EPL Talk recently had the chance to interview one of the Liverpool legends, Jan Molby, when he was in New York City to attend an event sponsored by the Liverpool FC New York Supporters Club.

Jan Molby was a legend at Liverpool and played at the club from 1984 to 1996, making more than 211 appearances in the red and white. At the Reds, he won two league titles, two FA Cups and three Charity Shields. Before joining Liverpool, Molby played at Ajax alongside Johan Cruyff.

During the interview, I asked Jan several questions about topics including:

• Why Liverpool is in such poor and inconsistent form this season,
• What it was like to play alongside Johan Cruyff,
• His memories of the first Liverpool FC match he played,
• Whether he sees parallels between the way that Ajax played and how Arsenal play now,
• His memories of that wonderful goal for Liverpool against Manchester United in the 1985 Milk Cup,
• The rivalry between Denmark and Holland – who will be facing each other in World Cup 2010,
• Favorite memories of Kenny Dalglish,
• And much more.

Thanks to the Liverpool FC New York Supporters Club for making the interview possible. If you’re a Reds fan and you live in the northeast United States, learn more about joining the club at http://lfcny.org. And no matter where you live in the world, be sure to check out their highly-recommended podcast, MP Red, which includes a feature-length interview with Molby.

Don’t forget that the EPL Talk Podcast is the only Premier League interview and analysis podcast available for free. In the past few weeks, we’ve interviewed legends of the game such as Steve McManaman, Efan Ekoku, Martin Chivers and Robbie Earle as well as experts such as Declan Hill, Simon Kuper, Misha Sher, Matt Dickinson and many others. Why pay $40 a year to rival podcasts when you can subscribe to the EPL Talk Podcast for FREE featuring interviews with the biggest names in football?

Jan Molby is a player that I have a lot of time for. The Danish footballer was a maestro in midfield. While he’s best remembered as being a pivotal player for Liverpool during his time there between 1984 and 1996, he has a special place in my heart for being a pioneer with the club I support, Swansea City, where he introduced a beautiful style of play as player manager which laid the groundwork for Roberto Martinez’s arrival, much later, in 2007.

Judging by Molby’s artistry on the pitch with Liverpool and Swansea, it’s no surprise then that Molby’s early part of his career included two years playing with Ajax where he won the Dutch Championship in 1983 and played in the Ajax youth academy alongside Marco van Basten, Frank Rijkaard and Jesper Olsen. For those of you who had a chance to watch him play, either in person or on television, there was something magical about the way he played and how adept he was at passing the ball. To see just one example of his skill, watch the video above.

Fortunately for us, Molby will be visiting the United States next month where he’ll be making an appearance in New York City on December 19, 2009 at the 11th Street Bar. Molby will be available to sign autographs and memorabilia, as well as to pose for photographs. If you’re interested in attending or want to learn more details, visit the Liverpool FC New York Supporters Club website. Tickets to the Jan Molby appearance are $20 and tickets are limited, so sign up today if you want to meet the legend.

What the hell is going on at Portsmouth? Despite Sulaiman Al Fayed passing the fit and proper persons test that the Premier League subjected him to, he’s still not completed the takeover at Fratton Park. The fans of Pompey deserve better than this, it’s not fair and it’s getting beyond a joke. The club has had no additional finances for over 9 months now from current owner Alexandre Gaydamak, so desperate is he to recoup his overall investment.

Perhaps someone should point out to him that you get a lot less for a team that is either in the Championship or nothing for a team in administration. Portsmouth are clinging to the cliff edge by their fingernails and unless the deal gets sorted immediately, they are in serious trouble of lasting until the transfer window shuts.

On May 17th 2008, Portsmouth fielded the following side in the F.A. Cup final; James, Johnson, Hreidarsson, Distin, Campbell, Utaka, Mendes, Diarra, Kranjcar, Muntari, Kanu. Subs: Ashdown, Paramot, Diop, Nugent, Baros. Of that match day squad, 10 still remain at the club with another 8 who were either not at the club or unable to play that day, which swells the ranks to 18 first team players.

The Premiership season starts in 11 days and at this moment in time, it has now become clear that there is no guarentee that how many more of the remaining squad members will still be there come 3pm on the 15th when they face Fulham. That is unacceptable for Portsmouth’s fans, who always seem to be the last to know anything these days.

