This season's major trend has been a very singular type of managerial sacking, involving "intolerable pressure" building up in the media, directors and owners panicking, and a manager's job becoming basically untenable, regardless of whether he deserves to be sacked or not. In some cases, it was undignified to the point of being embarrassing to watch, such as at Chelsea, where the boardroom politics, the despotic ownership and the ridiculous amount of control given to senior players were made public. At Newcastle, Sam Allardyce did the impossible, in becoming a figure of public sympathy for being ousted through a mixture of supporter ignorance and an owner that seems to be too eager to please said ignorant supporters.

Now, at Liverpool, the position of Rafael Benitez seems to have been undermined still further by the actions of their owners, George Gillett and Tom Hicks. It has become apparent as the season has worn on that Liverpool are not going to mount a serious championship challenge in the Premier League. In fact, if anything they seem to have taken a backward step since last season, and are currently playing like they have more in common with the likes of Everton, Manchester City and Portsmouth than they have with Chelsea, Manchester United and Arsenal. The money that was reported to be delivered to Benitez to further strengthen his squad doesn't appear to have been forthcoming, and now there are worrying rumours coming from Anfield regarding a need to restructure the club's finances ahead of the construction of a proposed new stadium in Stanley Park. There are some Liverpool supporters that are starting to sound increasingly alarmed, to the point of drawing similarities with the beginning of the decline of Leeds United.

The problem at the centre of Liverpool's current difficulties is the funding of their take-over last year. As with Manchester United, Liverpool were subject to a leveraged buyout, meaning that Gillett and Hicks utilised stock market rules to purchase the club for a fraction of its actual value. At the time, Liverpool's supporters were very supine about it all. Stars and stripes flags were waved at Anfield. The new owners were more than happy to lap up the praise when they got to the European Cup final in May, even though they'd had precious little to do with it. This season, their big summer signing Fernando Torres has carried them single-handedly through the season. They made a dog's dinner of getting through their group stage, losing to Besiktas and Marseille in a group that they should have had sewn up with games to spare. In the Premier League, they have slowly and consistently fallen further and further away from the top three since the start of the season.

The major problem for Liverpool FC is that they simply cannot afford to not qualify for the Champions League this season and, indeed, every season for the forseeable future. The buyout of the club cost £300m, which has been loaded against the club itself. On top of this, one of Gillett and Hicks' first acts when they took over was to promise to build a new stadium, at a cost of a further £300m. Liverpool were already said to be £80m in debt at the time of the buyout. Gillett and Hicks are said to be trying to restructure the club's finances through the banks, but this in itself is an expensive business. A recent report in the Daily Telegraph put the cost of the restructuring at £15m, and the cost of the new stadium has already risen to £400m, with £20m having already been paid to architects.

In the beginning, Liverpool's supporters were open to the idea. Broadly, they supported Gillett and Hicks against their rivals in bidding, Dubai International Capital, who represent the interests of the ultra-wealthy Maktoum family. Gillett and Hicks said the right thing. However, leverage buyouts are done for one reason. To buy something that is considered under-valued in the market without putting much investment in and sell it on at a profit. DIC may well have the funding to underwrite the club's debts, but they have already stated publicly that they don't much want to pour money into a black hole (and why, indeed, should they?). The danger, for Liverpool, is that they could end up hundreds of millions pounds in debt, unable to service so much as the interest payments on debts that they may already have unnecessarily run up.

At Manchester United, supporters were already protesting before the Glazer takeover. It might not have been enough to prevent the buyout there from going through (although anyone looking at the end of year figures coming from Old Trafford will be able to tell you that journalists stating massive profits there simply hasn't read the full story of how they've been massaged), but their disaffected supporters at least have an alternative. Liverpool supporters might just find that things could get a lot worse for them before they get any better.

Here's a video from December 1983 of Liverpool (about who's current woes I have quite a lot to say) coming up against what I can only presume was an unexpectedly feisty Coventry City side in the First Division. Commentary comes from a pre-histrionics John Motson.

When you're sitting at your desk, wishing the day away and daydreaming about the football career that you were so cruelly robbed of, what do you think of? Captaining your national team to victory in the World Cup? Winning the FA Cup or the Premier League? Scoring the winning goal in the FA Cup final? Saving a penalty in a crucial play-off match? Whatever it is that you do idly daydream about, I wouldn't mind betting that you probably don't idly daydream about finishing in thirteenth place in the Premier League. Why is it, then, that clubs such as Reading have taken the decision to field weakened teams in the FA Cup?

They're not the only ones to have to done this over the last few seasons or so, but Reading's decision to pick an under strength team at Tottenham in the Third Round of the FA Cup has been this season's most high-profile case, so it's worth taking a closer look at them in particular. Reading are, you may be surprised to know, one of the oldest clubs in English football. They were founded in 1871, and were voted into the Football League in 1920. As long ago as 1913, they toured Italy and beat Genoa and Milan on their own turf. They were nicknamed "The Biscuitmen" after the massive Huntley & Palmers biscuit factory that dominated the town and played at the rustic yet homely Elm Park. They bounced around the lower divisions, offending no-one, and earned the nation's sympathy in 1983 when their supporters combined with supporters of local rivals Oxford United to off a proposed merger of the two clubs by Robert Maxwell to form a proposed new club called Thames Valley Royals.

