Recently by Paul Grech

Strikers have it easy as far as the glory business is concerned. Score a goal late on and you're labelled a match winner, no matter what you've actually done throughout the game. In fact, it is even better if you've done absolutely nothing during the rest of the match "he'll be quite for ninety minutes and then he'll find a goal," they'll say "that's why he's a match winner".

Despite Gerard Houllier stocking so many of them, Liverpool haven't really had much luck with French players irrespective of whether they were club record buys (Djibril Cisse) or players brought in with an eye for the future (too many to mention).

There are two scenarios that normally come into play when a player enters the final six months of his contract: either panic because of the imminent loss of a player for free or else relief at the realisation that someone who wouldn't otherwise be shifted is about to leave.

Perhaps the most striking outcome of last season's FA Youth Cup final was just how stronger Arsenal's players were when compared to Liverpool's. It was, almost quite literally, men against boys and this played a huge part in the ease with which Arsenal won both legs of the final.

Book Review: The Secret Diary of a Liverpool Scout by Simon Hughes

Now this is an intriguing book. Whilst most of the key architects of Liverpools's lasting success over the four decades after Bill Shankly took over avtively shunned publicity, most were still pushed into the limelight.