This morning is the gift that keeps on giving. We arrived bleary-eyed to the office this morning, only to have eyelids jolted apart by the mother of all wars between Conor McGregor and Nate Diaz.
To add to our delight, we then checked our emails, and found this fantastic email sitting in our inbox.
If you read the site yesterday, you will have noticed that confirmation filtered through that Liverpool were, indeed, at it again. They followed up their wundervictory over Arsenal with a feeble 2-0 collapse away at Burnley. Particularly poor for Liverpool was Estonian centre-back Ragnar Klavan, who finished bottom of the pile in our player ratings.
Far from enthused with Klavan's performance was former Irish manager Brian Kerr, who was commentating on the game for Today FM.
Here are his words:
He actually played against the Faroes when I was with the Faroes, and I remember studying him before the matches and thinking he was a bit of a weak link. I never thought he was a fellow that would be playing for Liverpool in the Premier League.
We got three goals against him with the Faroes, and we'd a load of part-time lads.
A load of lads working in the fishing industry and so on. They were good enough to expose him.
Here's the audio in full:
This criticism has not gone down well in Estonia, and the press officer of the Estonian Football Association has emailed this website to correct Kerr on what they term as three inaccuracies. According to Mihkel Uiboleht (it's pronounced as it reads), Klavan did not play against Kerr's Faroes at all. Here's his response in full:
Dear Sir, I saw this article: http://www.balls.ie/football/ragnar-klavan-liverpool-brian-kerr/343511
Mr Kerr is quoted here: "He actually played against the Faroes when I was with the Faroes, and I remember studying him before the matches and thinking he was a bit of a weak link. I never thought he was a fellow that would be playing for Liverpool in the Premier League. We got three goals against him with the Faroes, and we'd a load of part-time lads. A load of lads working in the fishing industry and so on. They were good enough to expose him."
There are three big mistakes in these quotes: 1) Faroe Island have never scored three goals against Estonia as claimed. They scored two; 2) In that game when Mr Kerr was coaching Faroe Islands and they scored two goals (07.06.2011), Klavan did not play.
Match sheet can be found on Estonian FA website: http://jalgpall.ee/protocol.php?st=style_fp.css&nteam_id=1&proto=509&game=423; 3) Mistake number two means that the last sentence "A load of lads working in the fishing industry and so on. They were good enough to expose him." is not true as Klavan did not play in that match.
Thank you in advance for correcting these mistakes!
Best regards, Mihkel Uiboleht Estonian Football Association Media Officer
Klavan did play for Estonia against Kerr's Faroe Islands team in 2010: a game in which Estonia won 2-1.
There you go, then. Klavan is a bit of a hero in Estonia: he has played 112 times for the national side, and was Estonia's player of the year in 2012, 2014, and 2015.
Klavan did look reasonably solid in pre-season for Liverpool, but with Joel Matip and Mamadou Sakho brooding on the sidelines in the aftermath of the Burnley Nightmare, he may find a first-team place hard to nail down in future.
