The Kid, The King and Cas...

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We had an ulterior motive for going to Liverpool last week. And now you know what it was. Hanging out with Liverpool's past and Liverpool's present (we're still working on the future). Kenny Dalglish and Fernando Torres. They're our machine-gun style interview of the week, but it doesn't end there. Oh no! Tony Cascarino joins us in the studio to reflect upon Arsenal losing their unbeaten status, Chelsea doing better without Mourinho than with him and, of course, the England manager situation...

We all gloat noting that Mourinho, as we predicted the week before, will most likely not be the new England boss. A shame, but, supposedly, he has another offer (Milan). Guillem and I agree that it is a load of crock and one would have to be equal parts foolish and gullible to believe that Milan, of all clubs, have put their eggs in Mourinho's basket. Still, it's fun to speculate what England would be like with the Special One in charge. I offer up Mourinho's hypothetical England XI, while Guillem does the same for Fabio Capello (remember to have your say below) - James, Richards, Ferdinand, Terry, Bentley, Young, Gerrard, Hargreaves, Barry, Rooney and Ashton in a 3-5-2 formation - and Cas offers up the Martin O'Neill version (hey, you never know...). Bill is ill this week - please send "Get well soon" cards and other assorted gifts to gamepodcast@timesonline.co.uk - but he rings in with his stat, revealing that West Ham are the ultimate Giantkillers on enemy turf. And we've got our Quick Hits as well, where - for once - it's my turn to stick up for Rafa Benitez. Please join the debate below. We have an extra incentive - well, bribe - to do so. Our poster of the week will win a brand new copy of Championship Manager. So get posting. We'd love to hear from you.

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Comments

[Ned Bottomley]

Hi G & G, I was lazing on my sofa listening to you guys after taking the dog for a hearty walk and couldn't believe that I won! Your podcast is the best, and not only 'cos you chose me as the weekly winner - but because of the insight - Yak wasn't Moyes' choice - but I bet he wishes he was now!

[Willie from Sydney]

Roy Hodgson is the only decent English manager there is if you are looking at pure coaches and experience.
Harry is the best English man manager.
Neither of them are considered. Why?

[David]

great podcast but please give it a break with this Liverpool fixation!
Its enough already!

[Riccardo, Nottingham]

Ned, to be fair the difference between Ferguson and Zidane incidents were that Ferguson broke his opponents nose and removed 2 of his teeth. I believe the guy ended up in hospital. Whilst Zidane felled Materazzi with a big swinging handbag.

[Riccardo, Nottingham]

Bravo Bravo Bravo !! Ned Bottomley you're my hero. And you're fellow Toffee to boot. I totally concure with you. The collective group think mentality of the English press is completely dispiriting, and usually makes for uninteresting reading. The good old days ? They were played on that swamp called the baseball ground wern't they ?

[GS]

I really enjoy the Game Podcast so was looking forward to what you had to say about my team (Middlesbrough) finally getting a win and against league leaders, Aresenal, to boot. Was there any mention of Middlesbrough or any of their players? No, nothing. All we had was an endless diatribe about whether Arsenal could play without their three musketeers Cesc, Hleb and van Persie. Well Middlesbrough don't have Cesc, Hleb and van Persie for any game (or any player approaching their quality) so how about a bit of analysis on how Middlesbrough managed to raise their game for this match and what that means for their survival prospects this season?

Same goes for Reading who pulled off almost as significant a coup in beating Liverpool; but were barely mentioned either. I watched these 2 teams battle out a dour 1-1 draw at the Majedski couple of weeks ago, with very little quality or inspiration shown by either side. No-one who witnessed that game could have possibly imagined both teams pulling off a giant killing the following week.

So come on guys, spare a couple of minutes for the other end of the table and tell us which was the real Reading/Middlesbrough and whether you think these teams have turned the corner.

