The Brendan Rodgers Thread
Discussion
hornetrider said:
Welcome back Horney 
I'm sure he's not as upset about it as you are Black can man said:
hornetrider said:
Welcome back Horney 
hornetrider said:
Black can man said:
hornetrider said:
Welcome back Horney hornetrider said:
Black can man said:
hornetrider said:
Welcome back Horney Thank goodness you are back.
hornetrider said:
I do like our new manager.
I've yet to see BR the manager. I've seen enough and read enough by him and about him to agree that he's at least a competent coach, as in someone that gets the team playing football. But a manager, not yet, he's been found wanting managing us off the pitch and more importantly found wanting on the pitch. A coach can get us playing stylish football. A manager will get us winning. Of course it's early days etc etc. But for me first and foremost the manager's role is to get us to win games. He's clearly picked the PR stuff off Mourinho though, I'm just hopeful he's also picked up that winning is more important than style of play.
Er...oddly enough Brendan Rodgers turns up quite a lot in this new documentary. A link to the first ep is here. Not sure what its about but he does appear a lot...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuF3MRj7JJ0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuF3MRj7JJ0
Flip Martian said:
Er...oddly enough Brendan Rodgers turns up quite a lot in this new documentary. A link to the first ep is here. Not sure what its about but he does appear a lot...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuF3MRj7JJ0
Already gone - was it a hooky copy of the new documentary?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuF3MRj7JJ0
It was blimey, I only finished watching it half an hour ago...
Worth watching. No great revelations or flashpoints in the first ep. BR has a very nice house though and walking towards his black porsche in the Melwood car park he does smirk a bit and admit he was "lucky the club supply me with a very nice car"... And Lucas' house seems a lot smaller (and to be honest, quite "normal" looking).
Worth watching. No great revelations or flashpoints in the first ep. BR has a very nice house though and walking towards his black porsche in the Melwood car park he does smirk a bit and admit he was "lucky the club supply me with a very nice car"... And Lucas' house seems a lot smaller (and to be honest, quite "normal" looking).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/1...
My heart sank. Not another gargantuan report on another debacle in the state's guardianship of the public realm. Not hundreds more witnesses, thousands more pages and millions more pounds on lawyers, all to a chorus of righteous outrage from that proxy of postmodern democracy, the public inquiry.
Then I read the report itself, on the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. We knew the half of it. An inquest followed by two judicial inquiries had already related what happened that fatal Sheffield afternoon when 96 people died after going to a football match. This report tells us far more. It tells us what happened next: the cover-up, the lies, the botched inquiries, and the attempts to make amends. It is a grim textbook in modern British government.
The panel that produced it is described as "independent". But were the original coroner and divisional appeal judge not independent, or the inquiries by Lord Justice Taylor (1990) and Lord Justice Stuart-Smith (1998)? What of the Home Office and its boss, Jack Straw, who concluded on receiving Stuart-Smith that, "there is no basis for a further public inquiry … for a renewed application to quash the verdict of the inquest"? And what of parliament, which agreed with him?
This new panel was set up entirely as a result of campaigning by the bereaved families. It was conducted not by a judge but by the bishop of Liverpool, helped by a diverse group of academics and journalists. It did not proceed "judicially" but by investigation. It did not hold grand hearings, like Lord Justice Leveson, with highly paid lawyers and star witnesses showing off before cameras. It dug into archives, examined documents, respected privacy, met and talked to individuals. It was exemplary.
Yet even this report pulls punches. It reveals the conduct of the South Yorkshire police but does not delve into the causes of its culture of conspiracy and deceit. It did not trespass on the apparent immunity of the police service to wider accountability. Nor did it discuss the failure of coroners, judges, politicians and home secretaries to respond to the clearly justified pleas of the victims' families. The scandal is not just what happened at Hillsborough. For its negligence and incompetence, it was an accident. The scandal is the passage of 23 years since then, which was deliberate. That clearly needs further action.
