoy it during the process but I really enjoy it when it's done and the player signs. You can then see everyone is happy, Kenny is delighted, the owners are happy, the player is happy to be here and we know he's going to be an important player for the future, then the enjoyment is there.

How big is your scouting network and can you give us an idea of how the scouting process works and how it is coordinated?

We've got quite an extensive scouting network throughout the world. We have developed the scouting network in the UK a lot since I joined the club. We've got a lot of full time scouts abroad now as well, constantly going to competitions. Whether they are based in the UK and travelling to competitions or based abroad and covering their countries, we are talking about eight or nine full-time scouts based abroad and at least as many in the UK. Steve Hitchen coordinates our scouting abroad - he is English but based in France - and then we've got two senior scouts - Mal Hutchinson and Alan Harper - coordinating the UK scouting network.

Abroad they work from 16 to the first team and in the UK it's more 17/18 upwards. That's just for the reserve and first team. Then we've got a lot of scouts for the academy working both abroad and in the UK. It's very big locally, around Liverpool and the north west.

If a local scout sees a player he will go and watch him in different circumstances; home, away, good weather, bad weather. If he's an attacking player can he play wide right, wide left, up front, so he tries to cover all possible situations.

Once a player has been recommended by a scout one of the scouting coordinators will go and watch him and that's where I start to get involved, going to watch the player as well, gathering information and data on him. If everything is very positive then we take it to Kenny and say 'we are looking for a left back - we think he's the one or he should go on the list as number two, number three, number one etc'. From then we go to do the deal. It's a very long process.

You expressed in a recent interview following the closure of the window that you had explained to the owners incoming players would have to precede outgoing players. How did you convince the owners to accept this, how accepting were they and what was the reason for this approach?

Trying to 'convince' the owners is not the right way to put it. They are people who are used to winning in everything they've done. The question from them was 'how can we win?' What they say is they are here to win and if they want to win we had to turn things around quite quickly. They understood very easily that if we had to wait to sell players before getting players in then first of all it would take a lot of time to do, and secondly our main targets would more than likely be gone before we could turn around and say 'okay, now we are ready to go and buy this player'.

They got it very quickly, and I've got to say - and I've said previously - that you've got to be brave when you are an owner to accept that because if at the end we didn't sell the players we had to sell it would have cost the club and them a of money. That's why I think they were very, very brave. They understood the process very quickly and they said they wanted to take the chance because they wanted to turn things around. They said if we can dramatically improve the team by doing some business quite early and buying before we sell, we trust you and we trust Kenny, so let's do it.

How much of an input does the manager and his coaching staff have in any decision to sign a particular player?

A massive input because if there is a player Kenny isn't comfortable with then we'll never sign him. He's the one at the end who has to say 'I'm really comfortable with this player' and 'I like your recommendation' or 'I don't like your recommendation'. The input from Kenny is massive, probably the most important. Then there are ongoing discussions all the time with the coaching staff because Steve spent a lot of time at the highest level with other clubs, he played against a lot of players and his teams played against a lot of players in the Champions League and other competitions, so you'll always get input from the coaching staff as well.

When we looked at goalkeepers during the summer to bring in a number two behind Pepe, obviously John [Achterberg] had a massive input into that. I was giving him reports and DVDs and saying to him we had a choice. He's the specialist as the goalkeeper coach. I like to rely on goalkeeper coaches to tell us 'yes' or 'no' and to give their opinion because goalkeeper coaches will see things that nobody else will see. They've got this obsession with this position and I often say they speak their own language! I don't think we would have done anything on the goalkeeper side against John's advice.

Do you speak with the captain or other players about transfer targets?

It really depends on the player. Stevie, for instance, has played with Jordan Henderson, they've trained and played together at Wembley against France, so of course it wouldn't be very clever not to ask Stevie. I did ask him what he thought, how he is as a player, as an individual, is he a good trainer, how does he behave off the pitch, is he respectful, things like this. It was exactly the same in January talking to Stevie and the other England lads about Andy Carroll. The same thing with Dirk Kuyt, being Dutch, he knew a lot about Luis Suarez. You always ask for reference. I wouldn't say we ask for advice and ask one player whether we should sign a player, but the more dialogue and more communication there is the better it is.

