To say Liverpool defender Paul Konchesky is having an awful season would be an understatement. Liverpool are a flaming bag of crap but he stands out even more than the team as a whole. How bad is it? His mom is showing more fire and passion than he has all season. Two problems. She’s doing it on Facebook and she’s talking shit about Liverpool and its supporters.

Carol Konchesky took her Facebook page down after posting a status update ripping the team and its fans.

Konchesky took offense to comments made about her son by fans after he had another shit game against Stoke. She decided to respond via a Facebook status update. Let’s just say she didn’t hold back.

It takes next to nothing to set Scousers off on indignant rants and robbing sprees. This situation was no different. Konchesky was forced to take her page down after angry fans started bombarding it with what I’m sure were calm, logical responses.

One person had a reasonable response to Konchesky’s comments.

Les Lawson, secretary of the Official Liverpool FC Supporters’ Club, said: ‘Comments like that are deeply unhelpful and extremely disappointing.

‘We Liverpudlians have been called worse in our time but the only person who is going to end up harmed by those comments in the long run is Paul Konchesky.’

Lawson is right. Konchesky is probably thankful this past weekend’s matches were snowed out. If he thinks he’s getting it bad now, just wait until the next match. His mother can forget going to any home matches. If there’s one thing Liverpool fans do besides steal, it’s never forget to remind you of any perceived injustice. Best of luck to the Koncheskys. They’re going to need it.

“Soccer style football legend, UK captain of the national team and the Manchester Red Devils Raoul Ferdinand” is pushing SoccerXizer machines here in the US. You won’t normally find us giving props to anything Manchester United related but this is brilliant.

It’s Brian Giggs approved!

H/T to 3 PM Extra

His father is a drug dealer. His mother is a shoplifter. He’ll sleep with your woman. His brother will too except he’ll take it one step further and give it to her while you’re in the same house. It’s just another day for the Terry family.

Rushden and Diamonds keeper Dale Roberts hung himself months after his fiancée Lindsay Cowen left him for his former teammate, Paul Terry. Paul is the older brother of Chelsea and former England captain John Terry.

The affair took place earlier this year while Terry was staying with the couple.

Lindsey admitted the affair when a suspicious Dale confronted her at their home in Higham Ferrers, Northants. A source said: “Lindsey came out and told Dale what had been happening. He was horrified.

“Dale rang Paul and he denied everything but he’s admitted to other players that he’s been sleeping with her.”

Heartbroken Dale, 24, said yesterday: “It’s true, she told me she’d been seeing Paul.

“We’ve split up. I’m trying to get my head around it all, it’s only just happened. I’m a bit messed up.”

“It is bad enough she’s done it at all but the fact that it is with him, one of my team-mates, makes it that much harder to bear.”

Rushden and Diamonds was forced to release Terry after Roberts and the rest of the team refused to play with him.

Roberts fell into a deep depression and never recovered after Cowan left him. He was discovered in his house and word of his death spread quickly through the team. Rushden and Diamonds’ next two matches were called off and have yet to be rescheduled.

Cowan had the audacity to release a statement claiming that she was devastated over his death.

[She] described the 24 year-old as ”my childhood sweetheart and the love of my life”.

”We had been together since a young age and I will never get over his death.”

That should comfort Roberts’ parents and friends. If that’s how she treats the love of her life, I’d hate to see how she does her enemies. How about not fucking your finance’s friends and teammates?

Anything the Terry family touches is bound to be a disaster and I’m saying this as a long time Chelsea supporter. I’ll take John Terry in my back four but I’ll never turn my back on him or anyone else in his family. A friend of mine pointed out that he “causes more contagious misery than ebola”. She also noted that if you play Six Degrees of John Terry, you can link him to everything bad that happens in the world.

“John Terry works for Roman Abramovich…. who hangs out with Vladimir Putin…. who carpet bombed 200,000 Chechens to death. Oops looky there, only 3 degrees between JT and genocide.”

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is old and busted. Try it out. It’s scary how well the game works.

How about the softer side of Vladmir Putin? He can’t be killing all the time. Here he is chilling out with some friends and singing Blueberry Hill backed up by Maceo Parker. What? Exactly.