[Pork Romeo]

Torres/Daglish, light hearted holiday season fun, but stupid if a regular feature.
____

Club World Cup is on in Tokyo. Nice you mentioned it. The South Americans rate this championship very highly. Since many of their stars move to Europe, it is a chance for South American clubs to stick it to the European Champions.

In fact, the Copa Libertadores holders have defeated the European Champions in the last two years.

I can understand European Clubs finding it troublesome due to fixture congestion, but Milan took nothing for granted against Urawa last night, the vibes were great, and it was an entertaining match.

I do not speak Italian, so I am not sure if the Italian media whinge about this competition as much as the English. But Milan certainly came to play.
_______

Speaking of whinging, a quick question for Guillem: Are the Spanish as insufferable as the English about under-performing in major competitions?

[Brendan]

Hi Guillem and Gab, thought I’d offer you a candidate for Championship Manager honours.

As a Liverpool fan, I enjoyed the Dalglish-Torres interaction, but I found the three-cornered England lineup thought experiment to be the most provocative aspect of this week’s show.

We know now Capello will almost certainly be England’s next boss, so I’m posing a slightly different thought experiment: which aspects of England’s recent play will Capello most urgently seek to alter?

We’ve heard Capello say England’s players have a ‘mental block’, but I doubt that will be among his immediate priorities. He may advise his players of the type of attitude he expects from them, but I think that sort of problem must be addressed over time.

I think the most ‘unCapellolike’ aspect of England’s recent play is their defensive structure.

Capello’s best work is characterised by aggressive defence – harrying opponents out of time and space; driving them into misjudgements and mistakes.

Most media attention has centred on goalkeeping woes, but I would argue the relative lack of pressure England’s outfielders applied to the ball was as telling. For instance, how exactly did Krancjar make his way to the shooting position he did for the 1st Croatia goal against a lineup with a five man midfield?

I would say players like Joe Cole and Shaun Wright Phillips may find it difficult to get a regular game for England. The might be good options to have on the bench, but I doubt they are up to Capello’s defensive standards.

Capello would love the idea of Gerrard and Rooney relentlessly harassing the opposition. Lampard, too, to a lesser extent. Gerrard may go back to the right or into a half striker role so he can accommodate both.

However, I’m sure he would expect Gerrard and Lampard to demonstrate the type of defensive application for their country they routinely put on show for their clubs. I’m sure I’m not the only one who notes Lampard and Gerrard seemed to be a lot slower tracking back with soft-touch Steve in charge than they would be at their clubs.

Crouch may be a surprising favourite of Capello’s. He works very hard defensively despite his relative lack of athleticism.

I think the other big problem Capello will try to address is England’s relative inability to keep the ball.

If Capello had arrived in the England job at an earlier juncture, we might have seen the best of Scholes in an England shirt. Capello understands how to use quality ball distributors to full effect.

In Scholes’ place, I expect Michael Carrick will get his chance.

Carrick cops a lot criticism for making a lot of lateral passes. However, giving him a hard time because he doesn’t split a defence as readily as a Scholes, Fabregas or Alonso is unduly harsh. Lots of lateral passes can be valuable in and of itself as they help dictate (or interrupt) the flow of a game. Carrick is an underrated positional defender as well.

Tom Huddlestone might come into the reckoning as well if he can improve his fitness.

[Craig]

What anti-scouse bias are you talking about? It's fictitious, invented by scousers with their massive persecution complex about everything. There is no bias. You're right Stuart. Must be something to do with the Spanish connection.

On another matter, can anyone tell me why Avram Grant has been given a four year contract at Chelsea? I'll eat my own liver if he sees it out. I'm not saying he's a bad manager, but Chelsea don't appear to plan beyond 6 months at a time, so why sign up a coach on a massive contract on the basis of about 10 games? It's not like they're in danger of losing him, and surely it would make more sense to wait till the end of the season, or when he's got his own players in to give him this deal. At least he's guaranteed a mass of compensation money when he leaves before the term is up.

