| Judge Backs Liverpool in Right to Negotiate Sale Deal The soccer club inched closer to a sale when a judge ruled against their unpopular American owners and backed the club’s board and its right to negotiate a deal. feeds.nytimes.com |
The Fiver | An audience of befuddled bingo players in Borris-in-Ossory parish hall | Paul Doyle Click here to have the Fiver sent to your inbox every weekday at 5pm(ish), or if your usual copy has stopped arrivingOUT OF THE FRYING PANTo the exalted names of Shankly, Dalglish, Barnes and Biscan, Liverpool fans can add that of another hero: Floyd. Not Keith, Pink or Pretty Boy, but Justice. Because Mr Justice Floyd is the high court judge who today paved the way for Liverpool to send Tom Hicks and George Gillett back to whence they came, with jeers in their ears and a £140m pain in their posteriors. The sale of Liverpool to John W Henry now looks like going through, and what the undignified and at times extremely boring brouhaha of the last few months has told us is that the likely new owner would be well-advised not to renege on any promises he makes to the club's fans or, if he thinks he must or just wants to because he can, then he'd better not renege on any contractual commitments to the banks, the swine.It was the Royal Bank of Scotland who took the case against Hicks and Gillett that led to today's verdict. The bankers insisted that, by trying to reconfigure the club's board to block the sale to Henry's investment prop, the pair breached the contract that they had signed with the bank as a condition for receiving extended credit. Effectively they retorted by arguing 'but we'd get more money if the board accepted a better bid, waaah! Waaaaaaah! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaah".The judge found in favour of the bank and imposed an injunction on the owners to prevent them rejigging the board. "The owners do not have an absolute right to veto a sale," gabbled Floyd before ordering those chastened owners to pay the bank's costs (up to £500,000) and adding that an appeal against his decision would be "inappropriate".As a result of the ruling, the three board members who are not Hicks and Gillett have convened a meeting for 8pm tonight, during which they are expected to give a final thumbs-up to the sale to Henry, and a satisfying two-fingered salute to the former owners. "We said at the outset we'd find the right owners for Liverpool, I think we've done that," hurrahed Liverpool chairman Martin Broughton. "I think Liverpool Football Club can look forward to a bright future."Crucially, that opinion is shared by the world's foremost readily-available composer of elevator anthems, Chris de Burgh. "I'm delighted by the judge's decision in the high court action involving Liverpool Football Club," crooned De Burgh to an audience of befuddled bingo players in Borris-in-Ossory parish hall. "In spite of what may have been the best intentions, Hicks and Gillett have been catastrophic for the club, they've been like unwanted houseguests who overstayed their welcome," continued the songster by popular demand. "It's time for the club and its millions of supporters to move on, hopefully to a brave new beginning and put Liverpool back where it rightfully belongs, at the top of the Premier League," yahooed the bard, seemingly unaware that the next step in Liverpool's other sorry saga - the one that's been unfolding on the pitch - will be a derby defeat at Everton.QUOTE OF THE DAY"Only a bazooka could have restored calm" - Italian managers' association president Renzo Ulivieri in-no-way-over-reacts to the trouble caused by Serbia supporters that caused their Euro 2012 qualifier in Italy to be called off after just seven minutes. Incidentally, the alleged ringleader of the Serbian ultras was subsequently arrested after being found hiding in the baggage hold of a supporters' bus and then identified by the tattoos his balaclava failed to cover.HOLDING THE LINE8 October: "I'm working on guiding the team out of this situation and strengthening the players. In the long term, perseverance leads to success. We'll experience negative moments in the future too, but we must hold the line" - Stuttgart boss Christian Gross.13 October: Stuttgart sack Christian Gross.GET 66 POUNDS' WORTH OF FREE BETS WITH BLUE SQUAREClick here to find out more.FIVER LETTERS"Re: masochistic readers following the rolling Liverpool blog from the high court (yesterday's Fiver). It was actually far more exciting and eventful than Liverpool's recent sporting endeavours" - Michael Curtis."If Lord Ferg is under the impression that Dimitar Berbatov is the only footballer who can solve a conundrum (yesterday's bits and bobs), he obviously hasn't heard of