A COMOLLI OF ERRORS

There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, of a young (and undoubtedly high) Ozzy Osbourne earning a living in Berlin in the 1970s by being on call for an eccentric German aristocrat (if that is not itself tautologous) whose highly particular fetish involved lying beneath a glass coffee table while someone – Ozzy, in this instance – perched above it and – …well, there’s not a sufficiently delicate way to put it – defecated atop the hitherto transparent surface. Whatever turns you on, I guess.

For any workshy young deviant, one for whom the last vestiges of ‘self-esteem’ have long since flown the roost, that is truly a gig to inspire envy. Getting paid for dumping – unbelievable, Jeff! (Mind you, I’m not entirely sure one could get away with listing it as a legitimate ‘job goal’ when signing a Jobseeker’s Agreement.) It is not that I am workshy per se: much as with anyone else, footballers included, work is fine provided it is adequately recompensed and/or its ‘texture’ is not too onerous. I’m sure that for Ozzy, beyond having to work out which of his narcotic pharmacopeia affected his ability to ‘empty’, this wouldn’t exactly have been the most strenuous of jobs – no pun intended.

Of course, we don’t need Ozzy Osbourne or footballers’ wages to tell us that the entirety of late capitalism, and not just its peculiar forms of employment, is, strictly speaking, insane. Unhinged. Demented. One only need know, say, that orthodox (non-coprophile) pornography is an $8b industry in the United States, and that one of its many niches is the punting of latex moulds of the vaginas of your favourite actresses fitted inside what look like torches – all of which indicates not only that posh wanks have come a long way, and quickly, but that we have little chance of escaping a world in which people take steps to the detriment of their ‘subjective’ desire but for the furtherance of their/our ‘objective’ interests (it being in most of our interests that we not live in a world in which footballers earn £150k/week, for instance). 

Anyway, I mention Ozzy only to illustrate the fact that the modern world is full of cushty sinecures and chancers blagging it in easy billets, all of which brings us to Damien Comolli and the fact that the equivalent position in football to Ozzy’s Berlin gig, erm, attending to tables is undoubtedly that of ‘Director of Football Strategy’, from which he (Damien, not Ozzy) was promoted to Director of Football in March 2011, a post he vacated this week having done about fuck all for approximately a while. 

Comolli: Beane counter

But seriously – what did he do, exactly?

His remit was everything on the football side excepting first team training and selection. At the time of his promotion, he summarised this as “a day-to-day relationship with the manager and his coaching staff. It’s also medical and sports science, performance analysis, player liaison, team travel, scouting and negotiating transfer contracts. A big part of it is the academy.” Less an executive role, then, than a factotum who takes the strain off the manager.

However, I’ve studied all this at length and it seems to me that he was, in essence, a glorified professional shopper. A money spunker. For his job. He looked at half-baked stats, extrapolated from context with all the dexterity of a man playing Jenga in oven gloves, then went online and, when not looking at funny shit on YouTube, purchased footballers. The key institutional problem with all that is there has been no real responsibility or accountability over signings (a point made by Liverpool’s lay ideologue and managerial apologist-in-chief, Paul Tomkins), a situation in which, should a player fail to have much of an impact, each could in theory blame the other. Of course, for football managers, ‘failure’, such as it can be properly quantified beyond points, is usually rewarded with a multi-million payoff…

Anyway, whether or not he was given a shopping list by the manager (who would probably only stonewall the fact, anyway, since he appears to have sailed past self-parodic cantankerousness to the point of denying his own name: “Kenny–” “No I’m not”), liaises with the finance department, then nips out to get the appropriate player is neither here nor there. It patently hasn’t worked, as anyone reading between the lines (not a place habitually occupied by Damien’s signings) of Tom Werner’s PR blancmange-sprach will have deduced: “We have a strategy that needs implementing and we felt Damien was not the right person to implement that strategy”. Translation: we need to win matches and that guy is buying not very pretty players for a not very pretty penny.

Ought they not have seen the signs when they brought him to the club in November 2010? At the time, it was widely reported that opting for this path derived from John Henry and Fenway Sports Group’s desire to employ the same Moneyball-inspired principles that had succeeded so spectacularly at their sleeping giant Boston Red Sox baseball franchise, copying Billy Beane’s trailblazing savvy thrift with Oakland A’s. In essence, this approach (sometimes called ‘Soccernomics’ in a football context) involved picking up undervalued players at cheap rates about whom statistics reveal hidden qualities. (Also, players that can be sold on at profit.)

Why Damien, though? Well, before becoming a high-level networker and mediocre talent-spotting talent, he played some (not much) youth football at AS Monaco – as Sacchi said, no need to be a horse before becoming a jockey – then got a law degree and coaching licence, at which point Arsène Wenger employed him at Arsenal for 7 years. In 2005, after a stint at Saint-Etienne as Technical Director, he went to Spurs, replacing Frank Arnesen. His work here was often at odds with the vision of coach Martin Jol, who, when sacked in October 2007, complained of the Frenchman’s “profit-driven” signings (Bent, Kaboul and Boateng for £30m) and that the short-term was being sacrificed – ironic, then, that he should wind up at Anfield, as Liverpool have recent experience of this, when the second-place finish of 2009 was followed by a failure to supplement Alonso, Mascherano, Torres, Reina and Gerrard, the lost momentum still a long way from being recovered.

In September 2008 he blames “agent activity” for failing to land the experienced striker required by Juande Ramos – it was the usual last-minute brinkmanship from Levy – and both were sacked the following month, Comolli returning to Les Anges Verts in November that year, leading to the almost immediate departure of the coach. Consecutive seventeenth-place finishes, one spot above the trapdoor, ensued. They have improved dramatically since he left. In November 2010 he was at Liverpool, FSG having failed to heed the Damien omens… 

His first spree at Liverpool was the double purchase of Luis Suárez and Andy Carroll for a net spend of around £1.5m once the sale of Torres and Babel had been taken into account, a much-parroted datum that construes this as a self-contained transaction, missing the crucial point that it sent a message to the market about Liverpool’s behaviour – essentially that of a gullible, amiable fiftysomething couple from Towcester (him in biscuits, her a legal secretary) accidentally separated from their tour group deep in the Rabat souk. In the summer they picked up Bellamy, José Enrique, Charlie Adam, Doni, Sebastian Coates, Jordan Henderson and Stuart Downing – the latter two, perhaps sabermetricked by some hidden statistical indicators, especially pricey – the whole lot on his watch costing £113m. 

