Oliver Kay article in the Times

I cant believe that the bit in bold in the article is true?? I wasnt at the game but couldnt hear anything via the sound effects microphones on the telly!!!

The Final Word with Oliver Kay

Before kick-off at Goodison Park on Saturday, officials from Everton and Liverpool gathered on the pitch to release 200 purple balloons under a banner that said: “Liverpool Unites”. As most of the balloons stayed in their sack, you wondered whether someone was trying to tell the local newspaper that their campaign to unite red and blue might struggle to get off the ground.

There has been a certain amount of revisionism on Merseyside in recent years about the “myth” of the friendly derby. According to some, the convivial Everton-Liverpool Cup Finals of the 1980s caught them at a moment of weakness and, had it not been that the city was being downtrodden by the government, the two sets of fans would not have stood side by side at Wembley chanting “Merseyside, Merseyside” and “Are you watching, Manchester?”

However superficial that sense of Scouse solidarity may or may not have been at the time, that historical context is inevitable when charting the deterioration of a rivalry that has reached the gutter. On Saturday we had all the usual bile (the chilling “Murderers” chants, the gestures to signify the deaths at Heysel and Hillsborough, the distasteful abuse of Joleon Lescott and of Steven Gerrard’s family) and then, most depressingly of all, the new and hopefully short-lived phenomenon of Liverpool supporters chanting “2-0 to the murderers”.

Jamie Carragher, born an Evertonian, but now the quintessential Liverpudlian, uses his experience on both sides of the divide to make some searing observations on the rivalry in his autobiography. He uses words such as “sinister”, “vile” and “inexcusable”. Heaven only knows what Carragher made of the moment on Saturday when Liverpool supporters stooped lower than a snake’s belly with their own take on the “Murderers” chant. According to some in the away end, it was a post-ironic take on Everton supporters’ perceived obsession with Heysel and its supposed repercussions for their club as they went into decline shortly after English clubs were banned from European competition. Whatever, it sounded truly awful.

There is no humour any more. Where once there was respect and gentle mickey-taking (“He’s fat, he’s s***, he’ s never f***ing fit, Peter Reid”), now there are personal attacks on men such as Gerrard based not on humour but on vicious and unfounded rumour. One less offensive rumour is that the Liverpool captain had a vest declaring “I’m the daddy” to show off in case he scored his 100th goal for the club on Saturday. That would have shut them up, but not, you suspect, for long

It's all pretty offensive to be honest. 

It's a huge shame that things have deteriorated so much in this game between the two sets of fans, however it is pretty much entirely down to the attitude of Evertonians.

The fact remains that their bitterness has stopped the derby being what it was once - something a bit unique in world football where you could sit alongside a bluenose.

What they fail to understand is that Liverpool and hundreds of thousands of innocent Liverpool supporters paid a heavy price for Heysel.  How many European titles were stolen from me because of the events that happened there.  Liverpool never got back in to the tournament for years and years after.

Every year I hope that a bit of common sense will prevail amongst some dickheads on the Gwladys Street but it never does.  It's a shame, but I personally know too many Everton fans who have got real problems with it and seem to blame every single Liverpool supporter for the events of a few nearly a quarter of a century ago.

Let it go eh lads.

Kay is a good writer but he's got it wrong there. Didnt see him write an article after the Man Utd game a fortnight ago...same sh*te/murderer chants loud and clear...maybe he didnt want to upset his mates in the cockney based media?

The only problem is, it is ignored when any other club sings worse songs, he makes light of the fact that Everton and United have been chanting songs about us being murderers for years and sees our tongue in cheek response as worse than the others, and once again there are reports of hands over faces gestures, which blows any other chant out of the water for being disgraceful, but has not been condemned by the press.

Oliver Kay doesn't mention "The Chosen One" attempts to make things better does he? No, because the ginger f**ker has made things worse with his pathetic "peoples club" sh*te and constant wingeing which only adds fuel to those sad park enders antics.

