Perhaps Pedersen saw videos of Thommo and Emerton and thought that's what's expected of wingers at Rovers!

In hindsight, if you look at his first 3 signings (Jan 99) of Jean-Michel Ferri, Frode Kippe & Rigobert Song, it was pretty clear there was only one direction for Liverpool to go under Houillier. I don't remember the 1st two making any impression at all, but Song was fantastically entertaining - completely inept, but convinced he was world class so always tried to be at the centre of things. His comedy turn was the only plus point about that embarassing 3-1 home defeat to Liverpool when McAteer and Peacock ran into each other and Peacock also chipped a nice backpass at chest height to set up one of the others.

It would be great from a season ticket sales point of view for Rovers to play entertaining football and win a high scoring game. Unfortunately, I think you're right and it will be dull, dull, dull. However, I think 1-0 to Rovers if we can avoid making a silly defensive error, or 1-0 to Brum if we can't.

I'd prefer to have him stay as a decent backup, but if you lose you temper permanently after being understandably dropped when a) the defence was awful in the previous game & b ) you were ill and couldn't train the day before the biggest game of the season, then you aren't going to survive for long at any club.

If by some horrendous twist of fate I ended up at Burnley, I'd be over the moon to be sacked. Probably the best day of Stanleh's life!

Using the "some people would refer to him" makes it look as though he knew exactly what he was going to say rather than it being a mental abberation.

Bolton can't be able to afford Okocha and Rivaldo, so I presume this means Jay Jay is on his way way (at the end of May May).

I missed the d for a while and thought you were talking about Stan...

Hopefully journalists will view this as a Ron Atkinson thing rather than a football thing. I don't think we can really criticise journalists for slagging off footballers this year though as there's been a lot of dodgy incidents. Footballers earn incredible amounts of money and endorsements based on their celebrity, which they take full advantage of - it's a double edged sword really, and those who've been exposed in the press have probably earned a million this year (a decent amount of it from the fans' pockets) so I'm sure they'll survive. Also, the tabloids tend to focus on those footballers who don't exactly hide from the public eye, rather than those who keep themselves to themselves.

Good riddance I say. Racism has no place in football, plus his so called apologies seem to consist of a quick sorry and then lots of attempts to say it wasn't really a big deal and also that the phrase just popped out of nowhere and he'd never said it ever before. What rubbish. Big Ron had a good turn of phrase - that's ok for Xmas cards, but unfortunately he's the worst analyst ever to be given a regular job spouting nonsense for an entire 90 mins (rather than being in the studio - he has plenty of competion at ITV for that one).

If we can find a good replacement to start straight away on a short term contract then they might want to consider letting Souness go. But I can't see Parkes turning it around this time so I'm not keen on us paying Souness a fortune to leave if there's no-one else available.

Are you sure about this? I've never heard of a club managing to reduce its wage bill by that, much in the course of one summer, especially as we'll get millions less in prize money for coming (optimistically) midtable rather than 6th. Or does this mean all of our best players (or none of them, but everyone else) are out of contract in the summer?

Funny that when moaning about Steve Bruce earlier this week, he said that when managers criticise players (admittedly he was referring to opposition managers), they are only covering up the underlying problem. So I guess that when he criticises his own players...

To be fair, this week's column slagged off Neill for costing us the game (which he did, not Jason's fault that Houillier has annoyed us all since) and the defence (which is true so far, although I'm hoping it's just a matter of time). It's been very difficult to say many good things over the last four games except on the subject of Jansen's goal and Brad's performance vs Liverpool. Hopefully this will change after the Pompey game

Just turned 30, can't say I feel any different!