FSG watch Downing and Henderson, forgetting their £40m price...

What perhaps brought home the profligacy to FSG and set off all their Sound Businessman Alarms was the game at Newcastle a couple of weeks ago. Take the £41m Toon received from Liverpool for Wor Andy and Enrique, then go and buy Ben Arfa, Tioté, Obertan, Cabaye, Santon and Cissé (with Ba, Marveaux and Abeid all freebies), and you’ve still got £8m in the kitty to pump into sports leisurewear (not a situation at which many Scousers would complain*) – that is, slightly less than the cost of the Cabaye-Tioté axis; £30m less than Henderson and Downing. And all that done with just contacts, scouts, and the cutting-edge notion of fitting parts together sympathetically in a team-building project, rather than pseudoscientific method punted as expertise to justify a salary.

We shouldn’t be surprised at Comolli’s presence in the oak-panelled upper echelons of European football. History is full of its overreaching courtesans, after all. But with Liverpool’s signings misfiring, with just 5 of 16 games at Anfield won, 2012 a car crash and the whole season a huge missed opportunity given the outlay and lack of European football, perhaps it’s time, finally, to ditch Moneyball and Soccernomics and to seek out some new reading material. A coffee table book, maybe. Although, on second thoughts…  

* Any scousers reading this, do not take offence; the structure of the gag is such that I would happily substitute any regional identity

This was originally published by the FCF

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BLUNT LIVERPOOL MISSING MEIRELES GUILE

craftsman

As the hangovers on the red half of Merseyside cleared in the aftermath of last week’s derby victory, it may well have been that they were replaced by the sober realization that, despite winning a first trophy since 2006 (and since securing passage to Wembley for an FA Cup semi-final), this has not been a season in which Liverpool have covered themselves in glory.

The long and protracted Suárez / Evra imbroglio soured already fractious relations with Manchester United and drew incredible interpretative contortions and opportunistic exaggerations from either side of the chasm – very little of it borne of reason, the vast majority a simple reflex of blind and intractable loyalties that already subtly and unconsciously pre-form the ‘objective’ evidence (one can only wonder how the supporters’ accounts of the ‘facts’ would alter in the admittedly unlikely event of the two protagonists, or antagonists, swapping clubs…). 

Thus, lay students of body language on Merseyside decided that The Handshake Affair was precipitated by Evra – I think it’s safe to say he didn’t offer his hand up gladly and that Suárez was idiotic to prolong the stand-off, perhaps out of some misguided attempt to play to the gallery – just as they acquired the ethnolinguistic skills to decide that “negrito” wasn’t racist in rioplatense Spanish. (Incidentally, it didn’t help that the whole issue was debated according to totally false premises: namely, that the meaning of a word is entirely internal to it and stable, rather than a variable property of the whole context of its enunciation, including the tone of voice and, yes, the kinesics [i.e. body language]. Thus “negrito” can be used in an affectionate, non-racist manner, but it’s reasonable to surmise that in this instance it wasn’t, given the alleged repetition and the situation in which it was uttered.) 

What if they swapped clubs?

Anyway, whether or not it was pressure from Liverpool’s corporate partners alone that brought The Handshake Affair to resolution before its toxic fallout could spread further, it’s safe to say that the whole protracted episode placed Dalglish in an invidious position (another interesting hypothesis: would his support have been quite as unstinting and vehement had it been a player less central to the team’s fortunes?). And, coincidentally, it was the feelings of said corporate partners that were recently cited by Dalglish in order to underline the progress – measured in pounds sterling, presumably – that have been made at the club, where the kit deal with Warrior Sports and a thriving academy are undoubtedly reasons to be cheerful. Even so, one had the impression that the manager was being as elusive as he once had been as a player, all this a diversion from the fact that the club’s most recent headaches have been principally on-field – which, certainly more than are fundraising or PR, is undeniably his domain.

Now, one doesn’t need to go quite so far as the preposterous #kennyout hashtag – perhaps the work of an agent provocateur – to assert that the oft-heard and somewhat vague refrain of “we’re better than last year” hasn’t rung entirely true. Indeed, had the league started on New Year’s Day, then the derby win would have had Liverpool clambering to one rung above the relegation spots, having gone into the game with only beleagured Wolves beneath them (on goal difference). As it is, over the whole season they are only those three points better off than this time last year and, while the squad does have more depth, it is still woefully short of regular matchwinners. 

goallessness

The £71m outlay on Carroll, Henderson and Downing still looks (at least) £25m too much. The big Geordie’s woes have been well documented, and the other two have but a single Premier League goal between them, but goallessness is invariably a function of the overall quality and speed of ball circulation, particularly in midfield, as it is about the simple making and taking of chances (not all of which are equal, of course, regardless of Liverpool having had more shots per game than all bar three teams). For all the woodwork-banging and inspired opposing keepers, only Stoke and Wigan have fewer goals from open play this season.

The midfield dysfunctions can be partly attributed to the loss of the control brought by last year’s Fans’ Player of the Year, Lucas Leiva, while Adam’s form as a deep-lying playmaker has been patchy, to say the least, and if he is not playing incisive passes then his lack of mobility can be a problem. Then there’s last week’s hat-trick hero. For all Gerrard’s final third thrust, he lacks the sang-froid of a true playmaker and, actually, when he plays in the centre often confuses those of more sober temperament and lesser physical gifts around him. Better to have him purvey his unpredictable and slightly frenetic brand of making-things-happen in more advanced positions. 