We've had lots of fans asking why Raul Meireles was allowed to leave the club to sign for one of our rivals?

I think Raul said it himself with what I've seen recently in the press. Basically, he came to see me and said 'I want to leave, I want to play for another club'. Our intention was not to sell him but we were put in a corner a little bit when he put in a transfer request and said he wanted to go and that he didn't want to play for Liverpool anymore. I think the owners and Kenny have said it, and we all have the same view. When someone doesn't want to be here it's difficult to say 'you are going to stay'. We've been through that process in January with Fernando Torres and this felt like the same situation. We've done it, we think it was the right thing to do for the club, because it's very, very difficult to have somebody here who doesn't want to be here. The job of the manager in the Premier League is already difficult having to manage 25 players and only having 11 to start on a match day, so you have to deal with all the others. On top of that if you have someone who is adamant they don't want to be here and wants to play for someone else, we took the view it's better if he goes and we get the best possible deal for the club. In the end I think we did well.

We've also had a number of supporters wanting to know why Alberto Aquilani was allowed to leave on loan when he had impressed during pre-season?

With him it was more a question of opportunities to play. He's obviously a big player, he's got a very good resume and he's a very good player. But Kenny and the coaching staff felt he would play in a certain position. As I told Alberto during the summer, unfortunately in that position is someone called Steven Gerrard and it would have been difficult for Alberto to play. There were different reasons. There were tactical reasons, the fact he was playing in this position and also we felt it would have been very difficult to keep him here not playing regularly.

I've got to say I was very impressed with the way Alberto behaved throughout the process. He was really an act of class. He only wanted to play football. He was not obsessed about money or anything else and to be fair to him, I was very impressed by his attitude and his personality.

Is it true that we have first refusal on Eden Hazard as part of the loan deal for Joe Cole?

No, it's not true. I've seen those reports, but it's not true. He's a very good player, as everybody knows, but there's no truth in it.

Why have we loaned out Dani Pacheco?

Dani has gone on loan because we want to see him play in the first team somewhere. Last year he went to the Championship and had a good start, then he was sub for a few games, but he did well in those games. We know how well he can do at youth level, he did really well last year in the U19 European championships when Spain lost in the final against France, he did well at the U20 World Cup in Colombia in August, we were there and watched all the games.

The next step is 'can you show us what you can do in the first team?' It would have been difficult for him to play in our first team, and rather than play in the reserves we thought if there is an opportunity for him to go on loan to a good team in a top league, and we can see what he can do and if he can develop, it would be a good opportunity. That's why we took it.

I call it a development loan. Put the player on loan, see how he develops and then that will give us a very strong indication of where his career is going. It's a little bit like Peter Gulacsi, who is on loan at Hull City. We think Peter has got fantastic potential for the future, he's done extremely well with the U21s for Hungary, he captained the team, he played in the Toulon tournament at the end of May against very good teams and he was outstanding, and we felt that this year was important for him for his development.

We will monitor both of them very closely.

Clearly the squad has improved over recent months - but are there areas you are already targeting as needing further strengthening?

Not at the moment. We want to see how we're going to do. We are very, very pleased with what we've done during this window, and the previous one as well. For me it's like a big window from January until the 31st of August and in total we brought in nine players, we changed the team and changed the squad, so it's the time to reflect. To be honest with you I would really struggle to answer the question now and say we need something there or something there, because I think we have such a complete squad at the moment. Let's see how those players develop, how they gel together, how the young players like Sebastian Coates adapts, and then we can make a decision later.

People doubted whether a Director of Football would work at Liverpool - tell us how your relationship has been with Kenny Dalglish during this transfer window....

It has been excellent, not only during the transfer window but from the first day Kenny started we've enjoyed a great relationship at work, and even out of work. It's an ongoing process both before the start of the window and then during the window, talking every day, even if he's away and I'm in the office. Sometimes we talk several times a day because things can change constantly, you think there is a deal and then there is no deal or a club is interested in one of our players and then the next minute they are not interested anymore, so there's a lot of communication all the time, seeing things the same way.

