What's with the snidish dig at SOS all about though?
Wasn't. Just recall at the time a bit of credit being thrown in that direction, which I didn't think was accurate. But if there's written evidence that H&G crumbled cos some SoS operative organised for H&G to be snapped in an uncompromising situation with some Malaysian rentboys, then God bless em. And God bless SoS too.
Think Graham Smith was involved in SoS back in the day. Never met him to my knowledge. Read a lot of comments from him over the years, think he's an accountant if I remember correctly, always seemed very knowledgeable.
I'm just uncomfortable about signs that fans are signing up again off the back of the ESL farce, for 2 main reasons:
1) I don't like seeing our fans allied in any shape or form to United fans, who hate us with every bone of their body, or thick-as-sh*t racist Chelsea wankers (ditto). If either club went bust I'd drink myself into oblivion to celebrate their demise. I also don't like our fans spouting the same inane "the game's gone" "I'm done with football" Sky soundbites as Gary Neville, Carra, Shearer, or Boris F***ing Johnson, who didn't want English clubs toddling off to play with "our European friends" because it's our patriotic duty to hate European people, or something. I'm sure a psychiatrist could explain what his F***ing problem is. If you've got all year.
2) FSG are not the right target IMO. Target the Premier League; target Man City; target the greedy owners of any Premier League club who couldn't give a rat's arse about the league being a fair contest as long as they're siphoning off billions of TV cash. United 'fans' force the biggest game in the calendar to be abandoned and the Premier League are still titting about trying to find ways of punishing 'the greedy six' for the ESL fiasco, when any penalty is almost certainly going to be illegal and City's lawyers will sh*t on it inside 5 seconds. Meanwhile, the same Premier League seem rather unconcerned with penalising a club whose fans forced a game to be abandoned, which sets a pretty dangerous precedent as the season reaches a point of European qualification, and relegation. Shut the game down, get it postponed, until you get the result you wanted.
FSG will sell I think, but it won't be because of unnecessary fan pressure. Their business model is screwed. They've kind of now got to speculate to accumulate, to try to get us back in the Champions League, or LFC's valuation will start falling quickly. Or they can sell before they lose much more than a few hundred million dollars. They don't seem the type to speculate to accumulate, haven't in 10 years, so I can't see them starting now. That points to a sale in the not too distant future. Maybe.
I thought they were going to sell after 7 years but maybe they could see Klopp was on the verge of great things and decided to stay in the game. Wise move. But any investor also needs to know when to get out.
This is a massive be careful what you wish for. It's like winding back the clock to rumours of us being bought by some Arab sheikh a decade ago. Great, he comes in, buys Timothy Twinkletoes TraorĂŠ from Sochaux for a billion quid, and everything's going great until there's a few bad results and the sheikh starts saying "Hey, Joe Cole's playing this week" and Klopp says "I don't think he is" and the sheikh says "Yes he is and also the one-legged b***ard son of Christian Poulsen is also playing" etc. OK that is unlikely, but there could be new owner issues of some sort and they could potentially be catastrophic. Is it worth the risk?
Our fans are sounder than anyone else's, he said with no hint of bias, but fan protests (or indeed any street protests) are always going to be in danger of some impressionable daft lads starting to chuck steel barriers at the bizzies and getting their names on the police national computer.
I've seen it in Northern Ireland recently. Arlene Foster roaring "THEY'RE CHECKING OUR CHICKENS!!!!" and before you know it a big group of lads are chucking petrol bombs at the police, because the adults told them to be 'incensed'.
Are fan protest groups responsible if the protest they organise gets out of hand? Liable? What about moral responsibility? Can they just re-run the Donald Trump defence of "the actions of those people is nothing to do with me"?
What if it's your lad comes home for his tea with a criminal record when he didn't have one when he left home that morning? There's defo gonna be some of those United lads getting a knock on the door this week.