Liverpool FC Forum

[RED BEERGOGGLES]

Not at all RBG, I don't take umbrage with that. I understand your view. Fairy play.

well that's OK then mate,and I am more than willing to accept the apology proffered   

[RED BEERGOGGLES]

Not at all RBG, I don't take umbrage with that. I understand your view. Fairy play.

well that's OK then mate,and I am more than willing to accept the apology proffered   :;):

Lifted from yesterdays Guardian ,for those  willing to remain open minded ,but appear decidedly less malleable ....
Just as the avalanche of words in this morning's papers on the myriad legacies of Margaret Thatcher have been predictably wildly polarised, so too is the verdict on her effect on our national game.

Colin Moynihan, who defied Thatcher to win a silver medal as a cox at the 1980 Olympics but went on to become her loyal sports minister for the closing years of football's dark decade of the 1980s, on Tuesday called her "the finest captain of Team GB" and detailed a list of achievements he claimed modernised British sport at a time when she and he combined to "face, tackle and seek to eradicate the scourge of football hooliganism at home and abroad". In a piece in the Daily Mail Jeff Powell claimed she saved British football by taking a hard line on hooliganism. But those views are very much in the minority.

That she had little natural connection with, or affinity for, sport is widely documented. Her 11 years in power were bookended by a failed bid to force British athletes to boycott the Moscow Olympics in 1980 and the 1989 Hillsborough disaster and its immediate aftermath. Even staunch allies, including John Major and David Mellor, have confirmed that she had very little time for sport in general and football in particular. While every prime minister since has paid at least lip service to the power of sport and the pull of football, Thatcher exhibited the opposite.

Her pet project, driven by the then Luton Town chairman and backbench Tory MP David Evans, to deal with hooliganism by introducing a membership card scheme for all football fans, with draconian penalties for those who were not in possession of one and overseen by a new body with the power effectively to control their movements, was hated by those it threatened to police. It was eventually, reluctantly dropped only when Lord Justice Taylor's report in the wake of Hillsborough dismissed it as counter-productive.

Two days before Margaret Thatcher's ceremonial funeral, the families of the 96 men, women and children who died at Hillsborough will gather at Anfield to mark the 24th anniversary of the tragedy. Even in death the former prime minister seems inextricably linked with the tragedy that happened on her watch.

It will be the first annual memorial since the Hillsborough Independent Panel report definitively absolved fans of blame, reiterated that the main causes were a loss of control by the emergency services and the unsafe ground and exposed the scale of an establishment cover-up that smeared their name and kept the true causes of the tragedy obscured. It will also be the first since David Cameron stood in the House of Commons and the prime minister issued a blanket apology for the "double injustice" suffered by families of those who perished on the Leppings Lane terrace on the day and in the 23 years since.

Thatcher seemed to see football, and those who watched it, as of a piece with other "enemies within" on the picket lines and on the left. She and her ministers often described the game as a "law and order issue". As the then editor of When Saturday Comes Andy Lyons correctly identified in a piece for this newspaper in 2009: "Two crowd disasters in 1985 became a watershed. A terrace riot had been the immediate cause of the deaths of 39 Italian supporters at Heysel stadium, Brussels on 29 May but several other contributory factors were overlooked in the rush to condemn football fans, including the woefully decrepit state of the stadium and the badly mismanaged distribution of tickets. A month before Heysel a fire in a wooden stand at Bradford City caused 56 deaths."

Her attitude to football, inevitably coloured by the stain of hooliganism on Britain's international reputation, and the reaction of football fans to her were also bound up in the complex web of social and cultural upheaval that she helped create – particularly in the sport's great northern strongholds. Twenty years after she left Downing Street for the last time it was revealed that her ministers had recommended the city of Liverpool be abandoned to "managed decline". There were times when it appeared Thatcher would be happy if football followed a similar path.

In the dense 395 pages of text contained in the devastatingly argued HIP report just one colour photograph is included – it shows Thatcher and her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, standing grim-faced on the terraces at Hillsborough the day after the disaster. The report contained no "silver bullet" linking Thatcher to a premeditated plot to smear fans. But what emerges is a more complex picture of a prime minister all too ready to believe the line being fed to her by senior officers in a police force that by that stage was considered by many to be almost an arm of government.