Photo: Graeme Truby/Pinnacle - Tel: +44(0)1363 881025 - Mobile:0797 1270 681 - VAT Reg No: 768 6958 48 - 14/09/2009 - SPORT - ENGLAND C - FOOTBALL - England C Training, Globall Football Park & Sporthotel, Telki, Hungary

It’s safe to say Dana White won’t be calling this assclown for a UFC fight anytime soon. Then again…

“Aw who’s the puppy for? Who? Hmmm … No dog for you!”

So much for having people pay more attention to his play on the field. Michael Vick confessed to wanting a new dog.

Vick sat down with NBC News and TheGrio.com and admitted he wanted a new dog to help with his “rehabilitation process”.

Vick said, “I would love to get another dog in the future. I think it would be a big step for me in the rehabilitation process.

“I think just to have a pet in my household and to show people that I genuinely care, and my love and my passion for animals; I think it would be outstanding. If I ever have the opportunity again I will never take it for granted. I miss having a dog right now. I wish I could. My daughters miss having one, and that’s the hardest thing: telling them that we can’t have one because of my actions.”

It’s like the Obama press conference where he was talking about health care and then decided to give his thoughts on Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s confrontation with the police. “No! Don’t go there! Not now! Aw damn, he went there…” Everyone forgot everything else he was talking about the rest of the time.

It probably isn’t the best time for Vick to bring up wanting a new dog. People have finally started to talk about him only in relation to his play on the field. He should stick to talking football and his work with animal rights organizations if the conversation goes there.

It’s almost impossible to have a rational conversation about Vick with “dog lovers”. As far as they’re concerned, Vick shouldn’t be allowed to have a career let alone walk the streets. It doesn’t matter to them that he served his time and has kept himself out of trouble since his release from jail. Any attempt to say otherwise means that you hate dogs or approve of what Vick did. That’s ridiculous. No sane person condones what Vick did. It was disgusting and horrible. He deserved to pay for what he did. He also deserves a second chance and it’s not up to any of us to determine what he should and shouldn’t be able to do as long as he keeps his nose clean. Fine. Dog catcher is out.

The debate over Vick goes to the larger question of what rights felons should have after their release from prison. If they serve their time, they should be given the chance to become productive members of society with the rights everyone else enjoys. The idea is that they’ve learned from their incarceration and are in the process of rehabilitation. The justice system fails inmates in numerous ways but people should be given the chance to show whether they’ve changed or not. Obviously there are exceptions and caveats but that conversation is for another day.

People can argue about whether Vick’s punishment was harsh enough and whether he’s sincere about changing who he is as a person as well as his attitude towards animals. One can only hope that he means what he says. Do I feel comfortable with the idea of him owning a dog so soon after his crimes after everything I’ve said? At the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, no. It’s too soon however I also realize that it’s not up to me to determine when the time is right if it ever is. I equate it to not allowing child molesters around children even after they’ve served their time. It’s not something that is turned on and off like a switch. It goes deeper than that. Does the urge to be that way ever go away? I don’t think so but who knows. Better safe than sorry in some cases. At least he realizes that he can’t and probably shouldn’t have a dog for the foreseeable future.

The one thing we can say for sure is that going to prison made Vick a much better quarterback. That boy good and not terrible.

The full interview will be posted on TheGrio.com later today.

Notice a theme in today’s posts? Me neither. It’s probably the same way you don’t notice anything about the pizza at Pizza Hut besides the BP-sized oil slicks all over it. Unfortunately for a group of black soccer players from AFC Bournemouth, it was impossible to not notice the racism spit at them by a Pizza Hut manager.

“We ordered our food. The manager came up with the bill and said: ‘Would you mind paying first?’ We asked if that was the policy and he said ‘no’,” midfielder Anton Robinson, 24, told the Bournemouth Echo.

“When we asked why he had asked us, he said: ‘It’s the way you look.’”

“We had a good idea what he was trying to get at. A group of white kids came in straight after us and they weren’t asked to pay before they had their food. The only thing that was different was the colour of our skins.”

Robinson said the group of players, including fellow first-team regulars Marvin Bartley and Liam Feeney, told the Pizza Hut employee they were professional footballers, and were happy to pay when they were finished.