Clarke Carlisle" - David McGuire."Was the word 'orevrated'?" - Andy Korman.Send your letters to the.boss@guardian.co.uk. And if you've nothing better to do you can also tweet the Fiver now.BITS AND BOBSEngland left the field to a chorus of boos at Wembley last night following their 0-0 Euro 2012 qualifying draw with Montenegro. "This is football. It's not like boxing where you win by punching the opponent more," noted Fabio Capello sagely.Manchester United fans are planning an anti-Glazers march from a pub they are planning on going to anyway to the Tottenham game they will be going to anyway on 30 October.Meanwhile, said United supporters are expecting a 25% increase in ball-retention after Anderson said he wants to do one. "I am good in Manchester but I'd like to return to Portugal and my preference would be Porto. I love the country," he sobbed.Dirk Kuyt could be sidelined for "a long time", according to the Holland manager Bert van Marwijk, after suffering "very serious" ankle knack.Uefa is to investigate the aforementioned violence that forced the abandonment of Italy v Serbia. "The sanctions that are available range from a reprimand or fine, up to a stadium closure or 'disqualification from competitions in progress and/or exclusion from future competitions'," threatened a Uefa suit.Wigan Council have relented after an angry reaction from the town's football fans and replaced new signposts which omitted any reference to the Latics. "It was a clearly discriminatory act to focus solely on the rugby," fumed supporter Andy Wolstenholme, after the council added new messages reading "Wigan Warriors, Super League champions 2010" underneath their 'Welcome to Wigan' signposts. The original ones - describing Wigan as "home of Premiership football and Super League rugby" - have been bolted back on.And Blue Square South strugglers Thurrock have snapped up Portuguese winger Joao Miguel Martins Pais De Carlos from neighbours Brentwood Town.STILL WANT MORE?Why do Polonia Warszawa and Cracovia Krakow's fans get along so well? What about Dinamo Kiev and Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk? This week's Knowledge has the answer.They might not be up there with Dalglish, Barnes and Rush but Broughton, Purslow and Ayre are Liverpool fans' newest heroes after beating Statler & Waldorf in court, whoops Sachin Nakrani.If England players stopped pretending Peter Crouch was a human signpost with Lamp It Up To Me written on his forehead they may start playing some decent football, harrumphs Paul Hayward.Meanwhile Richard Williams reckons Fabio Capello's tactical nous and discipline is all well and good, but he still can't make England's ageing shufflers run any faster.SIGN UP TO THE FIVERWant your very own copy of our free tea-timely(ish) email sent direct to your inbox? Has your regular copy stopped arriving? Click here to sign up.SCOUSERS AND MINERS CELEBRATING? HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAGGIEPaul Doyleguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Canada's Sinclair named finalist for FIFA award Canadian striker Christine Sinclair made the 10-woman nominations list for the 2010 FIFA Ballon d'Or world player of the year award. cbc.ca |
BBC Makes New Allegations Against FIFA Officials ZURICH (Reuters) - An investigation by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) accused three FIFA executives of taking bribes in a programme to be aired on Monday, three days before the hosts of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups are decided. feeds.nytimes.com |
Veh will be lucky to hold on at Hamburg Hamburg's skittish win over Stuttgart provided evidence that Bundesliga managers are not up to the standard of its players"Great goals, absurd mistakes – heaven, hell, HSV," was Hamburger Morgenpost's take on the northerners' eventful 4-2 win over Stuttgart's 10 men on Saturday. The local tabloid was excited and repelled in equal measure by the six-goal "microcosm of Hamburg's season". As ever, the skittishness on the pitch was coupled with strange noises off it. The goalkeeper Frank Rost came away from the second home win in a row ranting like a man on the end of a double-figure pasting. "We are not running for each other. Spectacle and theatre – these are things for Real Madrid. A top team? Buying expensive players doesn't make us one. The table doesn't lie. I'm fed up with taking balls out of the net all the time, I won't get used to getting stuffed," the 37-year-old fretted. "They should put someone else in goal, maybe."The seventh-placed club is tempted to follow Rost's last bit of advice, his contract expires in the summer and probably won't be renewed. But that's not the point. He's also a man with ridiculously