The report reveals that cabinet papers showed she believed Taylor's report to be a "devastating criticism" of the police and was briefed that the "defensive – at times close to deceitful – behaviour by the senior officers in South Yorkshire sounds depressingly familiar". And yet she did nothing to alter a fictional narrative that, once set in stone by a media that infamously included the Sun newspaper with which her administration was inextricably linked, remained in place until it was shattered 23 years later by the expert independent panel chaired by the Right Reverend James Jones.

Worse, despite the evidence of a series of official reports going all the way back to the serious overcrowding at the "White Horse final" of 1923, the Thatcher administration had done little to address the crumbling, unsafe, unsanitary conditions at football grounds that led directly to the events of 15 April 1989. For her, the "law and order issue" appeared to obscure all else – including the irony that for her critics a direct line could be drawn between Thatcherism and the new breed of football hooligan, clad in designer clothes and organising fights well away from grounds.

It was not Thatcher but Lord Justice Taylor – appointed to investigate the reasons for the disaster – who plotted a course to a brighter future for the game. From the sold-out, safe, modern cathedrals of football and the wall-to-wall live coverage of 138 top-flight matches of the season to ever spiralling ticket and subscription prices and the alienation felt by some fans, both sides of the coin were minted in Taylor's report.

For a piece on the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster in 2009, the University of Liverpool's Professor Rogan Taylor said he believed Taylor saved the game from Thatcher. "The game died and was reborn. Some people might not like the new creature that it has become. [But] Taylor wrote a future for the game at a time when the government was seeking to consign it to the same dustbin as the miners and anything else that smelled of the smoke–stack industries and flat-capped working classes."

It was not the Taylor report alone – and its key recommendation that stadiums become all seated in the top two divisions with the help of public money, thus transforming crumbling unsafe grounds into places where families could comfortably enjoy an afternoon out – that overhauled football's image and laid the foundations for the Premier League boom that followed. But it was a key staging post. Others arguably included (in no particular order): Gazza's tears and triumphant homecoming from Italia 90; All Played Out and Nessun Dorma; When Saturday Comes and fanzine culture; CCTV and improved policing; the sudden middle-class acceptability of the sport for which Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch became convenient shorthand; and even acid house.

Yet away from the bleak images of Heysel and Valley Parade and the twisted metal fences of Hillsborough, it should not be overlooked that Thatcher's policies also – almost by accident – laid the blueprint for today's Premier League, for good or ill.

The media revolution she ushered in by granting a satellite licence to one of her biggest supporters in Rupert Murdoch was a huge factor in stoking the exponential growth in media rights, which for the top flight have grown from £191m to £5.5bn over the past two decades and, in turn, fuelled the growth in wages that helped attract the world's best to play here. Look, too, at the architects of the Premier League revolution and the money that fuelled it.

They included Alan Sugar, the Essex wheeler dealer who made his fortune selling satellite dishes and helped ensure Sky secured the live TV rights to the nascent Premier League in 1991 with his tip-off to Murdoch's lieutenant Sam Chisholm that he should "blow them [ITV] out of the water". Whatever their personal political leanings, men such as the Crystal Palace chairman, Ron Noades, the Spurs owner, Irving Scholar, and Chelsea's Ken Bates appeared the living embodiment of Thatcherism and its values.

For both good and ill the formation of the Premier League was football's equivalent of her "big bang" deregulation of the financial markets of the mid-1980s, enabling the big clubs to swat away eventually an ineffectual and vain Football Association just as the stuffy City institutions had been swept aside. Those yuppies on their huge phones, driving 911s or dancing badly in their striped shirts and red braces that were plastered liberally over all the documentaries that appeared on every channel on Monday night to music of the era might have been trading shares in Spurs or Manchester United.