All this may be true, yet much of the midfield muddle and toothlessness can be traced back to the deadline day exit of Raul Meireles, ostensibly over demands that his £30,000 weekly salary be doubled, as reported to have been verbally agreed with Hicks and Gillett when he signed. From an idealist’s perspective, Dalglish was surely right to jettison someone he felt wasn’t sufficiently committed to the cause (although, if the evidence for such a view is his attitude after his pay wasn’t reviewed, this is somewhat chicken-and-egg). From a pragmatic perspective, however, letting go a player who was voted last season’s PFA Fans’ Player of the Year (that is, by all fans in the country) looks to be a serious mistake. Whether Lucas and Gerrard are available or not, the playing staff simply didn’t have another player with Meireles’ qualities.

Following their New Year revival, Liverpool finished last season in rampant form, using a 4-2-3-1 system beloved of Rafa in which the most advanced player, Suárez, had licence to drop deep and the advanced midfield trident – Maxi, Kuyt and Meireles – were free to interchange positions when in possession. Not only did Kuyt and Maxi suddenly start scoring freely (23 goals between them over the season, 17 of which came after Hodgson’s exit), the whole team played with a discernible flourish, a style that seemed to be the living, breathing embodiment of that Boot Room pass-and-move tradition in which Dalglish was steeped, and one that appeared to foreshadow how the team would play this season. 

Liverpool's pass-and-movers

However, if that blueprint wasn’t already seriously problematized by having a large, Carroll-shaped peg to fit into these shifting holes, then it was effectively binned with the departure of the midfield sophistication and guile of Meireles, a latter-day Terry McDermott who, after a five-goals-in-six burst, thrived when Gerrard was sidelined with a thigh strain and knitted the play together so intelligently. It was to the surprise of few on the Kop that the Portuguese went promptly into compatriot André Villas-Boas’ first-choice midfield at Chelsea, taking with him 50 international caps and that Iberian gift for subtle positioning and rapid ball circulation that means a partially unlocked defence is not allowed to recover due to ponderous or careless touches, the sort of quick-witted link-play that makes those around him more effective and that consequently enabled Suárez, in particular, to take up more dangerous positions in which to receive the ball.

As Liverpool huff and puff away in the league, further now from the leaders than they were twelve months ago, rarely finding the solutions to win games at Anfield and yet evolving in a cross-based stylistic direction that makes such an event increasingly unlikely, it would appear that – for all their recent cup successes – the wrong one of their midfield surplus was sacrificed in August. Even the most ardent Koppite would struggle to imagine that, twelve months from today, Kenny’s trio of North-Eastern signings will have improved enough to propel Liverpool to challenging for Champions League qualification. And with the emergence of Spurs and Man City, treading water is no longer enough.

A version of this piece was published by The FCF.

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CREDO, ERGO SUM (I BELIEVE, THEREFORE I AM)

Conform, or ye shall be cast out...

As Nietzsche, the great philosopher of ‘herd instinct,’ knew only too well, the truly free thinker often speaks up when ‘his’ culture is at its cocksure, self-congratulatory zenith/nadir. Just as the England Test cricket team’s recent ascent to world number one status saw me adopt the apparently heretical view that the domestic county game still needed a radical overhaul (many saw causality not correlation in the latter’s apparent rude health), so Liverpool’s Week of Beating Manchester and romp past some lambs in Wolves’ clothing has left me feeling little different than I did ten days ago in the wake of that abject defeat at Bolton. At the time, I was bemoaning the team having the cutting edge of a space hopper, a position to which I’m still beholden, despite many – the dutiful, obedient herd – believing the grounds for argument have now been swept away.

Tempting as it is to paraphrase the old Club 18-30 slogan – two swallows don’t make a summer – I shall not be so churlish as to deny the importance of these major scalps. Nevertheless, a sense of proportion – a scarce quality in the excitable world of Premier League football – is one I’m trying to cling on to as the roiling rivers of righteousness rise and pick up speed. Thus, it seems to me that these victories do nothing to vitiate the feeling that had settled in me after seeing Liverpool fleeced by the Trotters as easily as was Trigger in The Nag’s Head, the sense that King Kenny’s Revolution [tempted to pun that as ‘Kevolution’, in the manner of Rafalution, but felt there were acronym-based drawbacks], if not running aground, was increasingly losing momentum. 

Auto-da-fe

Yet before the naysayers parp indignant, what is undeniably more pressing than the arguments themselves – and of more urgency for the overheated psychological ghettoes of the fanatics of all stripes, all clubs – is whether such dissenting opinions can be voiced without risk of being wheeled off to the wrack, the asylum, or to some solemn auto-da-fé. (All this in theory, of course; I’m fully aware that nary a hair on the head of reality will be flustered by any of this.) Are our intimate, personal feelings merely reflex actions designed to keep us from ostracism? Is blind faith the only possible attitude one can adopt in order to be a true supporter? Credo, ergo sum. Nietzsche, again: “Everything unconditional belongs in pathology”. 

Let me be absolutely unambiguous: my wish to defend the right to be critical does not mean I covertly want(ed) Dalglish to be sacked. If there’s jerking to do here, it’ll be my cock, not my knee, ta.

What I’m saying is this: while ‘his’ ‘charisma’ was evidently crucial in steadying the ship last season, a task that may have proven beyond pretty much anyone else, and while his man management appears – insofar as this can be perceived from outside – to have been astute, there remain large question marks over his dealings in the transfer market (those Trotters, again) and thus valid doubts as to his ability to build a team: i.e. to select parts and make them best fit together as a whole. 

Beane-counter

Yes, yes, I am aware of the mitigation. Either the recent results – which, pre-Wolves, was a run of 6 points from 18 in the league, including games against the other three of the bottom four – are due to Suárez’s prolonged absence (the answer to which is surely: “Like, hello!?! Er, contingency planning!?! Not having too many eggs in a particular basket ought to be a lesson learnt from the Rafa years…”). Or, the ideologues and apologists will say, the squad is the dastardly work of a combination of highly-paid list-writer Damien Comolli and badly applied Moneyball theories – the point of which was that Billy Beane paid under the odds for the quietly achieving and unheralded players that he picked up.