The impression of Hillsborough is of government not as a rational process but as a series of lurches between disaster and response. The country seems to have reverted to pre-parliamentary days, when the lord chancellor and judges alone ruled the land from the king's bench. It is a historic irony that this time the judges have been taught a lesson, not by anyone elected but by one of their medieval confreres, a bishop.
Inquiries are gradually lifting responsibility for errors of government from the shoulders of ministers. They anaesthetise responsibility and hand it back detoxified. Politics has found a way of shifting, delaying and diluting blame. It happened over Bloody Sunday, arms-for-Iraq, the death of David Kelly, the Potters Bar and Ladbroke Grove rail crashes, the Shipman murders, phone-hacking, childcare deaths and urban riots. It is even happening over airports.
The outcome is either no action, as government goes inert for the duration, or a later kneejerk overreaction. Every health service tragedy means an inquiry and then a torrent of Whitehall risk aversion, form filling and bureaucracy. The Soham murders led to a fifth of all adults reportedly in need of criminal record checks. The high costs (and thus high fares) of trains has been attributed to the 91 recommendations of the Hidden report on the 1988 Clapham rail crash.
The Hillsborough report should lead to a reform of coroners courts, which, like other courts, seem immune to criticism or self-discipline. That a coroner could declare "everyone dead" at 3.15 on the fatal afternoon was bizarre enough, but that a divisional court declined to overrule it was more so. Two senior judges then blinded themselves to police malpractice, as if that were a contradiction in terms. But will anything change? In Britain's adversarial justice system, there is no lobby for the truth.
Whenever these scandals erupt, those in charge always claim that "lessons have been learned" and things have moved on. Yet the same defensive arrogance as was shown by the South Yorkshire police was apparent over the deaths of Ian Tomlinson in the G20 riots in 2009, and of Mark Duggan before the 2011 riots. Control of the police service is now so centralised that it answers only to the home secretary, which means to no one. The police in England and Wales are effectively privatised to the Police Federation.
The coalition wants to meet this challenge with elected police commissioners. The ambition is commendable. Accountability for police performance must "bite" somewhere. Nor should this refer only to policy. Police lobbyists cannot demand protection for "operational decisions". What else is accountability for if not to explain the handling of Hillsborough or the riots? Whether commissioners are the way to deliver this is moot. Why cities should be forced to elect police commissioners but not mayors is a mystery. In most countries civic government, like national government, falls to an all-purpose democratic authority. Tony Blair's similar bid to "elect" his 2002 foundation hospital trusts was a fiasco of non-participation, and led to swift "producer capture", as did the Inner London Education Authority.
But any democracy is better than none. A Sheffield police commissioner would have at least some local case to answer after Hillsborough. Instead, accountability has been rendered by two judges, a bishop and a prime minister, whose "apology" for something that is nothing to do with him is meaningless.
My heart sank. Not another gargantuan report on another debacle in the state's guardianship of the public realm. Not hundreds more witnesses, thousands more pages and millions more pounds on lawyers, all to a chorus of righteous outrage from that proxy of postmodern democracy, the public inquiry.
Then I read the report itself, on the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. We knew the half of it. An inquest followed by two judicial inquiries had already related what happened that fatal Sheffield afternoon when 96 people died after going to a football match. This report tells us far more. It tells us what happened next: the cover-up, the lies, the botched inquiries, and the attempts to make amends. It is a grim textbook in modern British government.
The panel that produced it is described as "independent". But were the original coroner and divisional appeal judge not independent, or the inquiries by Lord Justice Taylor (1990) and Lord Justice Stuart-Smith (1998)? What of the Home Office and its boss, Jack Straw, who concluded on receiving Stuart-Smith that, "there is no basis for a further public inquiry … for a renewed application to quash the verdict of the inquest"? And what of parliament, which agreed with him?
