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Miscellaneous - liverpool thread

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View: https://x.com/Ian_Ladyman_DM/status/1998812771589189683

Back in the days when Jamie Carragher was transitioning from footballer to pundit, he was given some advice from another sportsman in that space that he perhaps hasn’t forgotten.

‘I told him he had to forget about friends in the game and in the dressing room,’ says that TV pundit today. ‘My message was pretty clear. You are an analyst now and you have to say what you see and feel. If you don’t, then you are just fake.’

Twelve years on from his last appearance for Liverpool, Carragher has perhaps reached the top of that particular mountain and, rather predictably, now looks down to see some people firing bullets from below.

His observations on TV, podcasts and indeed in print about Liverpool’s decline in fortunes this season have arguably transformed Carragher into the most talked about football pundit in England.

Some of Liverpool’s players have been irritated by his views and Daily Mail Sport can reveal the club was moved to meet with him in late September to talk about the tone of some of his coverage.

On Saturday at Elland Road, meanwhile, as Mo Salah delivered his thinly-disguised evisceration of manager Arne Slot, the Liverpool forward even mentioned Carragher by name. ‘Tomorrow, Carragher is going to go for me again and again and that’s fine,’ said Salah.

Carragher confirmed to friends this week that he is comfortable with his approach to his work for the likes of Sky Sports and American network CBS.

‘His opinions are honest and come from a good place,’ one associate says.

At Anfield, meanwhile, the club accept their relationship with Carragher, a former captain and ambassador, is complicated and multi-layered. ‘He is a highly-regarded former player with a great legacy,’ explains one source. ‘He’s also a Liverpool fan. His family come to our games.

‘He has his own charitable foundation and some of that work crosses over positively with ours. But then the TV stuff is the fourth layer and, yes, that sometimes makes the relationship challenging.’

Salah’s lack of regard for Carragher is obvious. Saturday’s was not his first outburst. On X last January, he told Carragher: ‘I am starting to think you are obsessed with me.' Equally, club captain Virgil van Dijk is known not to be a fan.

Carragher is aware of it all but someone else who knows him well told us: ‘You ask if he’s had his tin hat on this week and of course I know what you mean. He gets criticised if he praises Liverpool too much and criticised if he’s too hard on them. It’s the nature of the beast. When he first started maybe it bothered him. It doesn’t any more.

‘Nobody likes being criticised but he won’t change his views on football, because they are what he feels. He thinks there is a lot of bulls**t and fakery in modern football and is happy to call it out when he sees it.’

In a world of social media clicks and short attention spans, footballers are becoming more sensitive to criticism than ever.

Last week, for example, Daily Mail Sport revealed that members of the Manchester United dressing room refuse to deal directly with the likes of Gary Neville and Paul Scholes, despite the fact both work – or have worked – for rights-holder broadcasters, who have invested huge sums in return for access.

United's issues with the so-called Class of '92 have ebbed and flowed and at times have run deep over the years. At Liverpool it's simpler. It's just about the players.

Meanwhile, journalists covering Liverpool have very occasionally been pulled up by players for things they have written. Carragher now finds himself in familiar territory but that doesn't mean he ignores wider pictures.

This week, for example, Sky Sports' excellent Monday Night Football host Dave Jones considered starting a Salah discussion by directly referencing the conflict with Carragher. It’s understood Carragher said he wasn’t comfortable with allowing the topic to morph from an issue between Salah and his football club into one between Salah and himself.

‘Jamie doesn’t care about being name-checked by Salah,’ reveals our source. ‘But he feels this is about Salah and Liverpool. He sees that his job is to talk about it and analyse it rather than be in the middle of it. He knows all the positive things he has said about Salah in the past. He has called Van Dijk a Liverpool legend and icon of the club.

‘If they now wish to forget that and convince themselves he has it in for them, then he feels that’s up to them.’

Carragher’s meeting with Liverpool came after Slot’s team lost at Crystal Palace at the end of September. Sources reveal it to have been cordial and similar things do occasionally happen at other clubs with other pundits.

In his criticism of Liverpool’s defending on Sky Sports that day, Salah, Van Dijk and defender Ibrahima Konate were all mentioned by name.

Carragher is known to suspect the meeting was driven by players and there is no evidence to contradict that. The club’s view in terms of all analysis of their games is that they have a responsibility to ensure that it never crosses the line from professional into personal.