Somewhere along the line, though, Reading have started to get delusions of grandeur. They moved to the Madejski Stadium in 1998 (it's named after their autocratic owner, John Madejski), and were promoted to the Premier League in 2006. This season, their second in the Premier League, they decided to field an under-strength team in the FA Cup. Manager Steve Coppell was fairly blunt in his assessment of the situation: "I have got to do what I feel is right for this football club. I have been consistent every year and I will continue to be consistent. But we are going there to win - we are not going there to keep the score down". So, Reading FC, who haven't managed a major trophy in one hundred and thirty-seven years, are now too big for the FA Cup.

I am, I think, a realist. Chelsea, Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool are focussed on bigger prizes than the FA Cup. They, however, have big enough, strong enough squads to sail into the semi-finals of the cup with their youth teams. I've heard it said before that any one of these four clubs could win the FA Cup if they wanted to, and there's an element of truth to this. The likes of Reading, though... I don't get it. They are currently in thirteenth place in the Premier League. They're not likely to get relegated, and they're not likely to get sucked into a relegation battle, either. They were knocked out of the League Cup before the end of September, and with just thirty-eight fixtures to play in the league, they can hardly claim fixture congestion as an excuse, can they? Ironically, a full-strength Reading team might have beaten Tottenham at White Hart Lane last Saturday, and now they have a replay that they almost certainly didn't want next week. The draw for the Fourth Round has probably done for them anyway. They have to travel to Old Trafford even if they do see off a vastly improved Tottenham team. They're looking at having played a forty-three match season. The irony is that the historical evidence indicates that the FA Cup doesn't impact on a club's season. It took until Brighton & Hove Albion in 1983 for a team to make an FA Cup final and be relegated in the same season. One hundred and eleven years. It simply isn't something that happens anything like every season.

I think that they are selling their fans short. Having got themselves in the Premier League, they have a decent chance of making the FA Cup final - the strongest team that Reading FC has ever had must mean that Reading FC must have its best chance ever of actually winning something, right? Isn't this, you know, what football is supposed to be about? Reading may well stay up in the Premier League this season, but they're fooling themselves if they think that resting players for a couple of FA Cup matches is going to make the difference between staying up and not. Ultimately, they're sacrificing the possibility of giving their supporters something that, in all honesty, money can't buy in return for another season of mid-table mediocrity and their supporters should remember that for every glamorous match against Manchester United or Liverpool there will be two against the likes of Bolton Wanderers or Middlesbrough.

There is a way of resolving this. If the likes of Reading consider themselves "too big" for the FA Cup, then perhaps they should just not enter it at all. If it's, you know, too much of an effort to take the FA Cup seriously, why bother being in it in the first place? I think (and this is a bit of a wild guess, but bear with me) that the world's oldest cup competition might just about be able to withstand the shock of Reading not being in it, and the same goes for Bolton Wanderers, Birmingham City, or any of the rest of those Premier League also-rans whose sole existence now seems to be to do whatever they have to do in order to continue picking up that Sky TV cheque every year. If the summit of your ambitions is to finish in thirteenth place in the Premier League every season, then you frankly deserve it.

It was the strangest thing, but Salomon Kalou's clearly offside goal was so far offside that it kept Sam Allardyce in a job for the next few days or so. The press had been predicting for the last few days that defeat at Stamford Bridge would probably cost Allardyce his job, but Kalou's goal was so far offside that the press focussed on that for a few days, allowing him to postpone his date with the hangman's noose for a few more days. Unless anything enormously disastrous happens tonight against Manchester City, he'll probably still there for this weekend's FA Cup match against Stoke, and it's difficult (even considering their recent form) to see them losing that match. I'd be surprised it Allardyce goes before the end of the season. He's too stubborn to go voluntarily and, if the details of his financial package are correct, he might be too expensive to sack.

I'm not, as you may be aware, a fan of Allardyce by any stretch of the imagination. I think that the much of the praise that he won at Bolton was overstated. His Bolton team was utterly joyless to watch and, whilst I understand that small clubs will always go down the route of making themselves difficult to beat, there will always be a low boiling point in the Premier League - a boiling point at which supporters expect entertainment. Twenty years ago, Wimbledon had perfected their party piece of hitting it long and hard, playing a physical game and scaring the hell out of "better" opponents. Their supporters didn't much like it, but it got them into the top division of English football for more than a decade. These days, though, in an era of £40 match tickets and the constant hubris about the Premier League being "The Biggest And Best League In The World", it might not be enough on its own. For Sam Allardyce, the line between success and failure is a very thin one, and there is no room for error when you're at a big club and not playing exciting, attacking football. Newcastle's supporters may have a long tradition of having been "entertained" (although there is, I think a considerable amount of myth to this - Keegan's 1996 team that blew the Premier League notwithstanding, I don't think that Newcastle United have consistently played "better football" than anyone else in the country over the last forty years or so), but in the realpolitik of the modern game, realising your limitations and maximising them early on can be one of the keys to building success over a period of time.