"Light touch" regulation led to clubs first floating on the stock market in the 1980s, like Thatcher's privatised utilities, and, amid the Premier League boom that followed, a new era of globalisation as investors and "benefactors" from around the world piled into what was now an international product that penetrated the lives of fans across the globe, seeking either profit or to burnish their reputation. As their commercial, match-day and TV income soared, clubs became entities to be traded by offshore trusts or floated on stock markets in Singapore or New York.

In the week that the protracted Portsmouth saga will finally reach a definitive conclusion in the high court, it is worth remembering that Lord Justice Taylor also presciently wrote: "Boardroom struggles for power, wheeler-dealing in the buying and selling of shares, and indeed of whole clubs, sometimes suggest that those involved are more interested in the personal financial benefits or social status of being a director than of directing the club in the interests of its supporter customers."

As extensively chronicled by my colleague David Conn, it was part of a process that changed football forever in this country.

Just as some commentators have argued in the past 24 hours that Germany's path suggested Thatcher's necessary shock treatment for the economy could perhaps have been achieved with less brutal impact on the social fabric of the country, so Conn and others have questioned whether the Bundesliga might have offered a different path for top-flight football.

As it is, just as Jonathan Freedland persuasively argued in Tuesday's Guardian that we still live in "the land Maggie built", so too our modern game was hewn during her administration – despite the fact she at times appeared personally bent on its ruination. And just as New Labour refined Thatcherism's broad thrust while holding true to its central creeds, so the Premier League's message has become more sophisticated over time without losing its free market thrust. It is an inevitably crude exercise and the Premier League's architects would point out that it is more redistributive than the top flights in Italy or Spain, but in all sorts of ways today's Premier League – with its ruthless divisions between rich and poor, winners and losers, its reward of sometimes reckless risk taking, its clear focus on maximising revenue – remains a child of Thatcher's Britain.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2013/apr/09/thatcher-football-hillsborough

[RED BEERGOGGLES]

Lifted from yesterdays Guardian ,for those  willing to remain open minded ,but appear decidedly less malleable ....

Just as the avalanche of words in this morning's papers on the myriad legacies of Margaret Thatcher have been predictably wildly polarised, so too is the verdict on her effect on our national game.

Colin Moynihan, who defied Thatcher to win a silver medal as a cox at the 1980 Olympics but went on to become her loyal sports minister for the closing years of football's dark decade of the 1980s, on Tuesday called her "the finest captain of Team GB" and detailed

a list of achievements he claimed modernised British sport at a time when she and he combined to "face, tackle and seek to eradicate the scourge of football hooliganism at home and abroad". In a piece in the Daily Mail Jeff Powell claimed she saved British football by taking a hard line on hooliganism. But those views are very much in the minority.

That she had little natural connection with, or affinity for, sport is widely documented. Her 11 years in power were bookended by a failed bid to force British athletes to boycott the Moscow Olympics in 1980 and the 1989 Hillsborough disaster and its immediate aftermath. Even staunch allies, including John Major and David Mellor, have confirmed that she had very little time for sport in general and football in particular. While every prime minister since has paid at least lip service to the power of sport and the pull of football, Thatcher exhibited the opposite.

Her pet project, driven by the then Luton Town chairman and backbench Tory MP David Evans, to deal with hooliganism by introducing a membership card scheme for all football fans, with draconian penalties for those who were not in possession of one and overseen by a new body with the power effectively to control their movements, was hated by those it threatened to police. It was eventually, reluctantly dropped only when Lord Justice Taylor's report in the wake of Hillsborough dismissed it as counter-productive.

Two days before Margaret Thatcher's ceremonial funeral, the families of the 96 men, women and children who died at Hillsborough will gather at Anfield to mark the 24th anniversary of the tragedy. Even in death the former prime minister seems inextricably linked with the tragedy that happened on her watch.

It will be the first annual memorial since the Hillsborough Independent Panel report definitively absolved fans of blame, reiterated that the main causes were a loss of control by the emergency services and the unsafe ground and exposed the scale of an establishment cover-up that smeared their name and kept the true causes of the tragedy obscured. It will also be the first since David Cameron stood in the House of Commons and the prime minister issued a blanket apology for the "double injustice" suffered by families of those who perished on the Leppings Lane terrace on the day and in the 23 years since.