There isn't another set of fans like them in the league. They PROPER hate us, loads of them do pushing motions and hands over faces. So is singing two nil to the murderers stooping to their level?  We've done it when winning their the last few times now. It has every single one of them scratching their heads. That shout they have over us completely blown into pieces. They've got no come back to it.

EVERYTHING Everton do is OK.
EVERYTHING we do is wrong.
An opinion usually backed up by the local press too.

I think we were just singing it because Everton call us it all the time. Like you can call us murderers but we still won, if you get what i mean?

I think we were just singing it because Everton call us it all the time. Like you can call us murderers but we still won, if you get what i mean?

It was tongue-in-cheek.

Possibly not very funny but when it's all Everton fans go on about then these things happen.

After the Rhys Jones events before kick off you would have thought the last things Everton fans should have been singing for 90 minutes would have been murderers.

They all need to grow up, and maybe the media should correctly target their poisoned pens at the Evertonian idiots.

Tongue in cheek or not, Liverpool fans really should be bigger than that. Let the Evertonians continue their bitter ways but us responding like this isn't in our make up.

Tongue in cheek or not, Liverpool fans really should be bigger than that. Let the Evertonians continue their bitter ways but us responding like this isn't in our make up.

It was just an act of shoving it back down their throats. It's not us lowering ourselves to their level.

There's no better way than shutting the gobshites up by beating them on the pitch though.

Torres showed this very very well, after reacting to their fans and beiong yellow carded, he twatted them with two sublime goals.

It was just an act of shoving it back down their throats. It's not us lowering ourselves to their level.

There's no better way than shutting the gobshites up by beating them on the pitch though.

Torres showed this very very well, after reacting to their fans and beiong yellow carded, he twatted them with two sublime goals.

I know why we did it mate, I just don't feel we had to. The result was satisfactory enough and things like that cause aggro between the two sets of supporters. Chanting like that can cause the scraps in town afterwards - resulting in more deaths and more bad press for both clubs and the city. Let them continue to be bitter and take the sh*t from the press for their continued chants of such events (although the press rarely mention that). There's no need for us "to shove it down their throats" because we're bigger than that.

It's brought unnecessary press onto our club and over shadowed what was a faultless performance.

its a shame whats happened, i used to go to the everton matches in the 80s last f20 mins only though...something to do

its not just everton fans though, i see the morons in red and blue in teh pubs after matches, its just the way society has gone
there is more scumbags in the world now than there ever used to be............and less respect shown between everybody.
the pushing thing in the face sickens me, i cant believe how bitter that is though, them people who do that are the bottom of the lowest

I personally feel this article does no good to extinguish things.

All it says to me is that we shall be continued to be looked down upon as a city. And that's O Kays final word.

I hate the horrible chants from both the bitters and us. Hate them. It's not sport and it's not funny to me. I'll take the piss out of Evertonians as much as the next red but when it comes to incidents where people have lost their lives and families who are still living with what has happened, then it's not a case of getting one over anyone at a football match.

It was tongue-in-cheek.

Possibly not very funny but when it's all Everton fans go on about then these things happen.

After the Rhys Jones events before kick off you would have thought the last things Everton fans should have been singing for 90 minutes would have been murderers.

They all need to grow up, and maybe the media should correctly target their poisoned pens at the Evertonian idiots.

Abolutely spot on post.

It was tongue-in-cheek.

Possibly not very funny but when it's all Everton fans go on about then these things happen.

After the Rhys Jones events before kick off you would have thought the last things Everton fans should have been singing for 90 minutes would have been murderers.

They all need to grow up, and maybe the media should correctly target their poisoned pens at the Evertonian idiots.

Exactly. They know they will NEVER be better than us, so they have to clutch at straws. They throw everything at us that they can, because they all know, deep down, they will never in a million years be the biggest club on Merseyside, never mind England.

