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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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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