[Matt Geraghty]

Any chance of re-naming thegame podcast to thekop or theliverpoolconnecton or thebitmorecoverageforthebig4 etc..

Change the record fellas.

[Ned Bottomley]

This podcast is absolutely invaluable - and I'm convinced you are the only football commentators who aren't senile.

That England weren’t up to snuff in the Euro 2008 qualifiers isn’t rocket science and you don’t have to be the illegitimate love child of Hercule Poirot and Mystic Meg to realise this. Or maybe you do…

To borrow from and distort Spinal Tap, all the press hype surrounds us like a turd tuxedo of tabloid twaddle. Everywhere we turn, we are forced to view life through the tabloids' rancid prism, as they trough from the gutters for more sensationalist bile.

If I told you that I agreed with Gab Marcotti that Blackburn's Christopher Samba ''is better than every single Manchester United defender”, you’d probably scoff, and possibly express your disgust with my lack of football knowledge. But why? Because the tosspot tabs have distorted our views, and if it isn’t top four it isn’t any good. Period.

Every day the press throw us garrulous tripe that we gobble up so willingly that now, whenever certain players' names are mentioned, we react as if presented with a rigged Rorschach test:

• Martin O’Neill? Brilliant for Villa
• Mark Hughes? Far better than Graeme Souness
• Arsenal? A team with class and a proud history
• Tottenham? Currently in a slump
• Everton? A small club
• Christopher Samba? Nowhere near as good as any Manchester United defender
• England? Utterly craptastic, their limp performances are simply unacceptable.

The press have trained us to have a feral Pavlovian froth around our outraged mouths when any of the following things happen; Spurs slump (hang on, have they ever NOT been in a slump, apart from in 1961?), someone wants to move grounds away from their traditional base (Arsenal were doing this in the 1920s), England fail to qualify for a tournament (didn’t they do that for pretty much all of the 1970s?)

The real answers to our Rorschach test should be as follows:

• Martin O’Neill? In his first 56 games at Villa he was outperformed by David O’Leary and his record so far is considerably worse than Ron Atkinson, John Gregory, Brian Little and even Graham Taylor’s first stint.

• Mark Hughes? A record that is an almost exact mirror image of Souness’ – except for one vital factor. Hughes hasn’t won anything.

• Arsenal? Herbert Chapman is talked about too much and Henry Norris too little. Not so proud episodes of moving ground and muscling in on the more lucrative north London fan-base as well as somehow gaining promotion from fifth place and simultaneously getting Tottenham relegated through shady administrative contortions.

• Tottenham? Haven’t ever had a sustained dynastic string of success.

• Everton? Historically the fifth most successful English club, even above Spurs! (look it up, pedants).

• Christopher Samba? Quite possibly good enough for any team in the Premier League.

• England? Perennially cr*ptastic, and compared to the 70s not that bad.

I think the problem is that it is simply too much fun to go with the crowd, and bash people simply on a wave of collective tabloid emotion. But the truth of the matter is that what the majority think is usually utter guff.

But with this appeal for realism, please don’t think I am asking for a return to the legendary footballing years of bygone eras. I despise all this wittering on about the 'good old days', a mysterious alternate universe where England were a world footballing power, nobody moved grounds, players played fewer games and the domestic leagues were a wonderful hotpot of competition. I’m sorry but this is pure, unadulterated faeces.

The 'good old days' were terrible, our league was horrendous, the England team was cr*p, 1966 was a home victory, even Sweden managed to get to the World Cup Final when they hosted it, for God’s sake!

If the 'good old days' were so wonderful, how did we have a match-fixing scandal (Tony Kay et al) decades before the Serie A bribery sensations? If players are paid too much now, do we really want to go back to the old days when a measly tuppence ha’penny was dropped into a player’s shoe for scoring a double hat-trick with all the trimmings?