I think the worse thing about it is this city is still divided between red and blue and it always will be. So when they chant "murderers" they are in fact calling their own son/daughter/wife/husband whatever a murderer.

I honestly feel though that there is no bitterness amongst Evertonians about Hillsborough because I've seen the videos and even to this day, plenty of Everton fans grieve about the event. The footage is there to see how the city united as one. That day hurt the entire city and continues to do so.

I've got to say though, the real bitterness has grown in the last five years or so. When I was growing up in the 90s, it was banter. Yes we hate each other's choice of club but don't hate somebody just for supporting Everton. It seems like it's my generation who've grown up with that bitterness. The previous generations saw Everton succeed and to some degree be on a par with Liverpool. They saw Dixie Dean, Brian Labone, Bob Latchford, Alan Ball, Gary Lineker and Big Neville Southall to name a few as well as the truth about both Heysel and Hillsborough, whereas since the Premiership Everton have been struggling to survive in the top flight for a long time and the modern day fans don't know the stories and the truth about what happened, unless they are well educated by their family (which some are trust me).

I have grown up in a house full of Everton season ticket holders, but I am a Liverpool supporter because of my dad. I hate Everton and I hate their bitter deluded supporters. Not as much as I hate Man Utd or their supporters though.

A further piece from Oliver Kay to yesterday's article:


It seems like I opened a can of words with a piece yesterday about certain things that were chanted at the Merseyside derby at Goodison Park. Some have accused me of failing to understand the context in which “2-0 to the Murderers” was sung by a number of Liverpool supporters, so here goes...

Sorry to disappoint you, but I do fully understand the context. I’m not exactly a novice when it comes to Merseyside football. But, from where I’m sitting, that context – Everton and Manchester United supporters gleefully chanting “murderers” for years without, it seems, the slightest clue about what happened at Heysel in 1985 – does not excuse what was sung. It doesn’t make the chant funny, clever or brilliant, as some seem to think. The chant sucks, as do the ones that provoked it in the first place.

Some considered it genius because it silenced the Everton taunts (“You should have seen their faces …”) and because it meant that Liverpool fans have “reclaimed” – or at least taken ownership of – the “murderers” tag, much like the gay community has with the word “queer” or the black community has with the word “nigger”. Some have likened it to Tottenham's "yid" chants or Robbie Fowler’s “reclaiming” of the drug-abuse rumours back in 1999 with his infamous cocaine-snorting celebration. I take the point. I just don’t agree with it.

The difference here is that we are talking about a disaster in which 39 people died. And yes I know it was a disaster that could have unfolded at just about any European match involving just about any English club over a period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s and that it took a particular set of circumstances – not least inadequate security arrangements and a crumbling abomination of a stadium, which Uefa should never forgive themselves for selecting – for it to happen when it did. Believe me, I know all that and I have frequently found myself trying to explain these things to people who think they know better.

I also know that a disturbing large proportion of Everton and United supporters take undue pleasure in singing about Heysel in order to score points. I just did not really think that Liverpool fans, of all fans, would try to score points by turning the tables and singing it back in a way that made a joke (whether you like it or not) of a disaster that claimed the lives of 39 innocent football supporters.

Someone called my reaction “fake moral outrage”. There’s nothing fake about it and I wasn’t outraged, just surprised and, yes, disappointed. I could have chosen to ignore the atmosphere on Saturday and particularly the "2-0 to the Murderers" chant, but I felt and still feel very strongly about it - just as I do the United fans whom I have condemned in the past for chanting despicable things about Hillsborough and for making light of their own disaster in the interests of point-scoring. I have often wondered what Sir Bobby Charlton thinks when he hears United fans at Anfield asking “Where’s your famous Munich song?”