‘To be honest, robust criticism can be helpful as it can help to drive and maintain standards,’ adds a Liverpool source. ‘Jamie has a unique understanding of this football club and what it stands for. Other pundits haven’t had the benefit of that lived experience.

‘Ex-players go heavier when the team loses because it means more. That’s the same with Gary Neville and Manchester United, I am sure. We don’t want pundits to be biased and Jamie’s Monday Night Football tactical stuff is often compelling.

‘There are no sets of rules on this stuff. Obviously we have our players’ best interests at heart and maybe some of Jamie’s heat of the moment stuff when we don’t play well can become more difficult. I think that’s a harder one for us and maybe for Jamie too, given his allegiances.’

With that in mind, a clip of Carragher talking to his son on the phone during Liverpool’s recent Champions League loss to PSV while working for CBS has not helped him. On the segment, he is heard criticising Konate and saying that Slot should ‘go’.

The clip has now been pulled with Carragher dismissing it privately as ‘heat of the moment stuff you say when you are angry’. He accepts it wasn’t his finest moment but also asked that nobody at CBS be taken to task too severely for something that should never have been broadcast.
Slot himself is known to be phlegmatic about the whole thing. The Premier League season started with Carragher asking the Liverpool manager robust questions about his team’s defending after they had beaten Bournemouth 4-2 on the opening Friday. Some saw it as unnecessarily blunt but the fact is that Carragher’s concerns have subsequently been born out.

‘The manager has a higher pain threshold than most players on this stuff,’ adds our source. ‘He is prepared to take it if it means his players don’t have to.’

Since the furore of the weekend and Carragher’s criticism of Salah on Monday night, the 47-year-old’s social media streams have been lively and it’s not all been pleasant. Former Aston Villa and Egypt defender Ahmed Elmohamady called him a ‘disgrace’, for example.

It is understood that no Liverpool players have approached Carragher directly about his punditry since Daniel Sturridge pulled him on a pre-season tour of Australia a decade or so ago. Sturridge simply wished to know why Carragher had said he should be sold.

His private view is that some of his comments resonate with players because deep down they know they are true. He has a suspicion of what he – and other former players – view as PR-heavy social media posts such as the one Salah tweeted of himself training alone in a gym at the training ground while Liverpool were preparing to play in Milan on Tuesday.

Carragher actually responded to that one on X, saying: 'I’m not sure I’ve wanted Liverpool to win a game more than tonight for a long time! Come on you mighty reds.'

He has also engaged with the Salah argument more times on X this week than maybe we would expect if it really was all water off a duck’s back to him. Some of those who reported on his playing career also recall how he could occasionally be sensitive to criticism himself.

But Carragher’s belief in the origin, depth and credibility of his opinions remains resolute and maybe that is what we should wish for from our pundits. The Liverpool dressing room may well believe him to be unfair and too emotional and feel that he attempts to hold them to too high a standard. They would find it considerably harder to suggest he doesn’t mean exactly what he says.
 
It sounds like we have loads of snowflakes playing for us. No wonder we go out there looking like a gang of fannies.
 
Nobody minded when Jocky Hansen used to slag LFC off because he also gave credit where it was due. The problem with Carra and some of those others named above is that, in trying so desperately hard to show how unbiased they are. they tip too far over into criticism too often and lose the balance Jocky always managed to preserve. Lawrenson was the first and the worst - as a regular on the BBC he called everything against LFC, to such an extent that fans started booing him when he turned up at Anfield and he eventually stopped going to home games altogether.
 
I don’t recognise the part where he doesn’t praise us. He’s done it plenty of times. He even said the other night about this team giving him some of the best nights of his life.
 
I'm not saying he's never done it, hence the "too often" (i.e.not always) reference. What I'm saying is that his ratio of criticism to praise is too high. We don't deserve a lot of praise at the moment but Carra's been at it from well before our current poor run.
 
I dunno, he praised us loads for the first two thirds of the season last season. We just don’t pay attention to it as much. People naturally remember bad things being said rather than good things.
 
I think he does both, but the issue I have with him, Neville and the rest of the pundits is that the narrative changes after each game. Win a game and you're back. Lose a game and its a crisis. Its always the last result that dictates the outburst to get as many clicks/views as possible. I get it as its what sells and you need to perform for an audience.

All in all its better not to listen or watch it.
 
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