The great Brazilian winger Garrincha’s biographer, Ruy Castro, writes on Brazil’s 1958 World Cup squad before they departed to Sweden: “The majority had intestinal parasites to spare, several were anaemic, one player even had syphilis. There were precarious bladders, tonsils begging to be removed and players with chronic digestive and circulatory problems.” So let’s not moan about a return to the good old days.

All I really want is realism and consistency, it is knee-jerk stereotypes and press hype that wind me up. I’ll leave you with a tale of two players, Duncan Ferguson and Zinedine Zidane; one headbutted a player in Scotland and got six weeks in Barlinnie prison, the other headbutted a player in the World Cup Final, and trudged away a free - albeit tear-stained - man.

[Stuart]

Guillem, you refer to counterbalancing a supposed negative attitude towards Liverpool from sections of the media, but it is getting ridiculous. In recent weeks we've had interviews with Jamie Carragher, Xavi Alonso, a Liverpudlian journalist, Fernando Torres and Kenny Dalglish; I've got a feeling Peter Crouch has also been featured this season.

[kit]

Going by the comments on the Gazzetta website not a lot of love for Cappello or the English.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned is suppose Fabio hates it here? He might not like living here, the players, the culture, the media, it's all new to him.

Another worry is that if it all goes wrong and Fab is turnipfied it might spark an international incident like with Portugal over Ronaldo (the Swedes were more phlegmatic re. Sven.)

Plus how will a clever man like Fabio cope with the half-wits he’ll be working for, the quarter-wits in the team and the eighth-wits in our press (er, present company excluded obviously).

[lloyd b]

Kashyap: don't give up on the machine-gun technique yet.. it's refreshing to hear the interviewees relaxed, acting naturally.. i'm getting fed up with the cliche-ridden, shearer-lipped, media-trained interviews footballers give nowadays.. the most annoying thing is you just know after the interview the player breathes a sigh of relief and says "what a goal, eh?", "we were shit" etc..

gulliem / gab: please keep experimenting.. if you come up with a formula to keep it fun and natural without being to Soccer-AM for the purists, you could be onto something..

for me, anyway!

[guillem balague]

Zuly, about the bottom three teams, that is a stat that I love and it was mentioned in the podcast few weeks back. Completely agree with you that the poorer teams are getting worse. I was suprised to find another stat -the top teams have lost half of the points they lost last season at this stage. I did genuinely thought this year it was going to be more competitive but it seems to be going the other way.

Jimmy, I think the way Chelsea play is not going to change much with or without Drogba. The club would need to change their midfielders to create a different brand of football.

Craig, I guess I am just trying to rebalance the scouse-hating that I have felt down south for many years.

Jo, very rarely the editing misses some of the points we try to make. This week I guess it was one of those rare cases. I mentioned that my sources tell me AC Milan is a strong possibility for Mourinho and agreed with Gab that it sounded crazy as Milan tend to appoint former players (and Berlusconi recently announced that too).

Stephen, Chris is doing so-so. Not only it sounded from day one that he was only there as a 'learning experience' kind of trip, his lack of Spanish did not help him either. The team is settling a bit now but I have been told not many people are convinced he is the right choice for the job

[Stephen K]

alright lads..great podcast without doubt the best in i-tunes. i have a question 4 guillem. How is chris coleman gettin on in spain and what do the locals think of an english man in charge? the torres/dalglish was class. p.s. gab did some job on the 5 live football daily the other day
anyway all the best
keep up the good work
steve

[jo]

Why is the idea of Milan being interested in Mourinho so absurd?
I wish you'd explain when you make such comments.

Where have you heard this supposed job offer is from? I've heard different hacks claim they know 'for sure' it's variously AC, Real, Barcelona...

Mourinho could be inventing the offer anyway, he's admitted before to making up job offers to stoke up interest.

[Kashyap Muthuswamy]

Guys, the Torres/Daglish thing was an interesting idea, but please don't make it a regular feature. Wouldn't want one of the most intelligent features in football sound like Heat magazine.