Thatcher seemed to see football, and those who watched it, as of a piece with other "enemies within" on the picket lines and on the left. She and her ministers often described the game as a "law and order issue". As the then editor of When Saturday Comes Andy Lyons correctly identified in a piece for this newspaper in 2009: "Two crowd disasters in 1985 became a watershed. A terrace riot had been the immediate cause of the deaths of 39 Italian supporters at Heysel stadium, Brussels on 29 May but several other contributory factors were overlooked in the rush to condemn football fans, including the woefully decrepit state of the stadium and the badly mismanaged distribution of tickets. A month before Heysel a fire in a wooden stand at Bradford City caused 56 deaths."

Her attitude to football, inevitably coloured by the stain of hooliganism on Britain's international reputation, and the reaction of football fans to her were also bound up in the complex web of social and cultural upheaval that she helped create – particularly in the sport's great northern strongholds. Twenty years after she left Downing Street for the last time it was revealed that her ministers had recommended the city of Liverpool be abandoned to "managed decline". There were times when it appeared Thatcher would be happy if football followed a similar path.

In the dense 395 pages of text contained in the devastatingly argued HIP report just one colour photograph is included – it shows Thatcher and her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, standing grim-faced on the terraces at Hillsborough the day after the disaster. The report contained no "silver bullet" linking Thatcher to a premeditated plot to smear fans. But what emerges is a more complex picture of a prime minister all too ready to believe the line being fed to her by senior officers in a police force that by that stage was considered by many to be almost an arm of government.

The report reveals that cabinet papers showed she believed Taylor's report to be a "devastating criticism" of the police and was briefed that the "defensive – at times close to deceitful – behaviour by the senior officers in South Yorkshire sounds depressingly familiar". And yet she did nothing to alter a fictional narrative that, once set in stone by a media that infamously included the Sun newspaper with which her administration was inextricably linked, remained in place until it was shattered 23 years later by the expert independent panel chaired by the Right Reverend James Jones.

Worse, despite the evidence of a series of official reports going all the way back to the serious overcrowding at the "White Horse final" of 1923, the Thatcher administration had done little to address the crumbling, unsafe, unsanitary conditions at football grounds that led directly to the events of 15 April 1989. For her, the "law and order issue" appeared to obscure all else – including the irony that for her critics a direct line could be drawn between Thatcherism and the new breed of football hooligan, clad in designer clothes and organising fights well away from grounds.

It was not Thatcher but Lord Justice Taylor – appointed to investigate the reasons for the disaster – who plotted a course to a brighter future for the game. From the sold-out, safe, modern cathedrals of football and the wall-to-wall live coverage of 138 top-flight matches of the season to ever spiralling ticket and subscription prices and the alienation felt by some fans, both sides of the coin were minted in Taylor's report.

For a piece on the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster in 2009, the University of Liverpool's Professor Rogan Taylor said he believed Taylor saved the game from Thatcher. "The game died and was reborn. Some people might not like the new creature that it has become. [But] Taylor wrote a future for the game at a time when the government was seeking to consign it to the same dustbin as the miners and anything else that smelled of the smoke–stack industries and flat-capped working classes."

It was not the Taylor report alone – and its key recommendation that stadiums become all seated in the top two divisions with the help of public money, thus transforming crumbling unsafe grounds into places where families could comfortably enjoy an afternoon out – that overhauled football's image and laid the foundations for the Premier League boom that followed. But it was a key staging post. Others arguably included (in no particular order): Gazza's tears and triumphant homecoming from Italia 90; All Played Out and Nessun Dorma; When Saturday Comes and fanzine culture; CCTV and improved policing; the sudden middle-class acceptability of the sport for which Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch became convenient shorthand; and even acid house.

Yet away from the bleak images of Heysel and Valley Parade and the twisted metal fences of Hillsborough, it should not be overlooked that Thatcher's policies also – almost by accident – laid the blueprint for today's Premier League, for good or ill.

