Liverpool

New England chief is thrilled to be back in London this week for an NFL game but reveals why owning a football club here is a non-starter for now

Evening Standard

Robert Kraft, a fan of the New England Patriots long before he bought the club, has always been proud that, in sport, his heart has ruled his head.

So, when he takes his seat on Sunday at Wembley for the match against Stan Kroenke’s St Louis Rams, his feelings will be those of a fan rather than an owner. “Unfortunately the low of losing is lower than the high of winning. You want to prevent losing as much as you can.”

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Boards rarely get thanked for making tough decisions

PlayUp

You can bet on one thing in the football merry go around – whenever a manager is sacked, someone will pipe up to say it is the players who got him the sack by not performing. It is a conclusion hard to resist after recent events at Chelsea, despite denials from the senior players led by John Terry.

Yet I wonder if we have not got this all wrong. It is fans, with their hunger for instant success and impatience at what looks like failure, that force boards to act. In the last week, we have even had Liverpool fans turning on Kenny Dalglish, the hero whose return to Anfield became such a clamour that it led to the sacking of Roy Hodgson last season.

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When it comes to averting a crisis, the Frenchman need only look at his great rival

PlayUp

Arsenal’s match with Tottenham may have been a prelude to the Oscars, but it could have more far reaching consequences than any movie. History does not always repeat itself, not in exact details, but Arsenal’s demolition of Tottenham did take me back to the 2001-2002 season. I believe it has lessons for us.

Then, everyone was convinced Manchester United’s great run under Sir Alex Ferguson had come to an end. For a start, he had said he was going at the end of the season. The season had barely got underway when, on 28 August, Sir Alex Ferguson sold Jaap Stam to Lazio for £15.3m. It came a week after Stam’s book Head to Head was sensationally serialised in the Daily Mirror. He described how Ferguson had tapped him up when he was at PSV and also advised players to dive for penalties.

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Insideworldfootball

Liverpool should be very careful that the club does not allow its handling of the Luis Suárez affair to get out of control. It is one thing playing the victim card as it has been on this issue. But situations like these acquire a momentum that makes what seems like a carefully planned journey to get sympathy turn into a train crash. Liverpool is perilously close to that and the events in the match against Oldham on Friday are a further warning of the consequences of the present Liverpool behaviour.

It is intriguing to consider who at Anfield has been driving the ‘Suárez is the victim’ bandwagon. It is hard to believe that it could be anybody other than Kenny Dalglish. I come to that conclusion because it is seems unlikely that the American owner, John Henry, who is used to operating in a very different sporting world, would have been tempted down this path if Dalglish had not taken the helm and set sail. In their American world, coaches do not go public on disputes with sports bodies in the way managers in Britain do every time they feel their team or players have been victimised.

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Insideworldfootball.biz

In the last few weeks, readers of the sports pages of British newspapers may have been forgiven for thinking we are facing another American revolution. Having given the distinct impression that they had joined a new order of sporting Trappist monks on crossing the pond, American owners of English clubs have suddenly become as voluble as teenagers let out of school. Or at least two very prominent owners have.

Yet what they have said shows that there is still a vast gulf between the old world and the new when it comes to sport. These American owners may own English clubs but they do not understand the particular culture of English football.

The American lack of openness in Britain has always been in stark contrast to their behaviour in their own country. There access to the media is on a scale unimaginable here or even in Europe. Reporters, even female ones, are allowed into the dressing rooms after a match. On the days leading up to the Super Bowl, players, officials and even the team owners readily make themselves available to the media. But in this country, American owners have been even more invisible than the British ones.

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