In fact, the shopping under Dalglish has recalled that Mark Williams’ character from The Fast Show, the one that’s asked to pop out for a loaf of bread and pint of milk (or any items belonging to the same phylum of consumer goods) but instead – “even better than that” – returns with castanets, a pestle-and-mortar, and some WD40. Or Downing, Henderson, and Carroll, as they’re better known… 

Andy runs from the petrol-wielders

Despite the goal against Wolves, Carroll of course remains the biggest blot on Dalglish’s copy book. He is to intelligent movement what Shanghai is to carbon neutrality. Notwithstanding his role in Saturday’s winner, he has generally cut a forlorn figure at Anfield: if not galumphing hither and thither, then harrumphing equally aimlessly. And he cost £35m, a purchase akin to a 16-day cocaine bender, when all you’ve got to show for it at the end is the business card of a cosmetic surgeon who promised vaguely to rebuild your septum.

Of course, I’m more than aware that the Liverpool faithful catechize thus: Suárez + Carroll = Torres + Babel, give or take a mill’ (I’m unsure whether that phrase in the equation has an appropriate Greek symbol). However, and even though economics has long since seen off psychoanalysis as the intellectual discipline housing the most blaggers and pseuds, the problem is clearly that the transaction sent a message to the market, much in the same way that Chelsea Regan, by allowing herself to get fingered on the stairs at Jordan Morgan’s party, might as well thereafter have gone everywhere in a SLAG T-shirt (a non-ironic one, I mean, the sort that would be worn by a Western woman who’d been naïve enough to flaunt kneecap while walking around central Tehran as she was bundled on State TV for a peremptory and unconvincing confession en route to her live stoning). Subsequent behaviour is affected by past actions: “precedents”, I believe they’re called. Hence the fees for Jordan and Downing.

Anyway, with his loping stride and uprightness and ponderousness and lack of mobility or speed of thought (or sense of where he might need to be in order to bring the degree of difficulty of his next headed chance to within the narrow latitude afforded by his form/talent), Carroll resembles nothing so much as a giant Penny Farthing. And is equally archaic. Now that the only club rich and/or gullible enough to take him has rejected the chance to swap him for their astronomically deluded, universally reviled and cosmically greedy ex-skipper, there seems only one possibility left for Liverpool. I thus await the day Mike Wedderburn announces that the Big Geordie has been destroyed in a blaze, a grubbily ill-conceived white-collar insurance job…only for there to emerge sightings of Carroll on Dartmoor, like an expensive, exotic pet – a lynx, say, or puma – that grew too large for owners who hadn’t properly thought through the purchase and were forced to let the beast to go feral, since when it has roamed the mossy uplands, hungry and able to think of nothing save killing (at which point he’d probably make a more than useful target man, I imagine…). 

Craig's list...

All of which has recently left Liverpool bereft of forward options. Granted, Craig Bellamy, while clearly one vertebra short of a spinal column, offers a distinct threat (no, not like that; I said distinct). But Dirk Kuyt, without the garnish of goals, has increasingly resembled a tired old lettuce – are those brown-fringed and mulchy leaves still usable? On Saturday, even Tuesday, yes, we bulked out an insipid fish finger sandwich. But for how much longer?

So, what can be said of both Liverpool’s football and the manager’s vision?

One would hardly expect Dalglish to own up to his mistakes; after all, his statements are bound by pragmatic concerns, not truth-telling. Even so, and despite the commendation of his man management above, the censure levelled at his players in the aftermath of the Bolton game was pragmatically illuminating. Accusing them of lacking the fundamental values of the club – respect for the opposition – invited a couple of immediate thoughts: first, surely he has ample opportunity to remind them of these values in the dressing room; second, is this a smokescreen for their lack of cutting edge? Blaming their absence of ‘values’ allows him to justify manoeuvring players toward the exit (whence the Carroll swap story), while simultaneously protecting his footballing judgment. 

What price piety?

 So, again: what can be said? What is permissible?

The eminently sane and invariably perceptive Iain MacIntosh, mobilizing something of a ‘don’t-be-lunatics’ argument amidst a delegitimation of dissensus, recently wrote, slightly browbeatingly: “When Dalglish took over from Roy Hodgson he inherited a club that was headed for a relegation battle. […] Dalglish saved the club, he lifted it up the table. He brought passing football and patient, intelligent play. He forged a defence that has conceded just 21 goals all season, a record bettered only by Manchester City”.

Yes, he did both of those things. But here’s the thing: not at the same time. First he created good football, then he ripped it up (not deliberately) for defensive solidity. Toward the end of last season, Liverpool hit a devastating patch of form, with Kuyt, the flaky-in-the-wrong-system Maxi, and the jettisoned (for a vastly inferior replacement) Meireles all feeding off, and rotating about, Suárez’s cunning and darting movement: a team characterized by electric final-third interplay, and all the better for Gerrard’s absence. This season has been largely lumpen, prosaic fare. Conclusion? When Kenny had to improvise, he was able to throw together a nice recipe for good football; since being given the keys to the piggy bank, he has so far been unable to construct coherent, progressive football.

Is the parade of ordinariness – and boy, when was the last time such a pedestrian, average Fergie team visited Anfield? – genuine cause for concern? If so, should we simply shrug like dutiful acolytes? How does it reflect on Dalglish? Spending £35m is hardly a minor decision for all but a couple of clubs in Europe. And it directly affects the speed of the team’s recovery.

Whether or not we think the divine body of Dalglish is the right man for this job – and I do, albeit with caveats – it would be wise to acknowledge the piety that might, a priori, lead to all manner of argumentative contortions and self-deceit, to what Nietzsche described in The Genealogy of Morals as an instinct “in which every lie is sanctified”. After all, let’s not forget the etymological link between credentials (often thought of as an entirely objective and measurable quality) and credulousness. Sometimes, we see what we want to believe, the ‘properties’ or ‘attributes’ that you wish to see (including ‘charisma’), especially when the fervour is strongest.

Perhaps every club has its prophets, its potential messiahs, yet the vehemence with which one must endorse their every last action and not venture any dissenting theories is not a healthy state of affairs. Football is still too pious. And frankly, it all seems too trivial.