There wasn't one time during the summer when we didn't agree on everything, whether it was players going out or players coming in. Also, because we prepared so much for the window in the last six months we knew before it started what we wanted to do. When you've done all the preparation it's almost a smooth process. We say 'we want him, him and him, they are our targets so let's try to go and get them'. Then it's just a question of timing. Kenny knew exactly what I was doing, when and why. I kept him informed through the progression of all the deals. We didn't change from our idea, we knew the positions we needed to strengthen and the players we wanted, so it was quite an easy process.

Towards the final stage of the window, obviously he knew we were following Coates, I had told him during the Copa America so he could watch him, we had two scouts over there so they were sending reports every time he played a game. Kenny could follow the progression of the player, how he was doing etc.

The relationship has been really, really good, not only during the window but overall.

[fredflintstone]

christ that was frustrating. we'll play plenty worse than that this season and win. bloody ref had a pisspoor one for us again - gave them their debatable penalty and denied us one stonewall and a couple of maybes. annoying.

Debatable ?

Stonewall ?

You need to get rid of delglish & get a desent manager that won't buy crap like Carrol

i don't know who delglish is. but dalglish is pretty decent.

What about grammer ? Dalglish hahahahahaha pathetic . Morons do spelling post .

[StevieH]

christ that was frustrating. we'll play plenty worse than that this season and win. bloody ref had a pisspoor one for us again - gave them their debatable penalty and denied us one stonewall and a couple of maybes. annoying.

Debatable ?

Stonewall ?

You need to get rid of delglish & get a desent manager that won't buy crap like Carrol

i don't know who delglish is. but dalglish is pretty decent.

What about grammer ? Dalglish hahahahahaha pathetic . Morons do spelling post .

don't particularly care about your general level of english but if you're going to post in a liverpool thread and get the name of the club's greatest player and current manager wrong, expect a rebuke lad.

oh it's 'grammar' by the way.

[SantiSuk]

How I wish Abrak could add precis skills to his intellectual armoury! I gave up half way.

[Devil]

This was a surprisng read! Goes to show you should never judge a book by its cover.

Craig Bellamy's African dream

http://www.liverpool...s-african-dream

Liverpool striker Craig Bellamy has spoken for the first time of his pioneering charity work in West Africa ahead of a two-part television documentary which starts on ITV1 Wales this evening at 19.30 pm and continues next Tuesday, 20th September 2011.

In the past three years, the Wales international has played an important role in developing youth football in Sierra Leone and his Foundation is eager to build upon the success of the 84-team league stretching over four regions nationwide.

Tune in tonight to learn more about the charity that was born in the aftermath of Liverpool's defeat in Athens back in 2007.

"I was on the bench for the Champions League final for Liverpool in 2007. I didn't get to appear. I was disappointed not to appear. I was at my wit's end," said Bellamy when explaining the inspiration behind the project.

"I had a mate working in Sierra Leone and he said 'why don't you come out and see me?' and I fell in love with the place.

"It really scared me but I felt I had to do something. If I didn't I'd regret it for the rest of my life.

"The poverty is another level. It made me want to do something about it. To qualify to play in the league they need to go to school - it's not about football, it's about education.

"It's been a massive success, truancy rates have gone down and Unicef say it's one of the best things that has happened to Sierra Leone."

He added: "I've never done a documentary before, I felt totally out of my comfort zone but it was something that had to be done.

"I'm a private man - who you see on the pitch is not who I am off it - so making this has been a learning experience for me as well.

"My parents were great, my dad gave me everything. What I'm trying to do is to give the same support to my boys in Sierra Leone so they can make a success out of their lives.

"What I love about the people of Sierra Leone is that they see a future for themselves."

The show comes while three players from the academy - 14-year old centre-forward Mustapha Bundu, central midfielder Santigie Koroma, 15, and Sulaiman Samura, a 14-year-old centre-back - are spending a six-week training placement at Cardiff City and staying with Bellamy's family.

The two-part documentary follows the livewire striker on a 10-day visit to Sierra Leone in June this year. The first episode of the documentary shows Craig travelling from his home in the Vale of Glamorgan to West Africa, and includes footage of him meeting the girls teams playing in his League, as well as an amputee football team, victims of vicious machete attacks during the 11-year war.

Cardiff-born Bellamy, who spent last season on loan with the Bluebirds added: "Everyone there has a story about the war-with a war that's only 10 years old you are bound to have people who are affected by it.

