While Rafa has rounded on Jurgen Klinsmann and Graeme Souness after their attacks on the TV this week, the Liverpool boss is getting support of a kind in the papers. First up is David Conn in the Guardian, who points out that Liverpool's debt problems are fairly clear and it's the owners we need to blame.

Rafael Benítez says Liverpool are in debt: shock, astonishment, clear the back page. The manager says Liverpool must reduce this debt and so do not have millions of pounds to spend buying players: astonishing and extraordinary.

Benítez has shocked us, in truth, with a statement of the bleedin' obvious but it is noteworthy somebody in his position has finally come out and said it. Being taken over by two businessmen, who loaded on to the club the £174m they borrowed for their takeover, was not, after all, the most glorious event in the history of a great club.

Benítez now acknowledges this debt is a problem, and the need to reduce it has eaten into his transfer budget. The revelation simply states what has been horribly plain all along.

Brian Reade in the Daily Mirror, meanwhile, says the owners cannot afford not to give Rafa some cash to spend in January.

Graeme Souness has been rightly derided for some of his TV couch criticism of Liverpool.

When you brought Torben Piechnick, Istvan Kozma, Julian Dicks, Nicky Tanner, Paul Stewart, Mark Walters and Stig Inge Bjornebye to Anfield, attacking Rafa Benitez for making bad signings, is a bit like Jordan calling the Queen an old slapper.

But I hope the men pretending to run Liverpool take note of his view that if their team don't finish in the top four this season they could face meltdown.

Mainly because if Manchester City do, Champions League status allied to limitless wealth means they will attract the best players in the world and become very hard to budge.

Failure to let Benitez spend the £12 million he brought in for Keane on a replacement could mean the difference, come May, between big-club status and meltdown.