It just comes down to what you find acceptable. I don’t find the "murderers” chant acceptable. I don’t find “Without killing anyone, we’ve won it three times” acceptable (and that, unlikely as it may sound, was actually sung by the United players on the pitch at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow in May). I don’t find “Where’s your famous Munich song?” acceptable. I don’t find “2-0 to the Murderers” acceptable. I don’t find chants about Michael Shields or Harold Shipman acceptable. I find the chants about Steven Gerrard’s family utterly despicable, as I do the Evertonian “joke” of covering your face with your hand as if to signify someone being crushed at Hillsborough. I actually feel sickened as I write this.

Maybe all of this makes me someone who has spent so long in the press box that he has lost touch with the tribal nature of football’s rivalries. Maybe, but I don’t think so. Maybe it is also possible to get so wound up in that tribal warfare that you lose sight of where the boundaries of taste lie. Some will not care, but, for me, the “2-0 to the Murderers chant” was a long way over that boundary. I know full well what the explanation is. I just don’t think that it constitutes any kind of excuse.

I don’t find “Without killing anyone, we’ve won it three times” acceptable (and that, unlikely as it may sound, was actually sung by the United players on the pitch at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow in May).

Not unlikely at all, no doubt led by Gary Neville!

Not unlikely at all, no doubt led by Gary Neville!

Dispicible scum, and these people are supposed to be the role models.

On holiday last summer me and a good mate of mine who happens to be a typical bitter blue were talking about this type of thing.

I was saying about how stupid the Michael Shields chants were with him being a normal lad like anyonelse from the city and was in the wrong place at the wrong time being obviously innocent. His response was alarming , claiming " yer but what was he doing in bed after the champions league win anyway" and sh*t similar to that. I proceded to tell him that could of been anyone , naming myself and a few other reds who are close mates of his. Yet he still persisted that he didnt give a sh*t about him and didnt feel sorry for him atall.

Now i refuse to talk to him about football , as away from it he is one of the soundest lads you will meet but is so bitter and twisted that i fear i would spark him out if we ever got into that kind of debate again.

He is just an example of the vast majority of Everton fans at the minute who even though deep down they know what they are singing is wrong and pathetic they continue to do it because to support Everton you are judged upon how much you hate Liverpool rather than how much you love Everton.

I dont know what to think about the Livepool response on saturday because it is hard to take getting that type of abuse from them every year , seeing the sheer hatred in thier faces. It was a way to shut them up and it worked but i certainly dont want it to become custom at the derby.

I kind of understand his point but the way i see it is, In simplistic terms there's normally two kinds of people, one set like myself (Bravado aside) who when kicked, kick back harder or wittier and the other set of people who generally try to rise above.. He's obviously claiming to be of the latter..

But to claim he doesn't buy the whole "reversal of derogatory comments" attitude is silly.. For some people its a natural reaction to reclaim a terrible tag.

Some considered it genius because it silenced the Everton taunts (“You should have seen their faces …”) and because it meant that Liverpool fans have “reclaimed” – or at least taken ownership of – the “murderers” tag, much like the gay community has with the word “queer” or the black community has with the word “nigger”. Some have likened it to Tottenham's "yid" chants.
The difference here is that we are talking about a disaster in which 39 people died.

Sorry but there is no difference between the examples he used and the Haysel disaster.
Has the fact eluded him that the words "Nigger" and Yid" are linked with slavery and the Holocaust where copious amounts of people died..

This might not be everyone's ideal way of looking at things. I have a few sorry members of the family, cousins and uncles like, who are staunch blue noses and have been all their lives. Lots of banter and piss taking over the years and lots of laughs with it.  In addition to this, I always thought if we wern't in it, then better everton bring silverware to merseyside, than it going to manchester or london etc. Now, having witnessed the vile chants they have lowered themselves to. I hope they never win another game. I hope newcastle thrash them this weekend and I hope they go out of the F.A. cup at the first hurdle. To finnish thier season, relegation please. No soft spots left now, even though family members are still staunch. F**k em all.

I just feel that this is a very sorry state of affairs for football to be in, sad that this has come to all this.