It is not an easy thing to do, and should not be rushed, but it is possible to support your team at the same time as abandoning the reflex chirruping of the party line, to depart the now timorous, now tumescent herd, to live life as becoming, not belonging (no wonder that, in the Romance languages, ‘to experience’ is generally the same verb as ‘to experiment’). Tribalism is so un-becoming, with its top-down emotional prescriptions, its pantomime hatred, the utter subjection of thought and belief to a miserable sense of identity, the fetid interiority of it all. One only need look at recent events in Port Said to apprehend the cancerous ‘microfascism’ lurking within the herd and apt to appear when its us/them borders are rigid and the molecules within become overheated, unable to dissipate the identity-system’s energy… Desire is physics. So, try and turn down those passion taps, folks: pride is not a universal positive. Attain immanence, like Viv Anderson. No fixed attachments. Fuck it: let’s play as the UK. Who cares? Nations are artifices, a pious costume for the mute biological process that we are.

They say it’s a terrible thing, to lose one’s beliefs. It’s not. Not if the thing you believe in is a morass of lies, wish-fulfilling fantasies and subjugation mechanisms. Escape, escape! And allow football to escape with you. For, as football shows us every week, in grounds the length and breadth of the country, the last thing we need is the false togetherness of the herd. What we need are tools for conviviality.

Quite urgently.

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WHITHER LIVERPOOL...? (OR: WILL 'EL PISTOLERO' MISS MEIRELES' BULLETS?)

With the summer plans of the majority of Europe’s elite players now decided, attention returns once more to the throb and rumble of domestic football. And at the end of a week in which Premier League-watchers have got their quasi-socialist knickers in a twist (at least twenty years too late, frankly, no matter how sensible their long-term arguments) over the contentious TV rights-selling plans voiced by Liverpool MD Ian Ayre, it is no bad thing that both the league in general and his club’s supporters in particular – its fans in the Far East included – can look forward to arguably their blue riband fixture: the visit of Manchester United to Anfield.

Focussing again on on-field matters – and thus reminding (or congratulating) ourselves of the potential commercial hegemony of the League As A Whole when compared to all other European leagues – provides an opportune juncture for supporters of Liverpool to take stock of where they will be by the time the summer rolls round. Specifically, it is time to ask – before today’s result obscures too much, good or bad – how Kenny Dalglish’s Anfield makeover is coming along now that the honeymoon period is definitively over.

Any statistician would tell you that a seven-match old Premier League season is not a significant enough period to arrive at hard-and-fast conclusions, but it might be sufficient to provide clues as to emerging tendencies. Certainly, this would be implicit in the views aired last week by the latest Kop Idol, Luis Suárez, who, in an interview with Gazzetta dello Sport, has unequivocally written off the club’s title aspirations, about which the red 58% of the city was so bullish back in May: “We have no limit and want to stay in the top four. The main reason why it is so difficult is because the two Manchesters and Chelsea are unreachable. But we can win the cups.”

What to make of Suárez’s remarks? Do they provide a hefty dose of realism to a club not slow, of late, to inflate small grounds for optimism into harbingers of imminent glory (something of which I have been guilty)? Are they an unnecessarily negative pronouncement from someone who has become, very quickly, arguably even more central to Liverpool’s fortunes than was Fernando Torres at his coruscating peak? Are they symptoms of a loss of faith in the Uruguayan regarding Dalglish’s ‘project’ at Anfield?

Without wishing to fence-sit: maybe, maybe not. Either way, these opinions should not really be evaluated on the basis of whether true or false (he could be bluffing, after all), for they are not ‘objective’ scientific statements, made from some loftily neutral perspective beyond what they purport to describe. They need to be understood as actions, ones that can themselves are part of, and can alter, the course of events (much as economists will tell you that consumer confidence has been adversely affected by gloomy forecasts, opinions, coming from Downing Street). As anyone who has played in a sports team will tell you, Suárez might – might – have unwittingly started to undermine the self-belief in the squad, like a slow puncture, imperceptible at first…

Anyway, regardless of such conjecture, it is self-evident that the two Manchester clubs have hit the ground running, just two points apiece dropped and goals aplenty. City’s extended spending spree in Europe’s luxury stores is starting to lose its starchy newness and settle together snugly as an outfit, while Fergie’s youthful additions and re-introductions (Jones, Young, De Gea, Cleverley, Welbeck) are meshing with the whippersnapper deadliness of Nani, Hernández and Rooney to promise much for the foreseeable future. The duopoly looks settled for now, but nothing is guaranteed. Granted, the two clubs have formidable shock absorbers in place for any potentially destabilising events, but you simply never know – this time last year, everyone said double-winning Chelsea were looking unstoppable, that Ancelotti was going to emulate Mourinho with back-to-back titles in his debut seasons. Then they fired Wilkins and off flew the wheels…

So, things can change quickly, but let’s assume that any misfortune befalling these juggernauts (further repercussions of the Tevez affair; the removal of Rooney or Silva through injury) is not substantial enough to derail them. Then, as Suárez says, Liverpool should reasonably surmise that they are competing with Chelsea, Spurs and Arsenal for two Champions League spots, in pursuit of which they have already defeated the latter at the Emirates, in almost identical fashion to the controversial Merseyside derby at Goodison (winning 2-0 after their opponents had been reduced to ten men with the game goalless), giving them excellent away wins in what ought to be two of their more difficult fixtures. Yet Arsenal are already being dismissed as top-four contenders in some quarters (including their Chief Executive, it seems) having lost over half their league games and been humiliated 8-2 at Old Trafford; Chelsea, meanwhile, have started brightly under Vilas-Boas and look strong. So, maybe it is a simple shootout for fourth with Spurs, a team that battered Liverpool 4-0, of course (having themselves been trounced 5-1 at the Lane by Man City and lost at Old Trafford).