"But what I love about the people of Sierra Leone is that they see a future for themselves"

For more information about the Craig Bellamy Foundation, and to find out how you can help support its work in Sierra Leone, please click here>>

You can also follow the Foundation on Twitter and Facebook

Author: Liverpool FC

[bkkjames]

Yea Dev, that came out a year ago. Suprising how some jerks on the pitch can be alright off-i hear diouf is available for free if you feel like giving him another go?

[carmine]

This was a surprisng read! Goes to show you should never judge a book by its cover.

Craig Bellamy's African dream

http://www.liverpool...s-african-dream

Liverpool striker Craig Bellamy has spoken for the first time of his pioneering charity work in West Africa ahead of a two-part television documentary which starts on ITV1 Wales this evening at 19.30 pm and continues next Tuesday, 20th September 2011.

In the past three years, the Wales international has played an important role in developing youth football in Sierra Leone and his Foundation is eager to build upon the success of the 84-team league stretching over four regions nationwide.

Tune in tonight to learn more about the charity that was born in the aftermath of Liverpool's defeat in Athens back in 2007.

"I was on the bench for the Champions League final for Liverpool in 2007. I didn't get to appear. I was disappointed not to appear. I was at my wit's end," said Bellamy when explaining the inspiration behind the project.

"I had a mate working in Sierra Leone and he said 'why don't you come out and see me?' and I fell in love with the place.

"It really scared me but I felt I had to do something. If I didn't I'd regret it for the rest of my life.

"The poverty is another level. It made me want to do something about it. To qualify to play in the league they need to go to school - it's not about football, it's about education.

"It's been a massive success, truancy rates have gone down and Unicef say it's one of the best things that has happened to Sierra Leone."

He added: "I've never done a documentary before, I felt totally out of my comfort zone but it was something that had to be done.

"I'm a private man - who you see on the pitch is not who I am off it - so making this has been a learning experience for me as well.

"My parents were great, my dad gave me everything. What I'm trying to do is to give the same support to my boys in Sierra Leone so they can make a success out of their lives.

"What I love about the people of Sierra Leone is that they see a future for themselves."

The show comes while three players from the academy - 14-year old centre-forward Mustapha Bundu, central midfielder Santigie Koroma, 15, and Sulaiman Samura, a 14-year-old centre-back - are spending a six-week training placement at Cardiff City and staying with Bellamy's family.

The two-part documentary follows the livewire striker on a 10-day visit to Sierra Leone in June this year. The first episode of the documentary shows Craig travelling from his home in the Vale of Glamorgan to West Africa, and includes footage of him meeting the girls teams playing in his League, as well as an amputee football team, victims of vicious machete attacks during the 11-year war.

Cardiff-born Bellamy, who spent last season on loan with the Bluebirds added: "Everyone there has a story about the war-with a war that's only 10 years old you are bound to have people who are affected by it.

"But what I love about the people of Sierra Leone is that they see a future for themselves"

For more information about the Craig Bellamy Foundation, and to find out how you can help support its work in Sierra Leone, please click here>>

You can also follow the Foundation on Twitter and Facebook

Author: Liverpool FC

Until this latest post of yours DEV i had no idea you thought us all such a bunch of retards.

[Jimjim]

Makes me want to stick in a fork in my eye!

ugh, I hate losses like that where we clearly battered them. 20 shots to four, Begovic had to make 10 saves!

Can't complain about the penalty as Carra was all over him. But when was the last time Pepe saved a penalty? C'mon Pepe! Been a long while and he used to be great at it.

One of those amazingly frustrating games, but what else can you expect at Stoke?

Henderson should have scored with one of his 3 straight chances in the space of a few seconds, then Adam had two straight shots right after and he couldn't find a way in, either. But Henderson should have taken his first chance one on one with the keeper.

Bellamy had a great header chance on the back post that he put wide, and then with one minute left in injury time Suarez had an open shot at goal that he put wide.

We should have put at least one of those chances in!

I was afraid of this happening today, but with our finishing only have ourselves to blame...

Can't complain about the penalty as Carra was all over him. But when was the last time Pepe saved a penalty? C'mon Pepe! Been a long while and he used to be great at it.

Have to disagree with you on the penalty Jimbo, not a penalty in my book and wouldn't of been given on any other day.

