Eddie Gibbs

On This Day in 1703: Honour Written in Blood, Why the 47 Ronin Still Matter When Loyalty Outlived the Law in Edo Japan

🇯🇵 #OnThisDay in 1703, 46 men chose honour over life and forced a nation to face an impossible moral question. ⚔️❄️

The story of the 47 Ronin, loyalty, law, and the price of obedience.

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Virgo did, and the silence he leaves behind will be deeply felt.

He brought humour without condescension and enthusiasm without strain. He made the game feel open, companionable, something you could share rather than merely watch. Many fine players pass through snooker; fewer become the soundtrack of the sport.

That familiar cry when danger hovered near the cue ball was not a gimmick; it was instinct sharpened by experience.

From TV's Big Break to snooker commentary, he spoke as someone on your side, alert to the tiny dramas that decide frames and fortunes. His commentary had urgency, warmth and judgement, never mistaking volume for insight.

As a player, he earned his place properly, a UK champion, but it was later that he became part of people’s lives.

🙏 RIP John Virgo

The voice that guided snooker home

John Virgo has died, and with him goes a voice that never talked down to the game or dressed it up. He understood snooker because he had lived it, the long nights, the lonely practice tables, the thin line between nerve and noise.

Liverpool’s Roundtable Was Polite, Presentable and Carefully Timed, But It Solved Nothing Richard Hughes, Arne Slot and the optics of orchestrated alignment

www.itwasalwaysliverpool.com/p/liverpool...

I’ve written a piece asking the questions I’d like to have put to Slot and Hughes, cutting through the PR, and examining what this video really tells us about Liverpool’s direction.

Bold, hopefully balanced, and unapologetically blunt.

Read it on my Substack 👇

🟥 Liverpool’s roundtable video was calm, polished, and tightly controlled.

But, for obvious reasons, it avoided the questions fans actually want answered.

It's always hard to have sympathy for a millionaire sportsman, but in this case, I'll make an exception. I really hope it all works out ok for the lad.

That's the unforgiving truth. Talent earns entry, belief sustains survival. Once belief is withdrawn, football rarely looks back, no matter how gifted the player left behind.

What might have been resolved cleanly will instead drag on, with diminishing returns each month, and likely conclude with a discounted summer sale.

Liverpool will likely pay a price for this standoff. A player once capable of commanding a strong fee will now carry uncertainty, and uncertainty always reduces value.

There is admiration for the way Elliott has conducted himself: training hard, maintaining his dignity, and refusing to sulk. Yet professionalism doesn't guarantee opportunity. It merely preserves reputation.

Now he exists in a limbo that modern football creates too easily. Owned by one club, loaned to another, unwanted by both. Clauses designed to protect balance sheets have instead paralysed his career at a critical moment.

Once that line was crossed, Elliott ceased to be a football solution and became a financial risk.

Aston Villa then applied their own cold measure. They saw him every day in training, weighed his qualities against their demands, and decided he wasn't worth the fee they had pre-agreed in more optimistic circumstances. That decision wasn't personal, but it was definitive.

By the time Elliott left on loan, the decision had effectively been taken.

Liverpool had already moved on in all but name. Last season told its own story. Arne Slot didn't trust Elliott with responsibility, didn't lean on him when it mattered, and didn't disguise it either. Managers rarely say a player is surplus; they simply behave as though he is.

🟥 Harvey Elliott and the cold arithmetic of elite football

Harvey Elliott’s situation feels cruel, but it's also brutally familiar. This is elite football at its most honest, a business where judgement is final.

On This Day 1870: When the Vote Was Won and the Fight Was Far From Over How the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment marked a moral turning point in American history

🇺🇸 #OnThisDay in 1870, the vote was won, but the fight was far from over 🗳️

📜 The story behind the Fifteenth Amendment, sacrifice, courage, and unfinished justice.

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🏉 My #SixNations preview OUT NOW on @libertyshield.com VPN blog - France to go back-to-back for me, pipping Ireland and England. 👇

January Transfer Window Truths, What Clubs Bought and What They Risked Assessing the Premier League purchases from the January 2026 Transfer Window

January doesn’t build teams.
It exposes them.

Fees lie. Wages trap. Loans delay reality.

Full breakdown, free piece on my Substack 👇
www.itwasalwaysfootball.com/p/january-t...

On This Day 1709: When a Scottish Sailor Stepped Out of Myth and Back Into the World How Alexander Selkirk’s rescue turned lived endurance into lasting legend

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#OnThisDay in 1709, a Scottish sailor stepped out of isolation and into history 🌊🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Marooned for four years, his survival would inspire Robinson Crusoe. I’ve written the story behind the myth, told close to home and close to the bone.

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On a day when another prodigy, Carlos Alcaraz, completed his own set of sporting conquests, it felt fitting. We are living through a moment when youth is not waiting its turn; it is taking centre stage with breathtaking assurance.

How long this can last is unknowable. Hunger dulls, wealth distracts; the body and mind always keep their own counsel. Yet for now, he plays with a freedom that feels rare, almost innocent in its ferocity.

Littler holds almost everything worth holding, and he does it without bravado, without the noise of self-proclamation, just with an appetite that appears bottomless.

There was a remark made back in 2024 by the class-act that is Luke Humphries; half-joke, half-prophesy, about getting one world title won before this kid started taking everything. It was meant kindly, perhaps consolingly, yet it now reads as a quiet admission of what was coming.