Now, however you appraise the significance of all that, it is not so much the results as the manner of Liverpool’s play that suggest to some of the less blindly reverential supporters that the club’s transfer activity in the summer, while adding depth, has not augmented the quality in a manner concomitant with the financial outlay. A nervy victory over Wolves and a home draw (the perennial problem of the Rafa era) with Sunderland, as well as defeat at Stoke when having utterly dominated the game, suggest that Liverpool do not yet have the requisite attacking dimensions at their disposal. The key question is whether this is a problem of the parts or of the whole, of the individuals’ talents or the cohesiveness of the group?

Liverpool's summer shopping still have it all to prove...

Of the three North-eastern lads purchased – at a cost of £75m – by Dalglish to bolster the squad/team, only Stewart Downing can be said to have performed creditably so far. As for the albatross-lugging Carroll, it is now widely accepted that Liverpool had no part to play in his exorbitant fee, merely telling Chelsea that they would have to pay £15m more for Torres than the Geordies wanted for their big Number 9. However, while this arrangement may have balanced the books (Carroll + Suárez = Torres + Babel, give or take), it nevertheless provided ‘information’ about the club’s behaviour in the market and thus continues to have an economic ‘half-life,’ affecting their subsequent dealings. Indeed, there is a feeling Liverpool have paid over the odds for almost all their summer purchases (save Charlie Adam, maybe). Certainly, there is a disparity in the price of Downing when compared to his former Villa teammate, Ashley Young, fast becoming a key man for both club and country. 

It could well be that Liverpool’s stuttering displays are because Dalglish is set on mixing and matching his formations to suit the opponent. On the other hand, it could be that they are caught between styles of play, two in particular (perhaps at the same time): the first, wing-based, is an attempt to adopt a 4-4-1-1 that seeks to maximise the gifts of Carroll with service from the flanks (albeit, in the continued absence of Gerrard, with the hitherto ineffectual Henderson or the slow Kuyt on the right), with Suárez free to roam in the hole. The other is a Dalglishian twist on the 4-2-3-1 system beloved of Rafa, the twist being that the most advanced player, Suárez, has the licence to drop deep and the three could interchange when Liverpool were in possession. With Maxi, Kuyt and Meireles as the advanced midfield trident in the second of these formations, Liverpool finished last season in rampart form (barring the last two games, only one of which had anything at stake). It was the living, breathing embodiment of that Boot Room pass-and-move tradition in which Dalglish was steeped, and seemed to foreshadow how the team would play this season.

"You talkin' to me?"

But no – the midfield sophistication and guile of Raul Meireles, so crucial to the club’s recovery, has been jettisoned, ostensibly over a request for the relative pittance (particularly when you consider what is being spent on Joe Cole to play for Lille, and in the past on Babel, Voronin, et al) of an extra £30k per week, as had been promised him by Roy Hodgson. For many, he was the best midfielder on the staff – including Gerrard – but last year’s PFA Fans’ Player of the Year (yes, they knew) has now gone, walking straight into compatriot Andre Vilas-Boas’ first-choice midfield combination at Chelsea and taking with him 50 caps for Portugal and that Iberian gift for subtle positioning and rapid ball circulation, the sort that means a partially unlocked defence cannot recover through ponderous or careless touches (a trait much in evidence with Henderson, it has to be said). 

With a surplus of midfielders having been accumulated at Anfield, was this the wrong one to sacrifice? For all Adam and Lucas’s strengths, neither is especially adept at the short, quick passing game (although the Brazilian is improving all the time), while Gerrard is no midfield general. Indeed, his presence in that area of the field all too often confuses matters for those around him, people of more sober temperament and lesser physical gifts. Far better to have him purvey his unpredictable and slightly frenetic brand of making-things-happen in the final third. In this light, surely the Portuguese’s talents – especially his link-up play with Suárez – should have been the cornerstone of this campaign’s stratagem. 

Well, all this is now moot, and for many Liverpool supporters Meireles’ departure on the last day of the window remains the great mystery of the recent transfer activity. Have they broken that great truism of sports management: if it ain’t broke… Or are we jumping the gun? Is it blasphemy even to question Dalglish’s vision, given his reputation at the club and the outstanding job in stabilizing a very rocky boat in January? Only time will tell. 

Nevertheless, while Carroll, Gerrard, and Downing will hope next June finds them chasing glory between the Black and Baltic Seas, Liverpool need to ensure that they have late summer Champions League trips of their own on the horizon. In order to try and secure that, Fenway Sports Group probably need to go shopping once more next January, and there are unlikely to be many bargains to be had. 

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REVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

king kenny, ken?

“Don’t do it!” I pleaded. “It’s sentimentality, pure and simple” I screamed. “You’ll just become a laughing stock, like that other Messiah-seeking club, Newcastle,” I reasoned. But Liverpool went and did it anyway. They listened to the great swell from the Kop – Dog-leash, Dog-leash – and appointed as manager the man widely regarded as the club’s Greatest Ever Player: ‘King’ Kenny Dalglish. “It’ll end in tears,” I mused, a feeling only confirmed when we lost at Blackpool in his first league game at the helm.

Never have I been more wrong about anything. Ever. Not even when I predicted that the Internet was a fad, or when I invested my life savings in flavoured ‘tongue sandpaper’ to help heavy-drinking smokers de-scunge of a morning.

As we all know, Dalglish’s tenure has, up to now, been little short of a miracle, transforming a side that was failing – flailing – to pull itself clear of the relegation dogfight into one that pushed hard for Europe and accrued more points per game in the second half of the season (1.833) than any other side save Manyoo and Chelski (it would have been better than even these two, too, were it not for campaign ending back-to-back defeats), in the process galvanising the entire club, top to toe.

How did it happen?