The protracted takeover for the club by Sulaiman Al Fayed has still not been completed and today the club inadvertently revealed the financial woes that the club faces. There’s nothing worse than sending a confidential e-mail to suddenly realise it’s become major sporting news.  Portsmouth’s Chief Executive Peter Storrie has opened a can of worms this evening after such a scenario revealed the state of Pompey’s financial woes. Storrie’s e-mail stated that “The business has debts to pay and the banks are not releasing funds, so this leaves the club with no option but to sell to keep going.”

Yesterday, I looked at the expectations we often place on international football. This got me thinking about the Dutch and their legendary Total Football era in the 70s. What does this mean to us today? Does Cruyff’s legacy still influence world football?

What do we want from our football?

The Spain/South Africa match was on the television at the bar. Villa scored his ridiculous goal: collecting the ball cleanly on his chest, dropping it to his foot and slicing it home as the defenders converged on him. An impossible chance converted through pure athletic instinct.

I turned to the beautiful girl next to me and said, “Did you see that strike??” I think I was praying she’d turn out to be closet football fan. Villa’s goal would give me the opening to ask her to dinner. We’d be talking transfer rumors over antipasti. Yes: this is how my mind works…

She smiled politely. “I don’t really follow sports,” she said, crushing my plans.

“It’s not just a sport,” I offered, clinging to a wisp of romantic hope. “It’s an art form!” She raised her eyebrows with interest. But in the end, despite a spirited description of Villa’s movements as brush strokes on a canvas, I could not sell football to her.

What I needed was a classic Ajax or Holland match from the 70s. What I needed was a Cruyff Turn. What I needed was Total Football.

The dream of beautiful football is an old one. It can push the blood through our circulatory tunnels as much as a last minute winner in a tight cup win. Thirty years ago, Ajax and the Netherlands national team gave the gift of Total Football to the world. Endless improvisation and invention. Outfielders shifting between all the positions. Flowing movement. An open game. Dazzling individual skill married with deep team chemistry. The Dutch gave birth to some of the most exciting football ever.

The teams and the concept were built around Johan Cruyff, often credited with being the greatest player to never have won a World Cup. Cruyff’s boundless inventiveness and liquid style was an inspiration to his teammates as well as generations of footballers since.

The idea of Total Football is still exciting. Any outfielder ready to shift into a different position at any time. Defenders becoming attackers. Strikers defending. Midfielders shifting all over the place. Whatever the situation needs. Like jazz players weaving lines of notes around each other to push the song on its mysterious journey.

The Dutch still love the philosophy of Total Football and, today, it permeates their footballing culture. Barcelona (who enjoyed Cruyff’s talents from 1973 until 1978) show the heritage in their flowing, veritable everybody-attack-but-the-keeper mentality which helped them win the triple last season. We even see glimpses of it in the modern Premier League. Players shifting roles when the moment calls for it. The free-flowing approach Arsene Wenger likes to employ with Arsenal may be the closest thing to Total Football in today’s English game. This harks back to Nick Hornby’s description of Arsenal in 1972 in the chapter entitled “A New Family” in his fine book Fever Pitch:

Over the summer of 1972, things changed. Arsenal, the most British (that is to say, dourest and most aggressive) team you could imagine, went all continental on us, and for half a dozen games at the start of the 72/73 season decided to play Total Football…

Everything about the Wolves game was disorienting – the five goals, the quality of passing (Alan Ball was outstanding), the purr of the crowd, the genuine enthusiasm of a normally hostile press.

By the end of the chapter, Arsenal revert back to their “dourest and most aggressive” nature, but Hornby captures the seductiveness of Total Football. You feel he was taken in, albeit bewildered, by Arsenal’s brief adoption of this football philosophy. Years later, Wenger would build a more “continental” side.

When it works it is beautiful to behold. When it doesn’t the players can be punished for being out of position by piercing counterattacks. Total Football cannot work in its purest state (that of the Cruyff era) in today’s Premier League. No one side has enough players bursting with the wholesale versatility Ajax and Holland were known for in the 70s. Today, in England, it would leave too many gaps for a patient foe to exploit.  But when an English side flirts with Total Football, slides into the mentality in brief moments, the aesthetic rewards for the supporter are enormous. The striker who steams back to help the defense. The centre-back who explodes forth and takes a shot on goal. The attacking full-back who jets down the wing to send in a cross.When the attacks come off right, the beautiful, risky nature of such movement is thrilling. When it comes to goals as well, there’s no better moment in football.

The Dutch Masters of the 70s never won a World Cup or the Euro. Total Football took their national team to the 1974 World Cup final, but they lost to host nation West Germany 2-1. Nevertheless, they went down in that final playing the most beautiful game. The mark that Dutch era left on football and the world of sport is forever indelible.