Not sure about expecting Pepe to be saving them? its more about the penalty taker to be honest.

Oh, I think the Carra penalty was definitely "debatable" as StevieH put it. Of course I wish it hadn't been given! So I guess I do have a small complaint, ha ha. If it had been on the other end, I would have been asking for it, let's just say that. It's true it may not have been given on another day, but I can't fault the referee for giving it. I thought it was BS at live speed, but on the replay and from the referee's angle, I can see why he's given it as Carra has him across the front of him as if holding him back. When doing that he gives the referee a decision to make and of course Walters definitely playing for the penalty didn't help. I do think the striker, especially given his size and strength, went down far too easy. Some said perhaps Walters fouled Carra right before the penalty and that's why Carra was stumbling but I would call it shoulder to shoulder.

Anyway, interesting that Stoke's manager now says the Delap handball was a penalty. I thought perhaps he was just too close and couldn't move his arm out of the way but I'd have to look again. I thought at the time that it was debatable, also, and referee has given the benefit of the doubt that he didn't give Carra.

So all in all, probably should have had a chance to equal the score with a penalty or had none given, at all.

About Pepe's saving penalties, I don't think you can ask any keeper to be saving penalties regularly but when he came here and with the penalty shootouts the first two seasons he was seen as kind of a penalty stopper specialist. Been a while since he's saved one, though, so we can't really call him a specialist at that anymore. Overall, though, he's one of the best keepers in the world and has improved the last few years, even.

[carmine]

Makes me want to stick in a fork in my eye!

ugh, I hate losses like that where we clearly battered them. 20 shots to four, Begovic had to make 10 saves!

Can't complain about the penalty as Carra was all over him. But when was the last time Pepe saved a penalty? C'mon Pepe! Been a long while and he used to be great at it.

One of those amazingly frustrating games, but what else can you expect at Stoke?

Henderson should have scored with one of his 3 straight chances in the space of a few seconds, then Adam had two straight shots right after and he couldn't find a way in, either. But Henderson should have taken his first chance one on one with the keeper.

Bellamy had a great header chance on the back post that he put wide, and then with one minute left in injury time Suarez had an open shot at goal that he put wide.

We should have put at least one of those chances in!

I was afraid of this happening today, but with our finishing only have ourselves to blame...

Can't complain about the penalty as Carra was all over him. But when was the last time Pepe saved a penalty? C'mon Pepe! Been a long while and he used to be great at it.

Have to disagree with you on the penalty Jimbo, not a penalty in my book and wouldn't of been given on any other day.

Not sure about expecting Pepe to be saving them? its more about the penalty taker to be honest.

Oh, I think the Carra penalty was definitely "debatable" as StevieH put it. Of course I wish it hadn't been given! So I guess I do have a small complaint, ha ha. If it had been on the other end, I would have been asking for it, let's just say that. It's true it may not have been given on another day, but I can't fault the referee for giving it. I thought it was BS at live speed, but on the replay and from the referee's angle, I can see why he's given it as Carra has him across the front of him as if holding him back. When doing that he gives the referee a decision to make and of course Walters definitely playing for the penalty didn't help. I do think the striker, especially given his size and strength, went down far too easy. Some said perhaps Walters fouled Carra right before the penalty and that's why Carra was stumbling but I would call it shoulder to shoulder.

Anyway, interesting that Stoke's manager now says the Delap handball was a penalty. I thought perhaps he was just too close and couldn't move his arm out of the way but I'd have to look again. I thought at the time that it was debatable, also, and referee has given the benefit of the doubt that he didn't give Carra.

So all in all, probably should have had a chance to equal the score with a penalty or had none given, at all.

About Pepe's saving penalties, I don't think you can ask any keeper to be saving penalties regularly but when he came here and with the penalty shootouts the first two seasons he was seen as kind of a penalty stopper specialist. Been a while since he's saved one, though, so we can't really call him a specialist at that anymore. Overall, though, he's one of the best keepers in the world and has improved the last few years, even.

They were both penalties. The referring was very poor. You were hard done by. Move on people. if you want really hard done by by what is a hopeless ref look at the way Spurs were treated at Stamford Bridge last season and then you really can feel hard done by.

Poor referring is very much part of the battle and another reason why ferguson is still by far the best manager.