This new panel was set up entirely as a result of campaigning by the bereaved families. It was conducted not by a judge but by the bishop of Liverpool, helped by a diverse group of academics and journalists. It did not proceed "judicially" but by investigation. It did not hold grand hearings, like Lord Justice Leveson, with highly paid lawyers and star witnesses showing off before cameras. It dug into archives, examined documents, respected privacy, met and talked to individuals. It was exemplary.
Yet even this report pulls punches. It reveals the conduct of the South Yorkshire police but does not delve into the causes of its culture of conspiracy and deceit. It did not trespass on the apparent immunity of the police service to wider accountability. Nor did it discuss the failure of coroners, judges, politicians and home secretaries to respond to the clearly justified pleas of the victims' families. The scandal is not just what happened at Hillsborough. For its negligence and incompetence, it was an accident. The scandal is the passage of 23 years since then, which was deliberate. That clearly needs further action.
The impression of Hillsborough is of government not as a rational process but as a series of lurches between disaster and response. The country seems to have reverted to pre-parliamentary days, when the lord chancellor and judges alone ruled the land from the king's bench. It is a historic irony that this time the judges have been taught a lesson, not by anyone elected but by one of their medieval confreres, a bishop.
Inquiries are gradually lifting responsibility for errors of government from the shoulders of ministers. They anaesthetise responsibility and hand it back detoxified. Politics has found a way of shifting, delaying and diluting blame. It happened over Bloody Sunday, arms-for-Iraq, the death of David Kelly, the Potters Bar and Ladbroke Grove rail crashes, the Shipman murders, phone-hacking, childcare deaths and urban riots. It is even happening over airports.
The outcome is either no action, as government goes inert for the duration, or a later kneejerk overreaction. Every health service tragedy means an inquiry and then a torrent of Whitehall risk aversion, form filling and bureaucracy. The Soham murders led to a fifth of all adults reportedly in need of criminal record checks. The high costs (and thus high fares) of trains has been attributed to the 91 recommendations of the Hidden report on the 1988 Clapham rail crash.
The Hillsborough report should lead to a reform of coroners courts, which, like other courts, seem immune to criticism or self-discipline. That a coroner could declare "everyone dead" at 3.15 on the fatal afternoon was bizarre enough, but that a divisional court declined to overrule it was more so. Two senior judges then blinded themselves to police malpractice, as if that were a contradiction in terms. But will anything change? In Britain's adversarial justice system, there is no lobby for the truth.
Whenever these scandals erupt, those in charge always claim that "lessons have been learned" and things have moved on. Yet the same defensive arrogance as was shown by the South Yorkshire police was apparent over the deaths of Ian Tomlinson in the G20 riots in 2009, and of Mark Duggan before the 2011 riots. Control of the police service is now so centralised that it answers only to the home secretary, which means to no one. The police in England and Wales are effectively privatised to the Police Federation.
The coalition wants to meet this challenge with elected police commissioners. The ambition is commendable. Accountability for police performance must "bite" somewhere. Nor should this refer only to policy. Police lobbyists cannot demand protection for "operational decisions". What else is accountability for if not to explain the handling of Hillsborough or the riots? Whether commissioners are the way to deliver this is moot. Why cities should be forced to elect police commissioners but not mayors is a mystery. In most countries civic government, like national government, falls to an all-purpose democratic authority. Tony Blair's similar bid to "elect" his 2002 foundation hospital trusts was a fiasco of non-participation, and led to swift "producer capture", as did the Inner London Education Authority.
But any democracy is better than none. A Sheffield police commissioner would have at least some local case to answer after Hillsborough. Instead, accountability has been rendered by two judges, a bishop and a prime minister, whose "apology" for something that is nothing to do with him is meaningless.
A good article. The institutional failings around the aftermath are absolutely widespread, and the issues so huge it is impossible to know where to start with them. I think we are now at the beginning of a process where the individuals concerned will face the consequences of their actions.
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