Re: Evra accuses Suarez of racism
To be honest is this not a PR disaster?
Kenny is a walking PR disaster. It was pretty much always the case, but he got away with it early in his management career because he was invariably winning.
The other person who comes out of this fairly poorly is the owner. There are two ways he could have contained this PR nightmare, either step in himself early and take the path of least resistance - dampen down the bad news with an apology, it was all a cultural misunderstanding thing - and hardly anyone would even be talking about it now. Meanwhile you quietly appeal the length of the ban and the FA shortens it because you have shown penitence for the crime and are sending out the right signal.
If you do not want to get involved in this personally then you make sure you put in place a senior management structure at the club to handle it for you. A structure that has a strong communications head and a manager with strict instructions that any actions or comments he makes on this subject have to be signed off by the PR guy.
Dalglish is doing what he is doing undoubtedly to try and create a siege mentality and keep his team close in spirit and deed. But what is good for one part of a vast organisation like Liverpool is not necessarily good for the rest of it. The club's image and reputation is taking a battering because there are no senior people there who seem to have the power or remit to argue their own corners in the face of the scattershot approach of Dalglish.
I cannot imagine any one person would have this amount of scope within their job definitions to cause this much trouble at any of Henry's other sporting entities, I struggle to imagine why he permits this to happen at Liverpool.
Too much that seems to have happened at the club over the past year has been rather knee jerk, whether some of the ridiculous, panicky transfer deals or this sort of pandering to the baser instincts of the more rabid elements of the support. Good owners need to stand aloof from populist gestures, Henry seems to be far too acquiescent in the poor decision making made by the people he is trusting to run the club. I do not know if this is a competence issue or a currying favour one, either way I am worried.
The owner doesn't have the first clue of what he is doing when it comes to football. NESV bought Liverpool because someone told them they could buy one of the most widely supported sports franchises in the world for £200 million. They jumped at it. The glazers were looking for over 10 times as much for man utd. £200 million was cheap. There was however a couple of reasons as to why this storied franchise was available so cheaply.
The problem is that they don't know anything at all about football. They didn't realise what a mess Benitez had made of the club, with the assistance of H&G. they didn't know how incredibly shit most of the players were when they took over.
They didn't realise how much fucking money these players were on. They didn't realise how badly structured the squad was, they didn't realise how long their contracts were. They were only dimly aware of how bad the clubs underlying financial position was, and how costs were exploding as income fell.
They had some lovely little plans for a transfer guru to scour Europe for top players at fantastic prices, with a coach at the cutting edge of management, using the most modern of methods to weld the team into a winning machine.
However, NESV didn't realise that all of their plans were going to be fucked straight out the window, because King Kenny wanted the job, and let it be known to the world at large through his mates who were all in the media and saying what a great manager he would be.
NESV looked at their fans in near open revolt against their manager, and saw they were chanting for the return of a man who hadn't had any real involvement in football since he disgraced himself at Celtic and Newcastle, and they just buckled.
Out went any notion of young coaches with inventive tactics, out went clever purchases, in came insanely expensive players of unproven top level pedigree, but proven behavioural problems, at galactico prices. All rational economic planning went out the window as they "overspent to show the fans that they were prepared to spend big." before scouring the North East for unbelievably bad value.
NESV have little or no leverage over Dalglish. If they sacked him tomorrow they could never set foot in their own stadium again and would have to sell the club. KK can do whatever he wants, and unfortunately, it appears that he only seems to be interested in pissing and shitting all over his own reputation.
Whether it be buying terrible players, or wasting obscene amounts of money, or making an unbelievably awful mess of handling this Suarez case, or even buying the crazy uncontrollable cunt in the first place.
Suarez, Carroll, Downing and Henderson are enormous catastrophic club-crushing blunders. any other football manager who had made the catalogue of horrendous errors that Dalglish has made over the last 12 months would have been not only fired, but sued for the damage he's done to NESV's economic interests.
But ultimately there is nothing that they can do about it, other than wait until he realises that his best managerial days were under Thatcher, and hope that he fucks off back to the 19th hole with the MOTD pundits, to tell off-colour stories about the good old days.
NESV can then look at their falling income, escalating costs, rising losses, and try and rebuild again, in the knowledge that Liverpool have officially replaced nNewcastle as the most criminally mismanaged club in england. Pretty soon Liverpool fans are going to start every season hoping for a good run at a Europa league spot, and if one of the CL clubs wins the League cup, maybe we'll get it.
I know many will be very angry at what I have written but it's the truth and we all know it.