high standards, the kind of chap who could find a fly in an ocean of the world's tastiest Bouillabaisse. That's not the point either, though. The most interesting thing about his predictable grumblings was their hearty endorsement by Armin Veh. "That's why he's in goal, because he's loud and he's getting heard", said the embattled coach. "He says the things that others don't want to hear."Veh has been saying similar things all season. In terms of pure playing potential and the squad's quality, Hamburg should be at the very top, fighting for the Champions League at the least. Their systematic failure to live up to their possibilities ("we never know if we're really making progress here," said the midfielder Piotr Trochowski, the scorer of the first goal) poses real questions about Veh's regime, but the 49-year-old has cleverly managed to deflect attention so far. After every defeat or disappointing draw, he's come out and criticised the "silly mistakes" at the back or questioned his team's appetite.It's a line of defence that didn't work for him at Wolfsburg last season, where results contrasted unfavourably with the championship winning year of 2008-09. In Hamburg, however, many supporters and the press tend to agree with this populist version of events. No coach has been able to last longer than two full seasons in the Volksparkstadion since the turn of the century despite the players getting more expensive and better. The high quality of the recruits has tended to be part of the problem: Rost rightly remarked that too many of them see Hamburg as a mere stepping stone for bigger and better things. Mladen Petric, the talented Croatian forward, epitomises this type. He's been decidedly ambiguous about moving to Italy or the Premier League for as long as he's been playing in the Bundesliga.The 29-year-old scored a fine goal and set up Ruud van Nistelrooy's equally fine 60th-minute clincher with a wonderful pass. Tellingly, however, it was the 20-year-old Tunay Torun who won the biggest plaudits. The Turkish striker, who was preferred to the not-fully-fit Van Nistelrooy, put in a tireless performance. "His running made it possible to do some serious pressing, a tactic that can't work with Petric and Van Nistelrooy up front", noticed Frankfurter Rundschau.It's a truism that even the best teams can't rely on skill alone to beat lesser opponents. But Veh's fundamental critique belies the fact that he's done nothing to help his team when it comes to slightly more intricate details like formation, tactics or dead-ball strategies. It's almost impossible to fathom that this should be possible in 2010 but Veh, by all accounts a decent man, is still stuck in the management mode of the 1980s. He picks 11 players, lines them up in a specific shape and then expects them to sort things out by themselves. Note his lament that his charges were "not communicating enough" on Saturday.One senior source in the dressing room told a friend that there are no tactical directives to speak of. None whatsoever. And Veh has previous in this respect. When Stuttgart won the league with him in charge in 2007, one player revealed that their widely praised attacking game, a style that reeked of well-crafted symmetry, systematic moves from the training ground and tremendous balance, came about as a happy accident. "We only practised patterns of attack once all year", he told this column.Every time Veh talks about silly errors, The Damned United comes to mind. In this fictionalised account, Leeds players ask Brian Clough how they should defend corners. "You're international players, you sort it out", comes the reply.Against Stuttgart, Hamburg's lack of direction could easily have been exposed once again. But the hosts were lucky that Stuttgart's Romanian striker Ciprian Marica chose the wrong moment to show off his impressive grasp of the local idiom. Seven minutes after equalising, he called the referee Wolfgang Stark an 'Arschloch' and was duly sent packing. Marica was fined a record €50,000 for his troubles by VfB, in spite of his protestations of innocence. "I would never use such language, the referee must have misheard me", said the 25-year-old on Sunday, while reaching for the fire extinguisher.HSV scored three more goals against the decimated Stuttgart team but still nearly managed to slip up thanks to some awful defending and over-all shoddiness. "We can't concede so many goal-scoring opportunities with one man up," said defender Heiko Westermann. "We'll never have a stable season unless we stop that." Chances are they won't.It would be a surprise if Veh were to stay the course, too, as the true extent of his laissez-faire attitude cannot be kept secret forever. A new manager