“That’s what normal people do,” Robinson said. “He hadn’t asked other customers to pay before their meals. It got a little bit heated, then he said: ‘If you’re not going to pay the bill now, I’m going to call the police to escort you off the premises’.”

Leave it to Yum! Brands to combine the worst of all worlds. It’s not bad enough that customers are subjected to the Pizza Hut/Taco Bell combination restaurants. Forget the XXL chalupa. Overt racism comes at no extra charge! What a bargain!

Pizza Hut apologized for the incident but laughably claimed that the incident wasn’t “racially motivated”. Even the Conservative MP for the area wasn’t buying that bullshit.

“I am glad Pizza Hut has issued a full apology, not least for the appalling choice of words used by the manager,” [Tobias Ellwood, Conservative MP for Bournemouth West] said.

That was no apology. That’s a corporation trying to mitigate bad publicity and avoid legal action. Pizza Hut hasn’t owned up to anything. They “[spoke] to the team member involved and … contacted the customers concerned to apologise for any offence caused”. Spoke? If they had any interest in making amends, the manager would have been fired and the rest of their employees would have been read the riot act about not letting that happen again.

Ellwood and AFC Bournemouth should put pressure on Pizza Hut to make amends though community action, the immediate firing of the offending employee and an acknowledgement that they need to properly train their employees. They should also demand that the “restaurant” show respect for all people and improve the quality of their pizza. That’s the biggest insult of all.

There’s another disturbing aspect to this story. It’s the reaction of the players to their treatment.

Robinson said all players were smartly dressed, telling the Echo: “When the lads go out for a meal, we know we’re representing the club. We know that people recognise us and we have to behave.”

It’s sad that the players felt they had to make excuses for themselves. This has nothing to do with representing the club or being recognizable. This has everything to do with patronizing a restaurant and expecting to be treated with courtesy and respect no matter who you are. Pizza Hut can make all the excuses they want but at the end of the day, nothing justifies the behavior of its employees. Customers behaving appropriately should never have to make excuses for themselves due to someone else’s ignorance. What took place that day has nothing to do with behavior and everything to do with racism.

Everyone should avoid Pizza Hut in general but hopefully Bournemouth fans and opponents of racism will go out of their way to not give their business to them or anyone else who would act in the same manner.

We haven’t thrown one of these up in a while so I figured it’s time for another installment. No horrible skateboarding or biking accidents today. Talking about James Brown in the last post combined with the fact that I’m going to see Prince at the Garden next Saturday made this video a natural choice.

Imagine going to see James Brown then having Michael Jackson and Prince come up on stage and do their thing. I can expect Sheila E next weekend. No doubt that’s strong. Part of me is hoping the drummer from the New Power Generation will come out weighing double what he did when the NPG was rolling with Prince in the 90s. One can dream.

UPDATE: Wikipedia just shattered my dream like Big Pun. The drummer’s name is Michael Bland and he now plays with one of the Jonas Brothers’ side projects. There is no god.

Mavericks owner Mark Cuban loves sticking his finger in the Eye of Stern. Fines? Who needs your stinking fines? He’s richer than Nazis. He hasn’t been afraid of anyone in the NBA let it be his fellow owners or David Stern. It’s one thing to mess with a bunch of crusty old guys who can’t get it up anymore. It’s another to mess with an owner who knows his way around an AK-47. In the words of Eazy-E, “Boy you should have known by now, eazy duz it“. Just ask Apollo Creed** and Alexander Litvinenko.

Mark Cuban directed his thunder at new Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov before the Mavs-Nets game on Thursday night.

“He’s a pussy,” Cuban quipped Thursday when asked about Prokhorov.

Cuban, who spoke while on his exercise bike in the Mavericks locker room, lifted his head up to smile, and then continued to verbally jab at the Nets’ new owner.

“(Prokhorov) doesn’t come to games,” Cuban said. “Who the hell knows?”

Aw hell naw. If Cuban thinks he’s going to get away with that, he’s got another thing coming. He didn’t stop there.