Total Football lives on here and there. A joy to find when it rears its beautiful head.

The Kids Are Our Future

Football loves dominant sides.

Think of Herbert Chapman’s Arsenal of the 1920s, ravaging England with the WM formation; Real Madrid of the early days of the European Cup, with Alfredo di Stefano and Ferenc Puskas wreaking havoc on unsuspecting continental champions; Liverpool getting comfy on their “fucking perch,” winning four European cups in the span of seven years in the late seventies and early eighties; AC Milan’s post-Berlusconi Dutch delight in the mid to late eighties and early nineties.  Dominant sides measure the development of the game as winning ways switch from country to country, club to club.

The Manchester United of recent years are certainly worthy of inclusion among the clubs mentioned above, but as the Premier League trophies pile up, the FA Cup loses its sheen, and England’s footballing strength gets more and more concentrated in the hands of the wealthy few, so grows United’s sense of entitlement.  There were several signs of this today when Manchester United defeated its City rivals to all but secure a record 18th league title, what should have been a moment of team solidarity.  Certainly Ronaldo whingeing like a git after getting subbed off at the sixtieth minute didn’t exactly inspire, but when Tevez somehow found an ‘I’ in team after scoring United’s second goal, cupping his ears in delight at the director’s box with whom is at odds over his future at the club, it was hard to imagine the neutral giving a round of applause to the nearly-champions.

Compare these antics to Barcelona, United’s competition in the Champions League final and a team seemingly reborn under the youthful tutelage of Pep Guardiola. After a hard-fought two leg enterprise against Chelsea, a club that represents for many over-moneyed and overly-negative English football (and who also drew comparisons to Man United in last year’s CL semi final), Barcelona came out as moral (and actual) victors.  Barcelona seem victors in the image department as well: sponsor-less for years, the Catalan club sport UNICEF on their shirts (compared to Man United, sponsored by a failed American investment conglomerate).  All this means the Anyone But United crowd will likely be joined by a fair share of footballing neutrals on May 27th.  To that end, it’s a shame United’s younger players didn’t show a little more respect to the notion of “team first” today.

Of course no one could argue that arrogance and individualism don’t play a large measure in winning sides; one need only think of Cruiff at Ajax or Giuseppe Meazza at Inter Milan (the latter famously showed up still drunk from carousing the night before, only to score three goals).  The difference is that for many, United represent the worst effects of neoliberal commercialization in the Premier League, the pushing of product, the prawn sandwiches, United shirts on sale at Reebok next to the sweatshop shoes.  Tevez using his considerable skills in an effort to raise his stock price, and Ronaldo disrespecting his manager and his teammates by throwing a tantrum after a brilliant performance (Ferguson shrugged it off to the media, and with four points to win in three games to secure the title, no wonder)—actions that reduce the game to what Eduardo Galeno called a “showcase of commercial exhibition”—don’t help Manchester United’s image problem.

United’s younger players would do well to help keep their self-interested gait off the pitch, and start acting in ways worthy of the champions they are now almost certain to become.  Lord knows the ABU crowd don’t need any more help than Ronaldo has already given them.

Could Manchester City finally put their 33 year major trophy drought to bed this season by winning the UEFA Cup this season? Why not, what  with Ajax crashing out last night at the hands of Marseille and Zenit St Petersburg and CSKA Moscow losing today, the competition for the trophy is getting into the nitty gritty stage and it seems to be opening up for City. Mark Hughes side has been wildly inconsistent, putting 6 past Portsmouth and 5 past Hull City, but dumped out of the League Cup by Brighton on penalties and were humiliated at home 3-0 by Nottingham Forest in the F.A. Cup but they’ve been impressive in the UEFA Cup both at home and abroad this season. With only one away win in the league, it’s been a strange season for the City faithful.

Tonight they travel to Northern Jutland to face Aalborg with a 2-0 lead and a chance to move into the Quarter Finals for a real crack at the trophy. Yet, Manchester City have a history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory which is unparalled in English Football that has seen their fans develop a very healthy ability to laugh at themselves. Surely this could be their season to finally put a proper smile on faces of the City faithful? It’s certainly a weaker UEFA Cup than it could have been with AC Milan, Aston Villa, Tottenham, Fiorentina, Bordeaux and Valencia all being removed from the competition before we even reached the last 16.I don’t think Mark Hughes will be upset to see any of those sides out at all. Their first 11 is certainly as good as some of the remaining teams in the competition, maybe one of the best, so it’s not impossible to imagine City lifting the trophy in Turkey on May 20th.

