My team Stevenage upto 3rd in the conference after a 2-1 win today at Crawley :thumbs:

Well done Dan *curses under breath*. We should have so won but a point is a point after 2 defeats

12th at the moment then Rebecca, things can change unlucky today against Scarborough, you let a 2 goal lead slip there. Who was in goal?

dunno i never went was away anyway and the report havent come up on the site yet

Look at Aldershot, came 4th last season now bottom of the league :shocked:

I know im shocked by that:puzzled:

Goes to show this league is unpredictable, who would have thought Aldershot would be so low and Alty so high?

Yeah I know:dance:

So, Michael Owen has agreed to join Newcastle on a 4 year deal. The writing was on the wall yesterday, I suppose, when Real Madrid said that they wouldn't let him leave 'on the cheap'. There was no way Liverpool were ever going to match Newcastle's £17 million offer. It would be madness to pay more than double what we sold him for just 12 months ago, and it would've made us the laughing stock of the football world if we had. Neither Newcastle or Real Madrid were interested in a loan deal, so Owen had no choice other than to join them, or spend another year on the bench and kiss his England place goodbye.

Good luck to him, because he will be worshipped as a god at Newcastle. But he must be kicking himself. Had greed not got the better of him just 12 months ago, he'd have a Champions' League winners' medal on his mantelpiece now. With Newcastle, he has no European football to look forward to this year, and he joins a club that hasn't lifted any silverware for 50 years. Such a shame, and such a waste of a massive talent.

He really did mess up by leaving Liverpool in the first place, obviously it would have been great to have him back at Liverpool but I am pretty certain that Rafa was not interested in him. I don't like the way that Rafa has treated Cisse, he should have been straight with him and Cisse has clearly been upset by these rumours and afterall he is the best striker at the club at the present time. Morientes is not upto standard and looks a totally different player to the one that did so well at Monaco, Sinama Pongolle is still only young and the same with Mellor and how Crouch does remains to be seen. I think the chairman wanted him but we did not have the funds to buy Owen and also a centre back and right winger and as you say we could not buy back Owen for almost double as we would look foolish.

Owen will be worshipped at Newcastle and it's a really big signing for them but Owen is too big for Newcastle, he may well boost them higher up in the league but with Souness as manager they are going nowhere fast, Owen left Liverpool to further his career and to win more trophies but in the end he won nothing at Real Madrid and has come to a team near the bottom on the table and on the road to nowhere. Great call Micheael :laugh:

The jury is still out on Cisse as far as the Premiership is concerned. It's a completely different situation to when he was the top striker in the French top flight (2003 - 2004). Time will tell, of course, but when he was substituted against Sofia at Anfield last week, I remained seated and didn't stand to applaud until Pongolle trotted onto the pitch. In all honesty, I'm far more interested in Pongolle and Mellor. Mellor can be everything Alan Smith was always supposed to be, but with a better temperament and the ability to actually find the back of the net. He plays with a passion that has rarely been seen at Anfield since Fowler's departure, and I'd at least have him on the bench at every possible opportunity.

John Aldridge said recently that he could see a possible reason behind Rafa's apparent reluctance to welcome Owen back with open arms. That was to play Crouch on his own up front at away matches, and play with a more defensive midfield that would support on the counter. That's not the Liverpool way at all, but Aldridge certainly knows the game a lot better than any of us.

Still, they made it clear on the news earlier today that Owen has had a clause put in his Newcastle contract. I'd presume that it would be to allow him to leave 'on the cheap' should they fail to secure European football come the end of the season. If they make it, it will be down to nobody else but Owen. If they don't, perhaps he'll show enough at the World Cup Finals next year to secure himself a place in a team that matches his undoubted ability. But that probably won't be Liverpool - the crowd at Anfield on Boxing Day will more than likely put the final nail in the coffin.

Today we've secured the signatures of two new players. Besian Idrizaj, a 17-year-old Austrian winger, and Ramon Calliste, a 19-year-old Welsh striker, released by man'ure nited at the end of last season. Yippee. :bored:

I have always been a fan of Cisse since he joined us and if they play to his strength as they did in the super cup then he should score quite a few goals this season but proably not as many as Owen would have brought. Why we persist with Morientes is beyond me, I prefer Mellor and Pongolle, at least they look like doing something in front of goal and Mellor has that goal scorer's instinct.

I go along with what Alridge said about Crouch as I can see us playing Sissoko, Gerrard, Alonso, Zenden and Garcia with Crouch alone up front away from home, just like we did against Middlesborough but it was Morientes instead of Crouch. It would not be my ideal choice but see how it works out.

I really can't see Owen staying at Newcastle if they have a similar season to the previous one. He will proably score 20 goals, have a good world cup then move soon after that. Great signing for a season for Newcastle because he will get them goals that will proably keep Souness in a job :bored:. I am not sure where he would go after Newcastle though?