“When [Avery Johnson] was with us, the expectation was to win a championship,” Cuban said. “I don’t think that’s the situation right now with the Nets. I think he recognizes that his job is progress more than rings right now. But you never know. If Prokhorov does what I did to try to make deals and get something before the trade deadline then all that changes.

“But, you know, building a true professional team means having to spend money. We just haven’t seen it.”
Asked if there was any added motivation to beat Prokhorov’s team, Cuban responded, “Who?”

Prokhorov didn’t take long to respond.

“I think Mark has it wrong,” Prokhorov said. “I don’t like cats.”

Cuban might want to have Brian Cardinal open his mail for the next couple weeks in case Prokhorov sends a bit of the 210 to the American Airlines Arena. It would serve him well to watch the 60 Minutes interview in which the Nets owner professes his love for the ladies and guns. You’ll never catch Mikhail acting like Cuban (pictured above) up in the club. He brings his own to the party. Hopefully this starts a rivalry where both owners try to one up each other then take each other out. “I must break you.”

**Random thought: The Apollo Creed reference got me thinking. Why do all national anthems have to be uptight, carbon copies of each other? Can you tell one from the other? We all know the Star-Spangled Banner. It gets you up when it’s played before an international sporting event like the World Cup but does it really do anything for you when it’s played before every domestic college and professional game? Imagine if our national anthem was “Living in America”.

Tell me that doesn’t make you want to run through a wall for the USA. Why should we be so somber about loving freedom? What says it more than James Brown and a backing band of guys with jheri curls. America, fuck yeah! We may be uptight and Puritanical underneath but we still know how to throw a good party to show how much we love the red, white and blue. At the least, some baseball team should use this for the 7th inning stretch. I’d say the Nationals but they really need to break out “Bustin’ Loose” by Chuck Brown. I’m looking at you, Detroit.

That’s what the Jets have to say to anyone who wants to name dishes after the team.

The team set their spokeswoman on Prime KO Japanese Steakhouse after they found out the kosher restaurant was serving dishes with names like “Green on Green Jets Salad” and “Jets Dragon Roll”.

Jets spokeswoman Jessica Ciccone called Prime KO Japanese Steakhouse at 217 W. 85th St. a few weeks ago to complain the gourmet Gang Green fare wasn’t authorized by the team.

“We were really shocked,” said restaurant spokesman Steven Traube. “I think she was just being spiteful.”

So far the restaurant is holding its ground. They added a “Jets latke” for Hanukkah. Can’t wait to see what they add for Kwanzaa. Something with a poached egg called Revis Island perhaps.

They might have better luck naming dishes after players. They could have a tasting menu and name all the dishes after Antonio Cromartie’s kids. Customers can get it at a reduced rate if they can name his kids faster than he could on Hard Knocks. Ordering the “Rex Ryan” could mean getting the whole menu. I’d suggest a dish named after Braylon Edwards but the wait staff would always drop it before it ever got to the table.

Enough has been made about Russia and Qatar (Katar or Quatar if you’re an American Twitter user) respectively winning the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. You can find critiques of either choice all over the internet. If you want some level-headed perspective, look to the English tabloids. At least government figures are taking the vote in stride.

Mayor Boris Johnson of London took away free hotel rooms reserved for FIFA during the 2012 Olympics after England was denied the chance to host the World Cup.

FIFA president Sepp Blatter and his team had been in line to benefit from the rooms during the two-week sporting extravaganza in the city.

However following the controversy of the 2018 World Cup vote, which saw England knocked out at the first-round stage with just two of a possible 22 votes from the FIFA executive committee, Johnson has decided that they should not receive the freebie.

He is yet to comment on the decision, which was taken after he met with Sebastian Coe, chairman of Olympic organising committee LOCOG - the body responsible for handing out the accommodation.

That’ll show FIFA. Now they’ll have to sleep under a bridge or shack up in a hostel with a bunch of construction workers and hippie tourists. Nothing like the image of Jack Warner sharing a shower and bunk with some hippie from Argentina who smells like patchouli and sings Manu Chao to himself in his sleep. Little does Pedro know that Jack does a mean rendition of “Dollar Wine”.

It’s going to be a long two weeks. Get your ass to Mars.