will come but the "great goals, absurd mistakes" mantra will ring true for longer, far beyond the city limits. As long as the Bundesliga cannot produce managers to match the calibre of its increasingly good players, it'll remain stuck on European football's mezzanine floor: halfway between heaven and hell.Talking points• He's had players running until they were literally blue in the face, tortured them with medicine balls and built the fearsome "Mount Magath" in Wolfsburg, his very own version of The Hill . Now, Felix the Bundesliga Grinch has decided to steal Christmas, too: in the wake of Schalke's 5-0 defeat at Kaiserslautern, the players were informed that their holidays were severely curtailed. Six days after their last game of the year, a cup game against Augsburg on 21 December, they'll have to report back to duty. "He's effectively abolished the winter break," wrote Süddeutsche Zeitung. Training will start one hour earlier, too.• It's a drastic measure that will find favour with many S04 supporters but it also betrays Magath's helplessness. Three days after a solid 3-0 win over Lyon in the Champions League, his team were so abject that the travelling fans turned their backs on them long before the final whistle. Some "Magath out!" chants were audible, too. "If we continue to play like that, we will go down", said the goalkeeper Manuel Neuer, a bleak assessment that was shared by his manager. After the seventh defeat of the season, the board weren't placated by Magath's Ebeneezer Scrooge impersonation. "I expect more than a relegation fight from Magath," said the chairman Clemens Tönnies. "I'm shocked. The manager has to explain to us how we get out of [the bottom of the table]." Unfortunately for the players, Magath seems to have prepared an answer. "We need to work and train harder," he said.• A comfortable 4-1 win over Eintrach Frankfurt brought a smidgen of tranquility and yet another 'peace' between Louis van Gaal and the board, just in time for Bayern Munich's AGM on Tuesday night. "This was our best game in the Bundesliga," said the happy Dutchman. Apart from two goals from Anatoly Tymoschuk and another strike from Mario Gomez – his 16th in all competitions – the game was most remarkable for a series of catastrophic errors from Daniel van Buyten. The Belgian, whose father was a professional wrestler, must have his eyes on a WWF belt (as in the World's Worst 'Fender) because they certainly were not on the ball: he nearly let in Theofanis Gekas after a complete mis-hit and then allowed the Greek striker to equalise by falling asleep twice in the space of a second. To his credit, the 32-year-old was aware enough to ask Van Gaal to be substituted at half-time. "It takes power to say that," said the manager generously.• A last-minute 2-2 equaliser by Hoffenheim prevented third-placed Leverkusen from keeping track with Mainz and Dortmund, who continued to win in impressive fashion. Thomas Tuchel's men played a patient game against Nürnberg and pounced when space opened up in the second half. A 3-0 scoreline was a little harsh on the visitors perhaps. Dortmund, however, were very good value for their 4-1 win over Gladbach. They took one half to wear down the defensive visitors ("you can't defend deeper than they did against us," said Jürgen Klopp), then scored three beautiful goals (Kagawa, Großkreutz, Barrios) to take the other Borussia apart with gusto. No wonder the manager had his contract extended until 2014. He and his team look untouchable this season.• Hugo (Almeida) was boss against St. Pauli, as his hat-trick bought the Werder coach, Thomas Schaaf, some valuable time. Unfortunately, the Portuguese striker hit another target 10 minutes from the end when his elbow connected squarely with Carlos Zambrano. He was sent off and is likely to miss the year's final matches. "I was fouled throughout the game and lost my nerve at the end," he explained.• Köln's Lukas Podolski, on the other hand, was lucky to escape with a yellow card following a similar outrage. "Two is better than one," he thought, possibly, before ignoring the ball in order to kick Edin Dzeko where it really hurts. Köln wouldn't be Köln if Podoslki got in trouble after the 1-1 draw with poor Wolfsburg, however. Hapless manager Michael Meier was fired on Monday morning instead, a mere five years too late by a conservative estimate.Results: Mainz 3–0 Nürnberg, Bayern 4–1 Frankfurt, Hoffenheim 2–2 Leverkusen, Hamburg 4–2 Stuttgart, Hannover 3–0 Freiburg, Lautern 5–0 Schalke, Dortmund 4–1 Gladbach, Bremen 3–0 St Pauli, Köln 1–1 Wolfsburg.Latest Bundesliga standings BundesligaHamburgStuttgartEuropean footballRaphael Honigsteinguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |