The Dim in Beirut

Statistics are Rubbish

Statistics are bullshit in football.

Do stats tell you how a player will fare in a different environment? No.

I've watched for years while different Liverpool managers have spent absolute fortunes on players from premier league clubs. I've listened to people telling me how, 18, 20 or 35m was worth paying for a player as they are "premier league proven". And I've watched for years as those big money signing completely balls up the minute they arrive at Anfield.

We need to sign players that will fucking revel being at a big club. That will look at their surroundings and say, FUCK YES, this is fucking it. Im going to fucking rock this place and add to its legend.

Instead, we buy players that shrink. That dont know what it’s like to play for a club with 24/7 media glare, in front of demanding fans that have seen it, who expect wins every time out and demand nothing but the best. Im sick and tired of seeing players like Carroll, Henderson, Keane, Pennant,Downing Barmby et all absolutely shrink through the sheer force of expectation.

The stats will tell you Downing and Henderson created x amount of chances for their previous clubs and thats all good. But I couldnt give a fuck what you did in front of a mute Villa Park in March, with your team 13th of the table. I couldnt give a fuck if you're scoring goals for Newcastle, or crossing the ball well at the Stadium of Light.

When you put on a Red shirt, everything changes. You become famous the world over. Your every move is watched. Your performances are scrutinized the world over from fans at the ground, to hundreds of journalists to fans on tv.

Go a few games without a goal at Stoke and no one will notice. But do it at Liverpool, as Peter Crouch will tell you, and you become an international joke. That’s what playing at a big club entails.

There's no amount of stats that will tell you whether a player has the mentality to cope with that pressure, that expectation, that scrutiny. That's why the mentality of a player is so important for us to know about. That's why the argument of being "prem proven", spoken by absolute fuck wits who are unable to think for themselves, is an absolute fallacy. That's why its completely ridiculous for us to spend double or triple what a player is worth simply because he has an English passport and has experience in this league.

Kenny said it best when we signed Luis Suarez. He was asked about his mentality and Kenny replied “He’s a foreigner who captained Ajax at 22 years of age. That tells me all I need to know about his mentality”.

Our recruitment needs to change. Our philosophy needs to change. Instead of spending obscene amounts of money on a couple of potentially good players with English passports and decent stats, we need to go buy winners. We need to go fucking look for warriors, people who will be willing to fucking tackle their own grandmothers in order to win a game. People that have either proved they have the bollocks to play for a big club, or have the passion and burning desire to be a success at a big club.

And you wont find that in stats.

The English Media- A Love Affair

3/1/2012 11:22:03 AM

There’s a lot of thing I hate in life.

If I made a list, it would include: salads, waking up early, Beirut heat, French keyboards, Parisian people, salads, X-box controllers, dentists, cats, gyms and science fiction.

Oh, and salads.

Those would definitely be in the top 20. But they’d struggle to knock off the following from the top 10:

Hypocrisy, double standards, injustice, hysteria, discrimination ( in all its forms), bullying, agendas, fakeness and witch hunts.

All words that define the topic of my piece: The English football media.

Words alone cannot properly do justice to how much I hate them. Im sure there have been times where I have despised people more than them, but I honestly cannot recall when.

Maybe it’s because of my background. Im a Lebanese man that’s lived half of my life in London and the other half in Beirut. I have lived through wars in my country and region where I have seen the true face of the media revel itself. I, due to my nationality, have been part of a people demonized by the kind folk at, amongst others, Fox News, the New York Times and the Sun.

Nobody needs to tell a Lebanese person or an Arab about how the media works. Nobody needs to be reminded of the double standards, the hypocrisy, the hysteria, the hidden agendas and the bullying that form the backbone of the media’s narrative on our region.

So,  seeing as Im a Lebanese person hopelessly and passionately in love with Liverpool Football Club, it is surely without any shock that you will learn that I have absolutely reached the end of my tether with the English football media and their campaign against Luis Suarez. I am sick to death of the persecution and vilification of the flawed genius who wears our iconic number 7 shirt.

I have stayed silent in this group on this matter since the news first broke. I have held my own counsel as I’ve seen the likes of Paddy Barclay, Oliver Holt, Daniel Taylor (chief sports writer at the Manc Marca, otherwise known as the Guardian), Henry Winter, Jonathan Northcroft, Matt Dickinson and others find Luis Suarez guilty of racism before the FA tribunal even was formed. I have laughed as they wrote about how backwards a country Uruguay was, about how racist a continent South America was. I have shook my head as all their pieces reminded us of how great and just and fair and so damn equal the United Kingdom is.

