FAN VIEW: When will Tom Hicks and George Gillett realise they aren't wanted?

Apr 4 2008

SO we hear from Mr Gillett at last though the timing of his outburst against Mr Hicks was as good as a Clinton Morrison volley.

It was inevitable that some negative publicity would surface about the club during this big fortnight of games (paranoid, us?!), but Mr Gillett should have known better.

You don’t give negative interviews when you are about to play some of the biggest games of the season.

It takes the focus off the pitch, and puts added pressure on both the management and the players. Daft.

That said, we have been waiting for Gillett to make some sort of noise about the situation, and for that I suppose we should be grateful.

There was a fair amount of blame shifting (most of which I imagine is true), a little bit of sucking up to the supporters (do the owners really believe that we are not savvy enough to recognise it?) and then the bombshell came: Gillett may seek to buy the club outright himself.

If this is so, why didn’t he do it in the first place?

He didn’t have the funds by all accounts, hence the tortured “marriage” with Hicks. Thank God we were spared the embarrassment of having both owners at the Arsenal game turning their backs to each other, Naboo-like.

When it snows in Colorado, it really snows.

What Mr Gillett hasn’t seemed to grasp yet is that the overwhelming majority of Liverpool supporters don’t want either of the current owners to stay.

It’s probably this single-mindedness that has made Hicks and Gillett their fortunes, but to the football world it’s distasteful.

Well, it’s distasteful once the football world stops laughing at us.

Rafa has done a great job just getting on with it to be honest.

The media may posit that the off-field shenanigans have taken the focus off Rafa’s mistakes, but the laws of cause and effect show that the two are intertwined.

Yes, the manager has made a few errors of judgement, but all managers do.

By common consent it was thought that Liverpool would be challenging for the title this year, with many pundits singling them out as favourites.

The non-challenge hasn’t purely been down to rotation, bad buys or tactical foolhardiness. The rotation policy was in place to ensure that the Reds were fit and ready for the business end of the season, ie: now.

Take away the United performance (which was very poor), and you can see the benefits of having a set group of players, all fit and raring to go.

The derby win was a product of that, as was the draw on Wednesday night, though we were lucky not to concede a definite penalty.

It made me laugh, though, when Arsene Wenger couldn’t believe the ref hadn’t seen Kuyt’s pull on Hleb.

This from the man who brought an old pillar from Highbury to hide behind when something contentious goes Arsenal’s way!

The League and second-leg meetings are still to come and I’ll be happy with 0-0 draws in each.

Arsenal is a great club, with top supporters and I would rather have met them in the final, but there’s a job to be done and we have the experience, the passion, the men and the crowd to finish it off next Tuesday.