Liverpool

When Wallis Simpson ‘stole’ our king and Edward VIII was forced to abdicate, the nation was split. With the benefit of hindsight what she had inadvertently done was remove a man who was patently unfit to rule. Edward was certainly a Nazi sympathizer and to varying degrees selfish, arrogant and witless while his brother who replaced him, George VI, turned out to be dutiful, diligent, determined and altogether a fine man. John Denham, the Communities Secretary, might just turn out to be Everton’s Mrs Simpson. By rejecting our plans to build a new stadium in Kirkby he might just have started the ball rolling towards the only logical, financially...

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Looks like the RS just blew their title hopes with Rafa scoring as spectacular an own goal as Carragher has ever managed. And it was worse, much worse, than KK’s famous outburst because it was premeditated, the dope had written it all out in longhand and read it as if delivering a bad wedding speech. Sir Alex has won the psychological battle, now let’s win the physical battle!

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As an Everton fan I can appreciate how lunacy in the boardroom can destroy a club. Peter Johnson (dubbed “Agent Johnson” by the Anfield faithful), did a mini-Leeds with Everton, mortgaging their future away so we could buy a cavalcade of stars. After a season we had to sell almost every single one. Johnson also had the charisma of roadkill – he once took Nigel Martyn to a meat-packing factory for contract talks and, unsurprisingly, Martyn chose to sign for Leeds. David Moyes said in an interview a few weeks ago that chairmen shouldn’t run the rule over prospective managers as much as potential managers should interview potential chairmen....

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Everton have now recorded victories or draws in each of their last 11 calendar entries and shouldn’t go anywhere with trepidation. For me, the big difference this season is fear, and more specifically a lack of it amongst Evertonians. All my immediate family are Evertonians, and when it comes to watching our blue boys in action we usually do it either from behind the sofa, or in extreme cases (Wimbledon, Coventry, Merseyside derby) updates are usually shouted to us as we quiver in fear at the bottom of the garden. I usually opt for the back of the sofa as my vantage point, hiding from the harbinger of doom...

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This piece was originally written for sportingo. Phil Neville and PFA chief Gordon Taylor both think that players are getting burn-out, which is a fatuous and hackneyed argument. Although today’s stars do play a lot of games, I don’t recall burn-out ever being a tangible reality; rather it is a invisible miasma, a ghostly threat like Communism in 1950s America. The BBC define burn-out as ‘physical and emotional exhaustion, reduced performance, and a lack of enjoyment/ reward from playing and training’. Taylor’s poster boy for exhaustion is Steven Gerrard, who started six games in the last 18 days, including the sojourn to Moscow’s plastic pitch and Liverpool’s trip to...

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