Evidently, getting rid of those preposterous and odious buffoons, Tom Hicks and George Gillett, was the turning point. Lest it be forgotten, their leveraged buy-out in February 2007 had mortgaged the club to the hilt, prodding it onto a vicious hamster wheel of money-down-the-drain debt-servicing. With a 3-2 executive board vote (can you guess who the two were?) finally removing the Statler and Waldorf-shaped shadow from the club on 15 October 2010 – in what they would describe, with no little chutzpah, as “an epic swindle”, prompting a threat to sue for £1 billion – we began to photosynthesise again. The club was swiftly sold, to new Yankee-doodle-everything’s-fine-and-dandy owners, New England Sports Ventures: chalk to the Texo-Canadian cheese and held in extremely high regard across the Pond, having turned around the fortunes of another iconic-yet-underachieving team, the Boston Red Sox. Even so, the gloom was still not entirely lifted, nor would it be as long as Roy Hodgson was pottering around Melwood like Terry Tibbs’s dullard chauffeur.

Hicks and Gillett look on in dismay from the Executive Box 

Of course, both Woy and his apologists – of whom there are many – point to the rot having set in the previous season, when the Rafa-lution started to run out of momentum, largely due to the cowboy (cowboy) executives and a dithering Rick Parry. Before this, however, Liverpool were a solid member of the so-called “so-called Big Four” and had become accustomed to life in the Champions League, with its cloying-yet-starting-to-grow-on-me anthem. In May 2009 they had finished a close second to a Manchester United side featuring Ronaldo, Rooney, Tevez and Berbatov as forward options (occasionally deployed by Fergie in the swastika formation), and boasted, in the complimentary talents of Gerrard, Xabi Alonso, and Javier Mascherano, arguably Europe’s second best midfield triumvirate. Add to that a peaking Fernando Torres to score the goals and Pepe Reina to keep them out, and Liverpool were primed to challenge for that elusive nineteenth title. Then we spent all our money on debts (and Robbie Keane). 

Despite the hugely disappointing follow-up season, in the fans’ eyes Rafa was still surfing the vast credit accrued during those six crazy minutes™ in Istanbul (and another near-miraculous European Cup final appearance two years later), but not in the eyes of Hicks and Gillett. The occasionally crabby, truculent Spaniard departed “by mutual consent” in June 2010 with a £6m golden handshake, leaving relatively little time for Hodgson – appointed on 1 July, after Dalglish’s application had been rejected – to strengthen a top-heavy squad overly reliant on the aforementioned figures (minus Alonso and, soon, Mascherano). 

Now, no one disputes that Hodgson is a decent, affable man, one whose appointment (widely backed in the media, lest it be forgotten) was considered a safe-pair-of-hands move for the choppy waters through which the Ferry ‘cross the Mersey was sailing; even so, it cannot really be argued now that he was unlucky, that he was anything other than ill-equipped to deal with the enormity of both the club and its problems. True, he persuaded Torres to stay (albeit without quite coaxing a smile out of him) and signed the impressive Raul Meireles. Jon-Jo Shelvey and Milan Jovanović arrived, as arranged by Rafa, along with Rangers prospect, Danny Wilson. English football’s Peter Pan, Joe Cole, was brought in on a free (and £100k-a-week) and out-of-contract Fábio Aurélio returned only months after rejecting a pay-as-you-play deal. However, it would be the singularly underwhelming signings of Paul Konchesky and Christian Poulsen that stung the Liverpool fans’ pride, and that would thus eventually define his short, tempestuous stewardship. 

On the field, Hodgson’s Liverpool began abysmally and thereafter scarcely improved. Amidst a woeful run in the league, Northampton visited Anfield and dumped us from the Carling Cup (“formidable opponents”, said Hodgson, of the Cobblers. Cobblers!). Thus, with the team playing with all the cohesion of a troop of psilocybin mushroom-swallowing anarchist gibbons at the start of a game of hide-and-seek (for which Woy was largely responsible, with his overly defensive and inflexible set-up), it became increasingly disconcerting and painful to look on at his general passivity in the technical area, standing there, dogmatic and devoid of a Plan B, not so much concentrating on the pitch as not looking at the crowd; unquestionably, this indecision invited more catcalls and opprobrium from the stands – and boy, did the Kop give it to Woy like no previous manager had got it. 

The undoubted nadir of Hodgson’s chin-stroking fecklessness was the year’s final game: a 0-1 home defeat to an exceedingly average Wolves side. So appalling were Liverpool that night that even the standard insults – “they can’t string three passes together” – had to be scaled down accordingly. But at least, during these dark days, the Liverpool fans retained something of their famous humour: baited by Evertonians during the 2-0 derby loss at Goodison with the chant “going down, going down, going down,” Liverpool’s travelling support replied “so are we, so are we, so are we…” Magic. 

The irritation caused by Hodgson’s tactical rigidity and general ponderousness pervaded his media dealings, too. As well as responding to criticism of Liverpool’s results with stock reference to the “dead wood” left by the previous regime (bound to have had his squad wondering to whom, exactly, he was alluding), among the worst of his PR blunders – mistakes, incidentally, that the cussed Dalglish was never going to make – was that of being overly deferential to Sir Fergie, de facto head of a sect of British managers at the LMA – a body that only the previous season had voted Hodgson Manager of the Year for his work at Fulham – an unofficial lobby (including Allardyce, Pulis, Bruce, Holloway, Moyes, and McCleish) that would often do the Govaner guv’nor’s media bidding whenever an upstart and/or foreigner (Wenger and Benítez, in particular) got out of line. But perhaps the most fatal PR gaffe was his sarcastic reference to the “famous Liverpool support” after the aforementioned Wolves game, a mistake that would precipitate the end. 

To the exultation of many and surprise of few, Dalglish took over as caretaker on 8 January. Despite the temptations (and distortions) of nostalgia, it should be recalled that this was not an instantaneous, Disney-like transformation in which Kenny’s sheer charisma made everything spic’n’span anew as he swept about the place, regally; indeed, it is almost astonishing to recall that Liverpool didn’t actually win until his fourth game, at Wolves, as a gallant 10-man FA cup defeat at Old Trafford was followed first by the dismal completion of Blackpool’s double over us, then a Merseyside derby draw. That being said, the first month was all about a rapid and necessary reorganization. To this end, the appointment – sorry, Dalglish’s appointment – of Steve Clarke to organize the defence and structure the training sessions was crucial in helping a recently careworn playing staff shed their inhibitions and produce a corresponding upturn in results. 

