Hicks Tricks Ricks

Hicks Junior was clearly absent when the customer care seminar was held at Anfield. If he had been there he might have picked up a couple of do’s and dont’s. In the latter category calling a supporter fuckface would have been fairly high up the list. He also must have missed the bit about “the customer is always right” and treat everyone with due respect.

The Hicks family were not exactly flavour of the month on Merseyside beforehand and young Hicks has not helped their cause. One can only shiver at the reaction of a Shankly or Paisley to such crass insensitivity, stupidity, idiocy. Such a situation would have been inconceivable a few decades when football club board members were at best anonymous, and only the chairman had any visibility.

So the new world order in English football sees more and more high profile foreign raiders muscling in on a game that used to be the preserve of the working class fans and middle class owners. Only Randy Lerner, the wonderfully named but low key, Aston Villa chairman has managed to make a positive impact compared to the debt-guzzling Glazers or the ham-fisted Hicks.

But in the end does it really matter who owns our club? Of course ownership doesn’t matter per se but as finances play an increasingly bigger part in the running of the clubs, then the liquidity and leverage quotients do begin to creep into pre-match chat in the pubs around Fratton Park and beyond.

So now we have reached the point where balance sheets mean more than clean sheets then maybe it’s time, as Hicks Jnr PR might have put it, to tell football “to go to hell”.