Tom Hicks' next business venture

It is a bizarre feeling to know that the football team you support is scaling the heights of European success on the pitch, while the people entrusted to run it in the boardroom are acting more like spivs & snakes than responsible "custodians".

Just 42 hours after one of those legendary European nights at Anfield Tom Hicks wrote a letter to chief executive Rick Parry in which he called for his head (http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport/1/hi/football/teams/1/liverpool/7341190.stm ).

George Gillett, seeing his opportunity to garner further opposition to his one-time buddy, publicly sided with Parry (http://football.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/0,,2273064,00.html ).

Parry has been a less than adept Chief Executive in his eleven years at Anfield. He is remote, somewhat aloof & openly disdainful of the supporters' views. However, Parry's departure from the club should be at the behest of those supporters, not on the whim of a JR Ewing wannabe.

Those responsible for sanctioning the sale of the club to the gruesome twosome last year, Parry & former chairman David Moores, have been getting an attentive ear in the press over the last 72 hours. Parry's outlet was the Independent (http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/we-thought-they-might-fire-us-it-has-been-a-nightmare-ndash-a-dreadful-year-808222.html ):

"Parry revealed that Hicks and Gillette are now planning to enter a process of arbitration to resolve the impasse over the club's ownership....

It seems increasingly unlikely that Hicks will find the money to take control at Anfield-a move which, in Parry's words, would put himself 'out of the door'. There is no sign of the minority investors the Texan has said he has lined up and the publicity generated by his frequent statements are understood to have made some London financiers unwilling to get involved."

The scale of the damage which this farce has inflicted upon morale was reflected in the cancellation of the manager's weekly press briefing, the first time such a step has been taken in Rafa Benitez' four seasons at the club.

According to the Independent's piece, a showdown between Gillett & Parry on the one hand, & Ian Ayre, the club's commercial director who has sided with Hicks, on the other, prior to Tuesday's Champions League game is said to have moved Hicks to pen his letter:

"Some sources suggest that Tom Hicks jnr has been informing friends in Liverpool for the past six weeks that his father's camp wants Parry out."

Hicks jnr has friends in the city?! After his less than stellar attempt to win over the regulars in the Sandon on the 23rd of February?

Moores, for his part, has been blabbing to Tony Barrett in the Liverpool Echo. The stereotype of the lachrymose Liverpudlian is taken out for a good airing in Barrett's unctuous piece; it's little more than the kid-glove Echo treatment of a man who made £90m from the sale of the club last year (http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/local-news/2008/04/12/david-moores-i-m-shell-shocked-at-the-damage-being-done-to-liverpool-football-club-100252-20754770/ ):

"It is embarrassing and it is not an acceptable way of doing things."

Hmm, yes, and your point is, David?

"I didn't know Hicks very well. I knew George [Gillett] a lot better....

It was really right at the end that I met Tom Hicks so I didn't really get a chance to to get to know him but I took George's word for it."

So he "took George's word for it", did he? Is this the way Moores does business, on the say-so of someone else? Moores also vows to "do my damnedest" to help resolve the affair, but then contradicts himself in his next sentence when he admits, "It is not my club anymore."

No it isn't, David, & don't we just know it, eh?

Meanwhile, this is what it's supposed to be all about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NComhg_LWps .