It will never go back to the way is was unfortunately, I was in the Everton end for the first Merseyside FA Cup final in 1986.
In my Liverpool Shirt, and when we won, they were all congratulating me, no bitterness, it was a cracking day.

Unfortunately nowadays, Everton, not being the team they once were, are so jealous and bitter towards Liverpool it has caused a rift and absolute hatred between the two sets of supporters.

Sad very sad 

Didn't know where to stick this so I thought I would leave it here

Slightly off-topic

I'm getting slightly sick of the amount of sh*t and abuse were getting now from opposing fans. At one time it was just the Harry Enfield sign on sh*t, now it just seems to be Hillsborough/Heysel stuff. At its a lot of teams were playing that are doing this. Mancs and Everton, pretty much expected now, but also Chelsea, Villa, Wigan, Man City on sunday and there is absolutely nothing said in the press (local as well), yet one small incident eg Athens or the chants at the Derby (I won't include Alan Smith because what was printed about that was a load of sh*t) and were castigated by supposed journo Reds.

It's just starting to really piss me off!

And breathe.........

Oliver Kay is at it again, trying to bring a bit of bad press on our club and get us all worried sick.

October 8, 2008

Rafael Benítez no nearer to contract extension - Oliver Kay

For the first time in what feels like an age, Liverpool appear to be quietly going about their business, but the silence from the boardroom is not necessarily golden. Rafael Benítez has been given no indication that he will be offered an extension to his contract, which runs out at the end of next season, and for as long as the club remain in the hands of Tom Hicks and George Gillett Jr, the Spaniard appears unlikely to be offered any long-term security.

Hicks claimed six months ago that he wanted to offer Benítez a new contract, albeit only a one-year extension, but that he could not force through his plan until he had bought out Gillett, his co-owner. Hicks and Gillett have since claimed that they have patched up their “unworkable” partnership, but whatever else they may have reached agreement on, the American tycoons appear to have no plans to resolve the manager's future amid growing suspicions that their focus is solely on their exit strategy.

Hicks and Gillett are firmly expected to sell Liverpool in the coming months, with another prospective investor having joined Sheikh Mohammed, the Crown Prince of Dubai, in declaring an interest in recent weeks. In the meantime, construction work on a proposed new stadium in Stanley Park has been postponed indefinitely, with the owners unable to provide the finance, and there appears to be no prospect of a new contract for Benítez, even though there is no logical reason that a deal should not be offered if, after a good start to the Barclays Premier League campaign, he has the support of the six-man board.

Benítez has been known to use the media to advance his causes in the past, which is one reason he fell out with Hicks and Gillett last autumn, but he was restrained when asked about the silence on his future. “I'm not worried about the situation at the moment,” he said. “I am trying to be pragmatic about it and am just concentrating on the things I can improve. It doesn't make it more difficult for me to plan for the future. I can only control things on the pitch and try to improve the squad. If I can do that, then things will be easier in the future.”

Benítez's situation is being monitored by leading clubs in Spain and Italy. Reports in Italy on Monday suggested that Juventus may move for the Spaniard if they lose patience with Claudio Ranieri after a difficult start to the season. Benítez, though, has reiterated his desire to stay at Liverpool. “I'm really pleased and I have two more years [in fact a little over 18 months] left on my contract, so right now I'm just trying to do my job the best I can,” he said. “I have always said I want to stay here for many years and I have the same idea now.”

Benítez received some encouraging news last night when a specialist indicated that Martin Skrtel's posterior cruciate knee ligament injury was less serious than first feared. The Slovakia defender could be back by Christmas.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/premier_league/liverpool/article4902899.ece

Spot on DLS. He's dragging the fading embers of an old story into the fold and that's tiresome now.

Controversy is boring O Kay. Go talk about football or something.

He's meant to be a Liverpool fan isn't he Ken? If he is, then god F***ing help us.