The Beautiful Game thread, season 2017/18

[XXXIV]

The ref Liverpool Everton...A true c***.

[RobVarak]

Mané making a schoolboy mistake was as big a F up.

[XXXIV]

Mané making a schoolboy mistake was as big a F up.

That was pretty pathetic.

[XXXIV]

Wrong thread for Joe Buck.

[dbdynsty25]

Some epic matchups in Champions League coming up...can't wait. PSG and Real in the first round is almost unfair.

[tjung0831]

Everton has cancelled their team Christmas party due to their play on the pitch!

[10spro]

I am calling it now. He’s only 8 but he’s my next Messi. And yeah he’s from Argentina...

[XXXIV]

A big f*** you! to man city signed Liverpool.

[RobVarak]

[pk500]

I am calling it now. He’s only 8 but he’s my next Messi. And yeah he’s from Argentina...

Sorry, dude, not impressed. I coached youth soccer for 10 years, and there's always one kid at U6, U8 or U10 level every year who can dribble through the entire side and do what he wants.

One of my son's varsity high school teammates was named first-team all New York state this year, and he was THAT KID at U6, U8 and U10. He did the exact same thing as this kid. David will be a fine Division I player, but nobody's calling him the next Messi.

Nice skills in this video for a wee lad. But contact me about this kid after he reaches puberty.

[10spro]

By puberty he’ll be signed by Barca, or some English club guaranteed. My dudettes have been playing soccer under the Whitecaps program for the past 8 years and I have not seen any boy that could dribble like this guy at that age. Talented kids with some vision yes, but this type of dribbling? Nope, not in the Whitecaps farm camp anyways.

And what caught my attention even more was his shot ability.

I have no doubt that you’ll be hearing ‘El Bute’ more frequently in about 5 years...And remember, it’s just me calling him the next Messi which obviously differs from your higher expectations.

[10spro]

Barca has always struggled against Real Sociedad in their yard, but not today. Here’s Messi beauty sealing the deal.

[XXXIV]

Sweet 10s.

Now get him to do something like that in a world Cup elimination game.

[GB_Simo]

The more optimistic supporters think we'll blitz the Vanarama National League and earn immediate promotion. I think I'll be happy enough if I can make it to November with a tiny bit of hope left in my heart.

Enjoy, fellas.

Not sure I know where to start with this, but some simple facts might get the ball rolling: 19th in the Vanarama National League, Hartlepool United Football Club is on the brink of being liquidated.

It's difficult to fully explain how a club in the top tier of non-league football can possibly be running at a loss of £130,000 per month, but I'll have a go anyway.

During 2014 our then owners, Increased Oil Recovery, were looking for a way out. For a number of reasons, many of them allegedly connected to some unfortunate tax-related confusion involving the company's Norwegian owner, they were no longer prepared to bankroll the club as they had during our glory years. (Glory here is relative, I realise: if all you've ever known as a supporter is the top table, consecutive League One play-off appearances might not seem so wonderful. For a Poolie, it was like waking up to find it was really tomorrow and you really had jam.) At the back end of the year, it was announced that a sale of the club had been agreed, with a group named TMH 2014.

Yes, really. The Monkey Hangers. You know this story by now, of course, but whack that term into the search engine of your choice if you fancy a refresher.

That all fell through when it became apparent that the actions of the fellows behind TMH were a tad on the fraudulent side. No "allegedly" here, incidentally - the figureheads are both spending time at Her Majesty's pleasure as I type. Still, no worry - Gary Coxall, a recently-discharged bankrupt from the other end of the country, was looking to buy a football club, asked an agent to make a few introductions and, at season's end, took us over under the guise of a recruitment company with offices in Dubai.

Said agent, Paul Watson of FullNinety Sports Management, seems to have somehow bagged himself a role as Head of Recruitment as part of that deal. It may be mere coincidence that several of his agency's players are on our books at present, and it may be untrue that some of our former players sought to leave as a direct result of his unsolicited attempts to usurp their existing agents. Equally, it may be false that some of those former players had moves away blocked by the same individual, or that some agents refuse to deal with Pools on grounds that being at daily risk of losing your client isn't a great fit for the business model. Of course, it may not be.