Meanwhile, for a net spend of zero, Kenny finally got rid of Ryan Babel’s cult muppetry and unburdened everyone of the sulking Torres (who had started to live up to the nickname El Niño). Torres’ departure, in particular, was a blessing that had already started stepping daintily out of its disguise; the pouting and moping and preening had for some time betrayed a sour, loveless marriage, a relationship that, at the time, we couldn’t quite let go, even though, had we cared to notice, the evidence before our eyes was overwhelming. How drunk on schadenfreude we would get, then, seeing the erstwhile apple of our eye depart for Chelsea and subsequently fail to, erm, ‘land a date’ for a whole 903 minutes of increasingly despondent, too-many-chiefs cul-de-sac running, while we nipped off down the pub and pulled an absolute stunner (metaphorically), probably even hotter than our outgoing beau / belle when he / she had first arrived from Sunny Spain. 

Towers and Babel, by Peiter Breughel

With Towers and Babel jettisoned, in from those twin bastions of esoteric nightlife, Amsterdam and NewCASTLE-like, came Luis Suárez for £22.8m – already cheap at half the price (by which I mean cheap at double the price) – and an injured Andy Carroll for £35m, a fee that has twisted many a knicker. Not that it needed to, for John Henry himself has stated that Liverpool didn’t even enter the negotiations; these were conducted directly between Chelsea and Newcastle, the former told by Liverpool that they would be paying +£15m for whatever the latter wanted for Kevin Nolan’s court order-constrained lodger. 

El pistolero has obviously made a gigantic impression and confounded even the most optimistic Reds with his bravery, industry, intelligence, movement, craft, and craftiness. With some footballers it’s justifiable to imagine moments of zero danger, simply because these players don’t have the skills or wit to extricate themselves from a tight spot; with Suárez, there’s always some danger, even in the tightest angle, back to goal, the trickster can pull something out of the hat… 

As for Wor Andy, the jury must remain out (a phrase that would surprise no-one if heard in a rather more literal context in the near-future). He is, of course, a monster in the air; time will tell whether he can be successfully integrated into a team that had recently rediscovered the pass-and-move method that once made the club European top dogs. It’s certainly hoped by everyone at Anfield that he can at least start the season fit, if only so that he doesn’t bench-warm alongside Sotirios Kyrgiakos where the two of them resemble a pair of Latino heavies off Miami Vice. Had Andriy Voronin still been there too, the ponytail frenzy in the dugout would probably have started to attract scouts. Porno casting scouts, that is... 

rumours of segregation along hair lines in the LFC dressing room proved persistent

Anyway, Kenny’s first five months of action have brought us much jubilation: the goals and wit of Raul Meireles; the arrival of Lucas as a midfielder of substance; the successive emergence of Flanagan and Kelly at right full-back (an Irish folk duo?); the 3-1 defeat of the Mancs, including a virtuoso performance from Suárez and the shortest aggregate distance hat-trick in the history of the game (about by 4.5 yards) by the perma-grafting Kuyt, not forgetting the Kop joyously regaling Dalglish with a polyharmonic rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’. 

Maxi Factor

Yet perhaps the greatest symbol of the club’s metamorphosis under Dalglish was the seven-goal-in-three-game purple patch enjoyed by Maxi Rodríguez – a player who has, lest we forget, won over 50 caps for Argentina (and scored of one of the greatest World Cup goals of all time), but who had not, it’s fair to say, set the world on fire. Or even Merseyside, where arson is on the school curriculum. In fact, had bookies offered 10,000-1 odds in January on Maxi notching two Premier League hat-tricks before the season was out, one imagines that not even his Mum would have taken a punt. Perhaps it was the form of Maxi and his interplay with Suárez and Meireles against Birmingham and Fulham that led Fenway Sports Group (the new name for NESV), after much umm-ing and aah-ing, to offer Dalglish a contract (a news story to file alongside ‘Sun Rises’), the finalization of which was then inevitably followed by a lacklustre home defeat to Tottenham in a game that would have guaranteed European football (a defeat that many supporters see as a blessing in disguise) and an end-of-school loss at Villa Park. 

The optimism fired during those five months has not, it seems, been unduly scratched by the slightly centre-mid-centric and British-flavoured summer transfer activity (along with persistent rumours of Meireles’ departure). Liverpool’s shopping began with the capture of Jordan Henderson, a Moneyball-influenced signing, no doubt (i.e. above-average stats in a below-average performing team; re-sale value), which was followed by landing the impressive gap-toothed Scottish pivote, Charlie Adam (a replacement for Xabi Alonso, maybe?), and the much-maligned Stuart Downing, Aston Villa’s Player of the Year, to put crosses on a certain Geordie yed.

Doubtless FSG have their plans for creating revenue to pay for this splurge – perhaps to consolidate their pre-eminence over United in the lucrative Far East markets (that’s shirt sales, not opium) – although they now seem resigned to the fact that Anfield cannot be adequately upgraded to the sort of stadium capacity that would allow us to compete more evenly, with Manyoo, the Arse and Chelski, at least, if not the bottomless petrodollar funds of the upstarts from Eastlands. 

What is undeniable is that, only months after the most depressing episode – both on and off the field – in living memory, the club has its soul back. The glass is once again half-full. What was there to worry about? It’s Kenny, for fuck’s sake. And there’s a certain beetroot-hootered knight who knows there’s someone at Anfield ready to go mano a mano. 

So, as I sit here delighted and mystified after the most turbulent, bewildering and ultimately joyous season in Liverpool’s modern history, the lesson in it all seems to be this: maybe there are times – specifically, when your club is going in more directions simultaneously than a herd of wildebeest being set upon by hungry lions – when misty-eyed sentimentalism is as logical a reason as any other to appoint a favourite son as manager.

YNWA.

Making of a Legend: Dalglish at Liverpool:

8 seasons as a player (1977-1985):

won six titles, three European Cups, an FA Cup, and four consecutive League Cups.

6 years as manager (1984-1990):

won three titles and two FA Cups. Heysel meant there was no European competition, then Hillsborough happened (April 1989.

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