The problem is that time is the one thing that no Premier League manager has. Unlike further down the ladder, every Premier League match counts. There's no room for error. Newcastle haven't actually been that bad this season (they're eleventh at the time of writing, above such luminaries as Tottenham Hotspur and Middlesbrough), but we already know that Allardyce won't get the two or three years that he needs to lay down his authority at St James Park and set the seal on the way that he wants things to be done. He's costing them millions and millions of pounds, and they won't tolerate two more seasons in mid-table. Fortunately, though, some of the madder elements of the Newcastle support already have a replacement for him already lined up. Alan Shearer.

It's campaigns like this which lead me to the inevitable conclusion that some football supporters deserve anything they get. Shearer is, at the time of writing, taking his coaching badges, but anyone that saw his witless half-time performance on the BBC team during the England vs Croatia match (when his contribution to the attack on McClaren's tactics seemed to be limited to complaining that the players didn't have enough - you've guessed it - "passion") will already know that, however bad Allardyce turns out to be, Shearer will be twenty times worse. Also, Shearer, who has made it more than clear that he wants the Newcastle job, hasn't made any effort to get any coaching experience over the last couple of years. So, replacing Allardyce would be ridiculously expensive and Newcastle fans would be getting someone with no managerial experience that has already demonstrated only that he has the tactical acumen of a water biscuit.

In the harsh glare of the modern football world, even the likes of Newcastle United are now light years away from the top four, and the fact of the matter is that the best that Newcastle can recently hope for in the next three to five years would be to emulate Bolton, Everton or Spurs. Regular UEFA Cup football might not sound like the most exciting thing in the world, but it must be better than whatever the vast majority of the alternatives are. Common sense, though, doesn't often intrude into the rampant egotism and unrealistic pipe dreams of the Premier League - a world in which a club with weekly 52,000 sell-out crowds and an estimated 1,000,000 supporters needs a multi-millionaire in order to secure a regular place in the top ten.

Deja vu is a strange feeling, isn't it? You might be forgiven a double dose of it this week, as the League Cup reached the quarter-final stage. Still, the four matches brought about considerably more than twice the entertainment that "Super Sunday" did last weekend, even though we're not really supposed to care about it very much. Everton had already dumped West Ham United out of the competition, but this week's three ties brought up three tempestuous matches which can only lead the casual observer to believe that, once out on the pitch and playing, every match still matters to the modern professional footballer.

On Tuesday night, Tottenham Hotspur put in one of their best performances of the season to end Manchester City's unbeaten home record with a 2-0 win at the City of Manchester Stadium. Jermaine Defoe had given Spurs an early lead, but Spurs were reduced to ten men when Didier Zokora was harshly sent off (Steed Malbranque, for the record, did deserve to go for a considerably worse tackle a few minutes later. With Defoe withdrawn after the sending off, Spurs tried to soak up everything that City threw at them, but they were still reliant on a newly resurgent Paul Robinson, who made one absolutely stunning save from Darius Vassell. Spurs tried to nick a second on the break, and achieved this with eight minutes to play when Steed Malbranque broke away and scored a second goal.

Meanwhile, Arsenal's kids were given a night off the homework to play out a similarly (though somewhat less surprisingly) bad tempered 3-2 win at Blackburn. They seemed to have the game all sewn up at 2-0, but managed to get themselves pegged back to 2-2 thanks to the very seasonally named Roque Santa Claus (ho ho ho, indeed). Denilson got himself sent off, and it looked as if they might be heading out of the competition, but a late goal in extra time saw them through. In tonight's Battle Of Half Of The Giants Mixed With Some Fringe Players And A Couple From The Reserves (as I presume Sky billed it), Chelsea beat Liverpool 2-0 with a massively fluke-tastic goal from Frank Lampard and a second from Andriy Shevchenko being enough, and Peter Crouch getting himself sent off for an uncharacteristically nasty tackle.

The draw for the semi-finals was made this evening too, and Arsenal will play Spurs, while Chelsea play Everton. Will the Arsenal kids be good enough to beat Spurs over two legs for a second year in a row? Well, there's a question. If Juande Ramos has turned Spurs around in the way they he appears to have done (six wins and just one defeat in his first ten games), they just might. If not, prepare for a battle of attrition between Arsenal and Chelsea (who will surely beat Everton over two legs) in the final next year. Manchester United's players, meanwhile, were using their time off "wisely" by having a massive piss-up in Manchester which has ended with one of their reserve players, one Johnny Evans, being arrested and bailed on suspicion of raping a 26 year-old woman. Is this what the clubs mean when they go on and on about the "need" for a mid-season break?