City though have perhaps received a little too much stick this season for me. Sure they’ve become the richest club in the world but it’s still a transitional season for them. Thankfully for us, Chief Executive Gary Cook seems to have kept a very low profile after his rather childish comments about AC Milan and Kaka in January, which is a blessing for us all. His rather acidic nature and bombastic attitude doesn’t sit well people and attracts as much criticism as it deserves, but Hughes has also had a fair amount of flak, unfairly I feel. It’s a learning curve for everyone at Manchester City, ever since the Robinho signing, they’ve suddenly moved onto a different level but they’ve got their best chance of some serious silverware for a long time in the UEFA Cup.

If they can negotiate tonight’s away leg, which knowing City, is no forgone conclusion, then the key teams to avoid are Werder Bremen and whoever wins in the tie of the round, Galatasaray v SV Hamburg. Martin Jol’s team have a lot to do and need to score in Turkey tonight to have any chance to get through but if they do, then they’ll become the favourite for the cup. If City can avoid those teams, then reaching the final becomes a realistic proposition for Mark Hughes. I hope they do get there, he’s dealt with rumour and counter rumour all season with supreme patience, fending questions about his future, transfers, ongoing issues with certain big name players and the change in expectations once Manchester City were ought by the Abu Dhabi United Group, with courtesy.He deserves a bit of luck after everything that’s been thrown at him throughout the season.

I wish them all the best in Europe and hope we get a Hamburg and Manchester City final for the last ever UEFA Cup final before we welcome the Europa League next season.

When the season began, few people would have given Wigan Athletic a snowball’s chance in hell of finishing in the top ten, never mind pushing on the brink of European Football as January almost comes to a close. After a fantastic first season under Paul Jewell in 2005-2006, which saw them finish in 10th place and then a nerve wracking final day survival by winning at Sheffield United to stay up on goal difference. Last season saw them struggle to cope after Paul Jewell walked away and Chris Hutchings paid the ultimate price after trying to fill his mentors boots again after unsuccessfully trying to follow him at Bradford City and Dave Whelan was left facing a major decision in who to turn to in order to keep Wigan Athletic in the Premiership. Thankfully for Dave Whelan, Steve Bruce was having a terrible time at Birmingham City and desperate to get away from the boardroom infighting and aborted takeover from Carson Yeung. It was in no small part to the laughable attempt at a takeover from Yeung that benefited Wigan Athletic but also, in my opinion, saw Birmingham relegated. Yeung’s statements that he wanted to get Birmingham into the Champions League certainly raised a smile on most football fans faces, especially Wigan Athletic’s once Bruce came back to the JJB Stadium in November 2007.

In the 14 months since Bruce returned for his second spell in Lancashire, Wigan have stabilised, survived and pushed on as Bruce looked to add some flair to the qualities that Wigan already had in their squad with players like Chris Kirkland, Emile Heske, Antonio Valencia and Mario Melchiot giving him an experienced and talented spine to add to. His two signings last January,Palacios and Figueroa certainly raised some eyebrows, but now no-one is in any doubt about the qualities of those two players. The duo certainly began to make certain other clubs wonder why their scouting networks couldn’t pick up these bargains and now with the sale of Palacios to Tottenham for £13 million, a fantastic piece of business for Bruce and Wigan. For whatever reasons Bruce has excelled at picking up some fantastic players for peanuts in his time at the JJB Stadium.

The fee for Palacios, coupled with the the money raised from the sales of Heskey and Kilbane has begun to allow Bruce a chance to build his Wigan Athletic. Crucial to this is the intriguing signing of Mido from Middlesborough and Bruce’s options of playing the Egyptian national side’s striking superstars week in, week out. Mido is a player so frustratingly talented, yet wildly inconsistent that Bruce is going to need every ounce of managerial nous to deal with him but Mido finally needs to stop acting like a primadonna to finally deliver on his natural talent.

At 25 years of age, he is now with his 9th club which should tell you all you need to know about his motivation issues and with a career that has seen him play in 7 different countries, banned from his national side after an amazing touchline argument with his national manager in the Semi Final of the African Nations Cup in 2006, numerous red cards, driving bans, alleged scissor throwing incidents at Ajax and so on. Wigan have made steady progress this year and Bruce tried to sign Mido whilst he was still at Birmingham City so he certainly seems to be keen on the striker. Perhaps Bruce is banking on Mido’s compatriot, Amr Zaki, to assist in getting the best out of the talismanic striker and if it pays off, Wigan Athletic will be a very different prospect to the one that faced sides prior to the transfer window opening.It is certainly an interesting replacement for Emile Heskey.