Uruguay had blacks in their armies when the English was still enslaving them. They had blacks in their national teams when the English were still denying them the right to wear the 3 lions shirt. All these are facts; but you know what they say about facts: never let them get in the way of a good argument.

The campaign from the media, from the very start, was to show how just and proper the English game was. It was to show how advances a society England was. It was to demonstrate to Sepp Blatter, and the rest of the world, how much better and firmer England dealt with racism.

Nevermind that there was no evidence. Nevermind that of all the cameras in the ground, not a single one caught a single word Luis Suarez said. Nevermind that not a single witness could confirm Patrice Evra’s story. Nevermind that he’s been found by the FA before to be an “unreliable witness who has made exaggerated claims”. There’s no rooms for shades of grey, for the media everything is, forgive the pun, black and white.

The sheer hypocrisy is bewildering. The English football media decided Luis Suarez must be found guilty. He is, after all a person from a backwards country where they actually have the temerity to call a fat person fat, a short person short and a black person black. He handled on the line against Ghana (perfectly fine when Scholes scores with his hand though), he bit a player in Holland (but when an Englishman in Jermaine Defoe does the same to Javier Mascherano, an Argentine, they all go quiet) and he dives (Rooney or our captain anyone?). Of course he’s a racist.

Never once, during this entire affair, have I read a single piece detailing why Liverpool and its fans absolutely reject the findings. Not a single journalist in a broadsheet, TV station or tabloid has actually highlighted the sheer lack of evidence in the report. There’s been a total agreement between every single journalist in the English football media that Luis Suarez is a racist. You could not find any other subject in England where every single journalist has exactly the same viewpoint.

But the saddest thing is, that during this entire time, I haven’t actually read a single piece on racism. Noone has actually, when it’s the hottest topic in town, decided to talk about race and how to proceed in eradicating it. Nobody has studied why there’s so few black managers (none in the premier league), black officials (none either) or black football journalists (a single one, Darren Lewis from the Mirror). Nobody has stopped to ask why in such a multi cultural country, are they no Arabs, Indians or Pakistanis playing professional football.

Why? Because, quite simply, they do not care a single dot. The media could not care less about racism. They could not give a damn about these matters. The entire goal is to sell papers and ad space, and in the soap opera of the Premier League, Luis Suarez is a perfect villain and racism is, thanks to dear old Sepp, a hot topic. A thoughtful, analytic and detailed piece about racism will not shift papers. A picture of Luis Suarez snarling at Patrice Evra under the headline “RACIST” will.

The Sunday Times this week called Luis Suarez “South America’s most loathsome export since General Pinochet”. This is a publication that are owned by a man who finances and funds a portion of the US government who actually helped install and prop up the dictator Pinochet in office. You could not make this stuff up if you tried.

It’s the hypocrisy that does it for me. Look at the way they demonized Fabio Capello for not speaking good English. Look at how they hounded Rafa. It’s an open secret that the faces of Sky Sports, Keys and Gray, called him a “fat Spanish waiter”. Noone sees anything wrong with that.

I’ll give you another example which Im sure Ill regret.

Im friendly with a black football player who plays in the Premier League in England. That player told me that last season, at his club, 2 of his white teammates racially abused him and other black players.  Proper old school  racism, nigger this, black cunt that, coon here and there. Not a negrito in sight.

The players complained. There was mutiny in the camp. The news reached the club’s owner, the FA and the media.

Has anyone who follows English football closely ever heard of this story? No. Why?

Because the powers to be decided to sweep it under the carpet and the media chose not to report the fact that two white British players racially abused their teammates.

Forgive me for thinking the media would have been a lot less lenient had the two players been from South America.

So next time you hear or read these journalists saying how Liverpool Football club and its manager are a disgrace to the sport, its fans racists and  that its number 7 should be deported, remember how hypocritical these people are. Remember the double standards, the hysteria and the injustices.

And never forget that the last time these people decided to bully a man and organize a witch hunt against him, forever highlighting his weaknesses and never his strengths, they succeeded in removing that man from the manager’s seat at our great club. And they succeeded, through their hidden agendas, to replace that man with a nice English gentleman, full of decorum and friendliness. A wise old man with 35 years of experience, a near spot on English and no belly in sight.

God, I hate them…