The media revolution she ushered in by granting a satellite licence to one of her biggest supporters in Rupert Murdoch was a huge factor in stoking the exponential growth in media rights, which for the top flight have grown from £191m to £5.5bn over the past two decades and, in turn, fuelled the growth in wages that helped attract the world's best to play here. Look, too, at the architects of the Premier League revolution and the money that fuelled it.

They included Alan Sugar, the Essex wheeler dealer who made his fortune selling satellite dishes and helped ensure Sky secured the live TV rights to the nascent Premier League in 1991 with his tip-off to Murdoch's lieutenant Sam Chisholm that he should "blow them [ITV] out of the water". Whatever their personal political leanings, men such as the Crystal Palace chairman, Ron Noades, the Spurs owner, Irving Scholar, and Chelsea's Ken Bates appeared the living embodiment of Thatcherism and its values.

For both good and ill the formation of the Premier League was football's equivalent of her "big bang" deregulation of the financial markets of the mid-1980s, enabling the big clubs to swat away eventually an ineffectual and vain Football Association just as the stuffy City institutions had been swept aside. Those yuppies on their huge phones, driving 911s or dancing badly in their striped shirts and red braces that were plastered liberally over all the documentaries that appeared on every channel on Monday night to music of the era might have been trading shares in Spurs or Manchester United.

"Light touch" regulation led to clubs first floating on the stock market in the 1980s, like Thatcher's privatised utilities, and, amid the Premier League boom that followed, a new era of globalisation as investors and "benefactors" from around the world piled into what was now an international product that penetrated the lives of fans across the globe, seeking either profit or to burnish their reputation. As their commercial, match-day and TV income soared, clubs became entities to be traded by offshore trusts or floated on stock markets in Singapore or New York.

In the week that the protracted Portsmouth saga will finally reach a definitive conclusion in the high court, it is worth remembering that Lord Justice Taylor also presciently wrote: "Boardroom struggles for power, wheeler-dealing in the buying and selling of shares, and indeed of whole clubs, sometimes suggest that those involved are more interested in the personal financial benefits or social status of being a director than of directing the club in the interests of its supporter customers."

As extensively chronicled by my colleague David Conn, it was part of a process that changed football forever in this country.

Just as some commentators have argued in the past 24 hours that Germany's path suggested Thatcher's necessary shock treatment for the economy could perhaps have been achieved with less brutal impact on the social fabric of the country, so Conn and others have questioned whether the Bundesliga might have offered a different path for top-flight football.

As it is, just as Jonathan Freedland persuasively argued in Tuesday's Guardian that we still live in "the land Maggie built", so too our modern game was hewn during her administration – despite the fact she at times appeared personally bent on its ruination. And just as New Labour refined Thatcherism's broad thrust while holding true to its central creeds, so the Premier League's message has become more sophisticated over time without losing its free market thrust. It is an inevitably crude exercise and the Premier League's architects would point out that it is more redistributive than the top flights in Italy or Spain, but in all sorts of ways today's Premier League – with its ruthless divisions between rich and poor, winners and losers, its reward of sometimes reckless risk taking, its clear focus on maximising revenue – remains a child of Thatcher's Britain.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2013/apr/09/thatcher-football-hillsborough[/quote]

[ycsatbjywtbiastkamb]

Another great article in todays times. Best read for the objective ones willing to understand the situation

The selfish Left, not Thatcher, divided us
Daniel Finkelstein

stopped reading right there.
you expect us to take any notice of an article written by a close mate of george osborne and speechwriter/adviser for william hague?
you may as well have posted up an article by norman tebbitt or keith joseph.
do us a favour mate dont post tory party propoganda on a LFC discussion forum.

[Benny The Noon]

Are Liverpool fans not allowed to support Tories then ?

[ycsatbjywtbiastkamb]

Are Liverpool fans not allowed to support Tories then ?

go and f##king start a conservative liverpool supporters association if you want to discuss that cr@p, do i have to remind you that LFC is a club based in a city that the tories tried to grind into the ground? have you any idea of the pain and suffering caused by their policies? do you know how many families fell apart under the strain of not having two f##king pennies to rub together? do you know why liverpool had such a high crime rate in the 80`s? do you know why their was an explosion of smackheads in places like croxteth during the early 80`s? have you ever heard of the term `managed decline`?