Officially, Watson is a consultant and not a club employee, which still has the appearance of a big old conflict of interest but does just about enough to stop the FA sniffing around too closely. He does, however, seem to have been making all of the big decisions affecting the club too, initially sanctioned by Coxall, who first siphoned a sizeable wedge of cash out of the club, then buggered off last May. Not to the office in Dubai, because as far as anyone can establish, it doesn't exist. Left holding the keys was Pam Duxbury, a representative of a firm called Sage Investments, who'd loaned the club money at a ludicrous rate of interest having - and I know not how - been sold the idea of the Mill House Masterplan I mentioned back in August. Sage's owner, having become Hartlepool United's owner almost by accident, fancied recovering that investment but found the club without a pot to piss in, having survived 3 winding-up orders the previous season.

Fast forward a few months, to the discovery that Duxbury was previously CEO of FullNinety, that Coxall allegedly sanctioned Watson bringing her into the club on a tidy wage and that the last couple of seasons might, almost in their entirety, have been about a few individuals lining their pockets and those of their associates while bleeding HUFC dry. The club was officially put up for sale in December. Interested parties were asked to demonstrate that they had access to funds of at least £3 million. Consider that Sage are said to have put £1.8 million into us before the owner saw no point in funding us further, and you'd conclude that they want the whole investment back as well as evidence of sufficient cash to see the season out. Nobody is going to put £3 million into a struggling non-league club, not unless the deal is sweetened.

The local council, seeing this too, approached a local property developer and asked him if he'd consider buying the club. There's a village just up the road called Wynyard, full of houses most of us could only dream of, but that Sir John Hall and Alan Shearer can afford. Half of that village is the work of this developer, so he's not short of a quid or two, and how about a bit of land in Hartlepool to make it worth your while, Sir? For a few days it all sounded terrific, until he released a statement saying he'd looked at what passes for the club's books and couldn't work out how much it would cost him to run the club. Pam Duxbury is a chartered accountant by trade, and you might ask whether she's either not a very good one, one good enough to know where the financial bodies should be hidden, or else one who genuinely can't untangle which friend paid which sum to which associate.

In the meantime, the fans are effectively keeping the club running. A crowdfunding campaign to keep us going in the short term raised £85,000, with football supporters from all over the country chipping in, while 7,500 people came to watch Pools play Wrexham the other week. They came in numbers from Middlesbrough, who we helped to keep in business in 1986. Wonderful, but Boro is 10 miles away, so there's some kind of local affiliation there. They also came from Huddersfield, from Coventry, from London, even from Glasgow. Our players, through a combination of inept coaching and being humans who need some idea of where their next pay cheque is coming from, lost 2-0 without managing a shot on goal worth the name.

Some of that £85k has gone towards the latest winding-up order. The rest is covering other bills, hopefully including the launderette who took our home kit in for a wash before our recent trip to Dagenham and wouldn't give it back until an agreement was reached over unpaid bills stretching back 2 years. We got the train from Hartlepool to London on the morning of the match, borrowed training gear and equipment on arrival, lost 4-2 and couldn't give any interviews post-match because the last train home from King's Cross left at 6:25.

There are still whispers of potential investment, but who wants a football club that's plunging towards the National League relegation zone, that's losing £130k a month and whose owners can't or won't show an investor where the cash is going? It feels like all we're doing with crowdfunding and other short-term fundraising is delaying the inevitable. I'm sat waiting to be put out of my misery. I almost want it to come sooner rather than later, so we can focus on the business of starting again, a phoenix club further down the pyramid that's self-sufficient and successful at whatever level we naturally sit at.

Except that I don't, really. This is my club, in the middle of my town. It's the club that coached me as a kid, one who'd have gone on to play in midfield for Pools if he hadn't been too fat, too slow and largely incapable of kicking a ball in a straight line. (These same "qualities" are broadly in line with those possessed by our current first choice midfield - I was simply ahead of my time.) I saw my first match there. I followed Pools all around the country with my Granda, lurching from disappointment to inevitable disappointment, each one as clear today as the day it happened. Here's one - Macclesfield away in the FA Cup, December 2006. We were on a bit of a run, they'd won once all season. My pre-match pint of lager was about 70% water, I ordered a bacon bun from a local sandwich shop and got given sausage and egg inside two slices of cheap bread, it was £1.50 for a bar of chocolate inside the ground and I spent the entire match believing I was about to fall over the back of the uncovered away end's perilously low fencing. To top it off, we lost 2-1. The 1 was an own goal. Oh, and we had a man sent off.