[Craig]

Great show guys, although Guillem is turning it into a bit of a scouse love-in.

Gab - just a couple of things:

Firstly, not that I’m disagreeing with you, but why would Milan not go for Mourinho? They’ve won the league once since 1999 – this is not good enough for a club like Milan. They seem to me to be a bit like Liverpool, with their constant falling away early in the league and putting everything into winning in Europe from early on. At least Liverpool can say that they have been turning the corner for the last 18 years – Milan seem to just stand still. Mourinho is a specialist at winning league titles and I have no doubt he’d do exactly that at Milan.

Secondly, I’m not sure I agree with your Mourinho England team. I remember in the World Cup he said that Michael Carrick had to play for England because they’re a different team with him in the side. I think England’s major problem is that in the center of midfield they lack a player who is confident receiving the ball, and I think Mourinho knows this too. They lack anyone with the technique to control the ball under pressure and play short passes if necessary a la Paul Scholes, just to calm everyone down and play with a cool head. Gerrard and Lampard play like their in a hurry and are scared of having the responsibility of having the ball when playing for England, always anxious of who to pass it to, which is why Gerrard is frequently shunted to the right wing or taken off in big games for Liverpool. The closest player to that who is available would be Carrick.

P.S. Please will one of you pick up on Gerrard’s dive last night for the penalty against Marseille? Gerrard is a persistent diver, and seems to get away with it because he talks like the big man. This is the same guy who criticizes others for diving. I guess we should expect nothing less from the bloke who “would have lamped Ronaldo” if he were Rooney, yet proceeds to get Hibbert sent off in the derby. Whilst there’s no doubting he’s a very good player, his personality is dubious and he’s a liar.

Rant over.

[Lloyd B]

loved the machine-gun interview with Kenneth and Fernando - was great fun and interesting.. please it a regular feature!

Talking of regular features, thank goodness you dropped 'News in Sound Effects'.. got tired with fast-forwarding it every week.. Danny, leave the jokes to Skinner & Baddiel (i.e. professionals).

Talking of which - Euro 2008 Skinner & Badiel podcast please!

[Ethicalstrategy]

Gab, do you really believe that an England team managed by Mourinho wouldn't include Lampard? Gerrard is a lucky boy that the Special One has decided to give the job a miss - he is the one who would have been most likely to have found himself sitting on the bench. Although I think he would probably have accommodated both in a 4-3-3 formation with Hargreaves holding.

[marica]

Many have declared themselves relieved at the withdrawal of Mourinho from the England race because of his supposed lack of integrity, yet welcomed the option of ....Capello!

Ignorance is truly bliss. Short term anyway.

[Jimmy]

Guys,

While Claudio Pizarro is no Didier Drogba, is it fair to write him off so quickly bearing in mind how few minutes he has had on the pitch? His link up play looks ok from what I have seen, and he hasn't had the advantage of starting many matches at all.

Being a Chelsea fan, I am not at all optimistic about Drogba's absence, but do you think it could be an opportunity to try something a bit different. If Sheva and Pizarro can be paired up front together, perhaps we can get the ball into their feet and see some better football rather than pumping balls to Drogba and feeding off the scraps, successful though that is!

[keith morel]

Gab

How do you think the Duck will get on at AC and will Carlo be sacked whenthey come back from the world club cup?

Also is Avram Grant starting to play mind games with the rivals? Does this show a confidence which is born from upstairs support?

Thanks Guys

Keith

[Zulfy]

R:E The debate about the top 4 getting better and better; I've gone and done some research:

I've counted the number of points collected by the bottom three teams in each of the big leagues in Europe, here are the results:

Serie A: 44 games played: 33 points
La Liga: 45 games played: 34 points
Bundesliga: 48 games: 39 points

Wait for it...

English Prem: 48 games: 28 points

So I put it to you that it's more a case of the poorer teams in England being worse than their European counterparts.