[ycsatbjywtbiastkamb]

sorry benny i know what you mean it`s just that she winds me up.

[dundreamin]

MANAGED DECLINE. Toryspeak for fook the scouse SCUM they are all drug users, thieves,spongers etc etc. I seen how these,b.astards operate as,I was in the Army from 1978 - 1984. Soon as,she came to power she gave the forces and police massive payrises as,she had to keep them onside. I was posted in Chester during the 81 riots we were going to Belize and were undertaking jungle training. That stopped and we started doing Northern Island training we all knew why. They were going to put us on the,streets of England if things got worse. I let it be known that I would refuse such a order. Bad move got beasted for months. It took me nearly 3,years to get out. That was pure punishment for having the cheek to oppose them

[dundreamin]

MANAGED DECLINE. Toryspeak for fook the scouse SCUM they are all drug users, thieves,spongers etc etc. I seen how these,b.astards operate as,I was in the Army from 1978 - 1984. Soon as,she came to power she gave the forces and police massive payrises as,she had to keep them onside. I was posted in Chester during the 81 riots we were going to Belize and were undertaking jungle training. That stopped and we started doing Northern Island training we all knew why. They were going to put us on the,streets of England if things got worse. I let it be known that I would refuse such a order. Bad move got beasted for months. It took me nearly 3,years to get out. That was pure punishment for having the cheek to oppose them

[Kharhaz]

Thatcher destroyed many peoples lives. And if anyone thinks this doesn't matter, try living that life and say so.

The fact the song "Ding Dong The Witch is Dead" is no.10 in the charts should surely awaken everyone's eyes as to how much she was hated.

[damjan193]

You guys should try living in south-eastern Europe. Politics and economy in Britain wouldn't seem so bad.

[Boocity]

I think this over reaction is quite stupid, the scenes of parties celebrating her death is embarrasing to the country, although i understand the feelings of people who were directly affected by her policies in the 80's, I cannot understand why kids who were not even born when she was in power dancing in the street, its pathetic

[kazza]

I think this over reaction is quite stupid, the scenes of parties celebrating her death is embarrasing to the country, although i understand the feelings of people who were directly affected by her policies in the 80's, I cannot understand why kids who were not even born when she was in power dancing in the street, its pathetic

Agreed

I think it is bad karma to rejoice in a death that will not change your life, it simply spite. You say "that is that and what's done is done" and you move on. She has not had a direct impact for a while and her death changes nothing so why rejoice?

[Benny The Noon]

Liverpool FC transcends the boundaries of the City now - it's global now and it's appeal is countrywide.

Not everyone will have an utter hated for Tories and for Thatcher - she devided a country and that will never change. She ruined some people's lives and she helped others. I will always understand why people will have a hatred for her - my family felt it - maybe not as much as others.

But I will never ever understand people's ability to disappoint - celebrating in the death of her is beyond the acceptable line. I have seen pics of kids aged 16 celebrating !! They werent even fecking born - their parents were hardly even out of nappies.

Some people will use it as an excuse to create problems and trouble. The funeral is going to be even worse - it's going to be an easy target for thugs to act up.

[SouthCoastShankly]

Another great article in todays times. Best read for the objective ones willing to understand the situation

The selfish Left, not Thatcher, divided us
Daniel Finkelstein

stopped reading right there.
you expect us to take any notice of an article written by a close mate of george osborne and speechwriter/adviser for william hague?
you may as well have posted up an article by norman tebbitt or keith joseph.
do us a favour mate dont post tory party propoganda on a LFC discussion forum.

Wasn't aware of who he was, I read it because the topic interests me. The points he make are obviously opinions but nevertheless include details that are conveniently ignored when discussing the mining strikes of the 70s.

If you're not willing to consider the others sides view ignorance will continue to blight your life.

Also for what it is worth, I have said previously that Thatcher screwed up. My point (and actually that of the article you chose to ignore) if you actually listened was the state the country was in and the damage the unions were causing, change was inevitable regardless of who was in power.