🟥 Emlyn Hughes: A Legacy Liverpool Must Bring Home
James Pearce’s article in The Athletic this morning, revealing that Emlyn Hughes’ extraordinary collection of medals, shirts and memorabilia is going to auction, stirred something in me.
Emlyn, affectionately nicknamed 'Crazy Horse' by The Kop, left Liverpool when I was three years old. I have no memories of watching him play. Yet he sits alongside Kevin Keegan as the only two players in my all-time Liverpool top ten whom I never saw live.
My first introduction to Emlyn was as a captain on A Question of Sport* It was only later, watching the John Motson narrated History of Liverpool FC in the 1980s, that I began to appreciate the magnitude of the man.
Watch the old footage. That boundless, box-to-box energy, the skill, the infectious enthusiasm, the sheer determination. There was something of the Steven Gerrard that a later generation would come to worship.
Listen to Shankly and Paisley speak about him. Hear the admiration of his teammates. Watch his interviews, that wonderful humour, warmth and commanding presence. Here was a man you would willingly follow into battle and beyond.
Four league titles, two European Cups, 665 appearances. Liverpool's first captain to lift European football's greatest prize.
He was taken at just 57. Far, far too young.
His family understandably want these treasures shared with the world. What better place than Anfield?
With the collection expected to fetch over £500,000, I believe Liverpool FC should purchase it in its entirety and give it pride of place in the Anfield museum.
Every generation of Liverpool players walk in the footsteps of giants like Emlyn Hughes.
Our club should ensure those footsteps are never forgotten.
Would you like to see #LFC buy the entire collection?
Stevie Nicks broke up with Lindsey Buckingham, then she wrote a song about it, and made him sing the song while Buckingham's wife was in the audience.
That's why they think they're each others musical soulmate.
"That is an absolutely DISGRACEFUL decision, that has been SWEPT under the CARPET!" 🫣
48 hours on from Manchester City's 3-0 win over Liverpool, Mark still can't BELIEVE Gravenberch was shown a second yellow and how there's NOT MORE people speaking about it! 👀
Should Gravenberch have been sent off? 👇
Five games, five wins, top of the league. Manchester City, a fortnight after an independent commission found they systematically broke the Premier League's financial rules for nine straight seasons.
So what exactly are we all watching?
Not asking for the season to be scrapped. That's daft, and it punishes nineteen clubs who've done nowt wrong. But I'd like somebody at the Premier League to explain why the table at the top of every sports page is one they already know is wrong.
Because here's where we actually are. The commission has ruled. City lodged their appeal on October 1st. No sanction has been announced. Nobody knows when it will be. Sky are reporting that Premier League clubs themselves don't expect City to even BE in this league next season if the appeal fails.
And in the meantime, the league just carries on. Points are awarded. Positions are published. Clubs are planning January windows around a table that might be fiction.
Think about who that actually hurts. Not City, they're fine, they're top. It's the club that goes down in May by two points and later finds out the table was never real. It's the club that sacks a manager in February over a league position that gets rewritten. It's the staff at a relegated club losing their jobs over a season nobody can stand behind. Real money, real people, decided by a table the league itself can't vouch for.
And the bit that genuinely sticks in the throat. Everton got docked ten points, mid season, reduced to six. Forest got four. Both for single PSR breaches. Both punished DURING the season it mattered, so the table stayed honest.
Eighty charges over nine seasons, plus thirty five for refusing to cooperate with the investigation into it, and somehow that one has to wait.
Carragher's right. Do it this season. Whatever it is, apply it now, to this table, the way it was applied to Everton and Forest. Because every week this drags on, the Premier League is asking us to treat a standings table as real while quietly knowing it might not be.
Due process matters and the appeal has to be heard, I'm not arguing with that. But there's a difference between due process and letting a club sit top of a competition for an entire season while the punishment for breaking that competition's rules sits in a drawer.
The league's credibility isn't damaged by what City did ten years ago. It's damaged by what the league is choosing to do about it now.
Nine seasons. Then three years of charges. Then a verdict. And still, somehow, nothing.
Who's season is this, exactly? 🖤🖤
#PremierLeague#MCFC
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