I was behind the goal at the Millennium Stadium when we equalised in the League One play-off final a couple of seasons earlier, though. Maybe it sounds ridiculous, I don't know, but I've never felt that kind of elation before or since. My pokey little club, from a north-eastern shipbuilding town that doesn't build ships any more, sneaking on to the biggest stage it had ever seen and refusing to go quietly, because we try in Hartlepool. Trying is all we ask of anyone who wears blue and white on a match day - we like it if you're talented too, but fundamentally, what we ask is that you give a toss. To sit and watch my club disappearing in the clutches of a handful of people who don't...I've got no words for it. I've got emotions, which is what's turning this into an unstructured ramble that I'll be curtailing soon, but words...not really. It makes me want to cry.

No: it makes me cry.

Sorry to go on, fellas, but this is breaking my heart.

[dbdynsty25]

What a game by both Roma and Liverpool...advance to the Semis of Champions League. What a great day of soccer.

[wco81]

"what a day for American soccer ownership in Europe"

Fox Sports studio host.



Yeah, that's the big takeaway from today.

[pk500]

What a game by both Roma and Liverpool...advance to the Semis of Champions League. What a great day of soccer.

I'm as shocked at Roma's performance today as I was Liverpool's last week. If only Sevilla and Juve can follow Roma's lead tomorrow. Then the CL semis would be dyn-o-mite!

[10spro]

It’s been a great week for Liverpool fans.

But the shocker no doubt is the Roma result advancing to the next round. Never seen Stadio Olimpico rocking so loud. They just took a page out of their rivals last year when they came back from a big deficit against PSG.

A huge upset because Barca hasn’t lost a game yet in either league although they’ve been struggling since the International friendlies.

[pk500]

A huge upset because Barca hasn’t lost a game yet in either league although they’ve been struggling since the International friendlies.

So odd how Barca can dominate La Liga but get eliminated early in a two-legged CL format. Real Madrid is sucking gas in La Liga but is looking pretty imperious in the CL.

Funny old game, football.

[XXXIV]

Sweet!

[Jimmydeicide]

"what a day for American soccer ownership in Europe"

Fox Sports studio host.



Yeah, that's the big takeaway from today.

If your referring to any of them not knowing the offside rule then yes, even their referee expert didnt know the rule .
im so wound up about this i had to turn the sound off. as soon as Fox hands over coverage the better.

UNBELIEVABLE !!! 2 defenders between attacker and goal. AAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

[10spro]

Michael Oliver. Youngest English referee in the UCL. Most yellow cards drawn in his matches. A contraversial call that absolutely robbed Juventus of a miracle comeback vs Real losing 4-3 on aggregate.

Just a garbage call and as G. Buffon mentioned:

‘Referee has a rubbish bin where his heart should be. A human being cannot decide the elimination of a team with such decision. When I don’t feel I’m good enough, I put myself in a corner. He should do the same. It’s a matter of sensibility. It means you don’t know where you are, which teams are playing, you don’t know s***.’

[pk500]

Please. That was far from a garbage call. It was the correct call.

Benatia shoved Vazquez in the back and kicked him in the chest in the box. The love child of Stevie Wonder and Helen Keller could have seen that.

I get that people are tired of Real Madrid and hate Ronaldo. But that was a clear penalty. Full stop. Much credit to Oliver. He should be lauded for having the balls to apply the rules of the game at such a crucial juncture instead of swallowing his whistle like so many other refs.

Michael Oliver passed the "What Would Collina Do?" test to me, with flying colors.

[wco81]

Man I hope they put up these games on demand.

They didn't show Roma-Barca here and I missed the Juve-Real.

[pk500]

Man I hope they put up these games on demand.

They didn't show Roma-Barca here and I missed the Juve-Real.

DVR or FOX Sports Go alert: Real-Juve is on at 5:30 p.m. (ET) today on FS2.