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• Striker says he is happy at the club and on Merseyside
• Merseyside police detain man for alleged racist gesture

Andy Carroll has said he has no desire to leave Liverpool after the club tried to exchange him for Manchester City’s Carlos Tevez only a year after his £35m arrival from Newcastle United.

Carroll, who has scored only six times for Kenny Dalglish’s team since becoming Britain’s most expensive footballer 12 months ago, was also linked with a return to Newcastle United earlier in the transfer window. Having produced a battling display in Saturday’s FA

The future of football needs strong and decisive leadership especially for the next generation of young people

Liverpool FC need to take a hard look at themselves and how they have responded to the complaint and the investigations into the allegations of abuse in the Patrice Evra/Luis Suárez case.

Throughout the entirety of the proceedings, over the past three months, all we have heard are denials and denigration of Evra. Since the publication of the 115-page report of the findings of the FA’s independent commission, Liverpool’s vitriol has increased. Suárez’s attempt at a belated apology is nothing short of lamentable. I cannot believe that a club of Liverpool’s stature, and with how it has previously led on matters of social injustice and inequality, can allow its integrity and credibility to be debased by such crass and ill‑considered responses.

At such a historic time in Britain, Doreen and Neville Lawrence have taught and inspired us never to give up the fight for equality, justice and fair treatment following Wednesday’s sentencing of Gary Dobson and David Norris for the murder of their son Stephen Lawrence in 1993.

With all these things, you come out of it with more credit if you hold your hands up. OK, Liverpool may have thought they had to defend their player as he is innocent. But if the club does not carry out a thorough investigation, how can it understand that Suárez said things which are not acceptable, but that he didn’t comprehend this due to his background?

If this is the case, Liverpool have failed him. Because they have not told Suárez what the club’s expectations are; that they have a zero policy towards racism. If he is ignorant of what is required of him, Liverpool should be asking: how come we have got a contract with the player?

Unless, of course, Liverpool are saying that they have explained to Suárez what the club want and he has defied them.

In any other sector, if someone makes a claim of racially motivated or abusive behaviour, an employer has to investigate if they are competent because this may be damaging to the business. Clubs in these cases don’t seem to be. And when it’s a high-profile incident involving a big-name player, they want to say, unequivocally, we defend our player 100%. Why are people not showing leadership and apologising, saying that we won’t do it again, and ask that they can move on?

Liverpool have been particularly hypocritical. You can’t on the one hand wear a Kick It Out T-shirt in a week of campaigning against racism when this is also happening on the pitch: it’s the height of hypocrisy. Liverpool players wore a T-shirt saying: “We support Luis Suárez”, seemingly whatever the outcome. This was a dreadful knee-jerk reaction because it stirs things up.

And, then, this was followed, after the verdict, with a kind of stance that says: “Hey, we support anti-racism and Kick It Out. But we’re not sorry. All we are really saying is that we blame someone else, not us.”

In the wider context of racism throughout our society there are issues. Undoubtedly there are still areas in this country you would not feel comfortable being in, and that is not just on grounds of potentially being racially abused.

I do think that the police service is much better than it was in 1993, when Stephen Lawrence was murdered. You can actually raise matters of race in a police station and get a degree of sensitivity that gives you comfort that you are going to be treated in a fair manner.

What we’ve got to do is keep building on that. We had the MacPherson Report in 1999, which rolled into the Race Relations Act of 2000 and then things did move forward, but there’s been a rolling back regarding equality since 2005, due to the reaction to the July bombings in London. And this has continued with the present government and the suspicion that is held of a multicultural society. It’s important that we sharpen up our focus regarding these matters.

This is a momentous time for us. Four million people play football in this country and this weekend there will be many kids in parks and on pitches: they need to know that if they misbehave, they can’t get away with it. That is the big issue.

Since the incident we’ve not heard a word of complaint from Evra about how his character has been besmirched by Liverpool. This is surely something the FA and the PFA and the whole of football should be concerned about: we can’t have a situation where there is just one side on the attack.

Surely the new owners, with their experiences of equality and inclusion in the US, can see how their brand is being

• Caroline Wozniacki dreams of leading Reds
• Roger Federer accepts Jimmy Connors’ point

Could Caroline Wozniacki be the key to Kenny Dalglish ending Liverpool’s 21-year title drought? The tennis, football and general sporting world have been waiting for a Wozniacki newsflash regarding whether she or Steven Gerrard would actually be the better captain of a football team since the women’s world No1 wore Gerrard’s No8 Liverpool shirt during the warm-up for a match in the Qatar Ladies’ Open in February.

So, after dumping Virginie Razzano out in the second round of the Championships 6-1, 6-3, she was asked, of course, who would be the best leader of Jamie Carragher, Glen Johnson, Dirk Kuyt et al: “Well, if I would have to choose between myself and Steven Gerrard, I think I would leave it up to him, since he’s doing such a great job,” the Dane began, before the modesty was instantly suddenly instantly forgotten. “I think I could. I think I’d be able to speak well with the players and with the referee. If I would say it myself, I think I could be a team captain.”

Listen carefully and you can hear Dalglish dialling up his favoured agent to make sure this deal will happen soon.

Generation game

Roger Federer and Jimmy Connors may not appear natural bedfellows. The great Swiss is as smooth off the court as on it, while it was the grain of grit in Connors’s persona that propelled him to his two singles titles here.

And yet these words from the six-times Wimbledon champion, who hopes to equal Pete Sampras’s Open-era record of seven on Sunday week suggest that Federer now agrees with the 58-year-old American regarding the latter’s comments that current rivalries are too soft. Specifically he meant Federer’s warm relationship with Rafael Nadal that appears a love-in when compared with Connors’ ongoing enmity with John McEnroe during the pair’s salad days in the first half of the 1980s.

Federer said: “It’s hard for me to talk about his generation because I don’t remember him much from playing. Obviously the rules have changed quite drastically so we’re not allowed to do all sort of crazy stuff out on the court, otherwise we get penalised, fined, all that stuff. You don’t want to be a bad sport either towards your opponent.

“If that’s what he means, I can understand some points with him. But it’s not as easy as it seems. I think we play with a lot of respect for the game still, which I think is most important, to be quite honest, that we respect what has been done before, like, for instance, from players like Connors and McEnroe, [Rod] Laver, back to when it all started really.”

Nick’s salad days

Nick Bollettieri is 80 years young on the 31st of next month. The American coaching guru, who knew Fred Perry when our last Wimbledon men’s champion was director of tennis at Miami’s Diplomat hotel in the 1950s, is his perennial bouncy presence around the SW19 lawns from where his column for a rival English broadsheet is being penned. But what keeps the New York native whose charges have included Andre Agassi, Jim Courier, Monica Seles and Maria Sharapova and who currently has Britain’s Heather Watson as a resident at his Florida tennis academy, so sprightly? Step forward wife, Cindi, and adopted Ethiopian son, Gio. Cindi is Bollettieri’s eighth spouse and is nearly 40 years younger than him, while Gio is six. Both have been here this week ensuring that the salad days for the man who once described the four-times married Perry as “in the nicest possible way, a shagger”, keep coming back.

Centre stage

In a rare move, the BBC switched its published listings and put Andy Murray’s match against Ivan Ljubicic on BBC1, demoting the One Show, EastEnders and other programmes to BBC2. What a responsibility.

Wimbledon 2011WimbledonTennisRoger FedererAndy MurrayLiverpoolJamie Jacksonguardian.co.uk