I have never heard of the two players we signed, they will proably go down the same route as many other players and never play a first team game or just make the bench in the champions league. No news on a centre back or a right winger yet :shocked:, time is running out and we really do need to sign players for both posistions. Daniel Agger from Brondby would be my choice for centre back and for right wing Rafael Van Der Vaart, but he just joined SV Hamburg!

The idea behind the signing of the young players has been getting a lot of attention here of late. Apparently, Rafa wasn't at all impressed at the lack of talent progressing from the Academy to Melwood, and on to the first team. He has been signing promising youngsters from all of the place. Idrizaj has signed for 2 years, and is Austria's current young player of the year. Calliste is a Wales Under-21 International, and he's signed for a year.

When we signed 17-year-old centre-half Jack Hobbs from Lincoln City (beating off attention from Arsenal & Bolton) on August 18th, it was announced as 'Rafa's seventh summer signing'. There's also Godwin Antwi, another 17-year-old centre-half from Ghana (signed from Real Zaragoza), Antonio Barragan, the 18-year-old right-back we signed from Sevilla, and Miquel Roque, yet another 17-year-old centre-half, signed from Lleida (Spanish second division).

We've apparently made a bid for Parma centre-back Daniele Bonera, but Inter want him too, and they won't sell unless they get an offer between £4.1 and £4.78 million. A bid to take Roma's Philippe Mexes on a one year loan has been rejected. We're still being linked with bringing Woodgate home from Real, and we've rejected an £8 million bid for Cisse from Spurs. I feel like such a bloody trainspotter! :spin:

so owens signed for the mags then ?

yeah thats amazinnn

Oh dear what a waste of a good player, Im sorry all you magpie fans but i think that Owen has made a BIG mistake.

LIVERPOOL DIDNT WANT HIM:nono:

:laugh: you certainly do know your stuff! I like the approach that Rafa has taken to get young players in from abroad, Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United have been doing it for the last few years so why not us? Now we just need for some of these lad's to make the step up.

As for the bids, I know about Mexes and all 4 bids we have made have been rejected so nice dice. I have seen Bonera play a few times and he has pace and does look a good player, Woodgate is a player I would like us to sign but with all those injuries I feel it would be a little silly to try and get him.

LOL! Not really. Most of that came from the official site, local radio news and the Liverpool Echo. :bigsmile:



We wanted him alright, but not at double the price we sold him for 12 months ago.

Liverpool have made a bid for Simao the Benfica right winger.

Deal fell through :mad:

From: LiverpoolFC.TV

Rafael Benitez today dismissed talk that he didn't want to bring Michael Owen back home to Anfield. On the day Owen was officially unveiled as a Newcastle player, the Liverpool boss has admitted the Reds wouldn't pay £16 million for a player they sold for half that amount only a year ago and that, in the end, made any deal 'impossible'.

"We tried until the very end to sign Michael. We even made phone calls early yesterday morning. In the end, it was impossible," he said. "When we spoke to Madrid, they only ever talked about £16m. We couldn't spend that much money on a player we sold for £8m. We have to think about the club over any player in this situation. Real Madrid put a lot of pressure on Michael to go to Newcastle because they wanted the money to sign Sergio Ramos. I hoped Michael would say no and then, maybe, we could do something."

Benitez will now put his faith in the club's current crop of strikers, including Djibril Cisse who has also had to read speculation over his future in the past few days.

He added: "Whenever I was asked about Owen I had to respect the strikers we have at the club. We had offers for Cisse, some involving loan deals. We never planned to sell Cisse but when Madrid kept on telling us they wanted £16m, it was a problem and we had to look at different possibilities. We had clubs interested in Djibril, but we made it clear to them we wanted to keep the player. I like Cisse and he is the type of player we need to score a lot of goals and he showed that in the Super Cup final. We didn't want to sell him and that's why we turned down some offers. I thought we could bring Michael to the club because Neil Mellor is out injured for a few more weeks and some clubs are interested in taking him on loan. We need different sorts of strikers at the club and having Michael, Florent Sinama-Pongolle, Fernando Morientes, Peter Crouch and Djibril Cisse would have given us many different options."



Today's Liverpool Echo called Owen's signing 'The most expensive loan deal in football history'. Owen has had several clauses included in his contract, but the most telling is the '£12 million bid' get-out clause. Come the end of the season, Owen can walk away if any club offers £12 million or more - coincidentally the exact figure Liverpool were prepared to pay to bring him home.

3rd win in a row for Stevenage now, Elding scoring the only goal against Halifax.

2-1 today against Woking:thumbs:

Where are Accrington now in the league? We are 3rd!