Resistance Is Useless
By The Boy Wonder
From Issue 50, Winter 2001
I suppose I should put in a disclaimer round
about now. It singles me out amongst my fellow
Englishmen, but I genuinely love the French. Without
understanding 99.9% of it, they speak the most
beautiful language in the world. Flick about on
the MW of your radio, eavesdrop on a French station
and then try it with a German one. The difference
is stark, like comparing a kiss on the cheek to
a punch on the nose. Their capital city pisses
all over ours; it is so beautiful that it can
even (albeit temporarily) make you forget that
your team has just humiliated itself and you by
losing it’s biggest game of the season 0-3
and going out with a whimper instead of a bang.
Their Art is among the greatest of all time, and
museums and galleries are full to bursting point
with the evidence. Their contribution to Literature
has been immense, from Dumas to Belloc, Flaubert
to Proust. The French hold Cinema, rightly, in
the highest possible regard and kept it at the
forefront of the arts when America was quite happy
to reduce it to materialistic sludge. The number
of classic films they’ve made in their own
country runs into the hundreds. Their football
teams play with the flair and attack that the
world wants to see, often playing with verve and
suffering from comparisons to the overrated Brazilians.
As a Liverpool fan it hurts to say it, but Case
Souness McDermott and Kennedy can only be usurped
by one midfield in the battle for the greatest;
Giresse, Tigana, Platini and Fernandez. The people
have an endearing Bolshie streak, which has long
since been squeezed out of the British. When they
go out on strike, they stay out on strike. When
they protest, you know about it!
With the occupation of France during both world
wars, it has often been the English way to stereotype
the French as cowards who will not fight. This
is a terrible slur on the brave men and women
of the Resistance, but it is still part of the
English mindset. As for football, there doesn’t
seem to be anything too cowardly about Eric Cantona
or Patrick Vieira, while the Arsenal team managed
by Wenger has been one of the bravest and occasionally
savage in recent seasons.
I suppose all the above is really my ‘covering
note’ for any subsequent accusations of
Francophobia, but I have got to come right out
and say it. Under Gerard Houllier, Liverpool have
lost all their stomach for a fight. It seems strange
to say it, I know, especially after the battling
display at Old Trafford, but don’t forget
that we were winning that game and simply held
onto the lead. The true test of a side’s
battling qualities is in adversity, when we’re
behind.
I’m writing this after the almost inevitable
defeat at Crystal Palace. The extreme sloth of
TTW&R’s editor (file the speed of issue
49’s arrival under ‘Miracle’
– sorry, Steve!) will no doubt see this
printed, if at all, after a run of games where
we have turned defeat into victory. It still won’t
alter the fact that this is the next step of Houllier’s
development as a manager. We must start turning
around such games, or we will be known forever
as a ‘fair weather’ team.
It is 14 months since Liverpool came from behind
to win a league game. And that was at home; 1
down to relegation threatened Sheffield Wednesday
(keep dropping, scum), Sami nodded in a corner
to level the match and Super Danny hooked in the
second. Gerrard’s first ever goal, and still
his best despite some recent classics, settled
the ship and Thommo scored another beaut. 4-1
in a game that we were we losing. That was the
last time it happened. Ironic, perhaps, that Thommo
should score in that game. Here was a player that
you could rely on in a scrap. The players he left
behind have not been so resilient, to say the
least.
So far this season, we’ve got a point against
Sunderland and a scrappy win over Liberec in games
we were losing. Since Sheffield Wednesday were
turned over by the Reds – hopefully the
last time we’ll ever have to face the murdering
bastards again – The Reds have lost to Spurs,
Blackburn, Chelsea, Leicester, Bradford, Arsenal,
Chelsea, Leeds, Spurs, Newcastle, Ipswich, Middlesbrough
and Crystal Palace. The pattern has become alarming
but irrefutable: if we’re getting beat,
we’ll stay beaten.
It’s not as if we can blame it on a lack
of time to recover. In virtually all of the above
matches, there was plenty of the game left to
recover the deficit but we never did. In ten of
them, we had more than 45 minutes of football
to catch up. The Leeds defeat emphasises the problem
of Liverpool’s almost bully-like side. We
were winning 2-0, 2-1 and 3-2. Each time, Leeds
were brave enough and resilient enough to hit
back. Once the score went to 4-3, that was the
end of the scoring. Not only that, but the Reds
had created chance after chance throughout the
game and squandered most of them. Once we were
behind, the chances dried up and Leeds ambled
to their victory. They had shown guts and determination.
Despite being outplayed for 70% of the match,
they deserved their win.
As a confirmed Houllier cynic (see ‘Lost
in Transition’, #45), this could be misconstrued
by some as clutching at straws, massaging the
figures to make it look as if Gerard isn’t
doing the business. Obviously, I beg to differ.
Since that article, I have come to see a lot of
endearing qualities in ‘The Frenchman’.
We all write/speak from the heart, and my heart
at the time told me that he would fail. With certain
reservations (his transfer record, for one), I
can now say that the Reds are moving along the
right lines. We just differ about the speed of
movement, and the team’s numerous failures
to bounce back from adversity must be addressed.
There is simply no ignoring the matter.
Let’s take a recent season as proof. A particular
favourite of mine, the Fowler/Collymore blitz
season of 1995/96. If the current 12-month Liverpool
record of one extra league point gained from matches
being lost had applied then, we would not have
come third but tenth. Four places below Everton,
if you want to get even more worried about it!
When you consider that third nowadays gets you
into the lucrative but vacuous Champions League,
you can see how resilience becomes extremely important.
Losing to Man U – drew 2-2. Losing to Southampton
twice – won 3-1 and drew 1-1. Losing to
Arsenal – won 3-1. Losing to Chelsea (twice)
– drew 2-2. Losing to Forest by two goals
– won 4-2. Losing at Wednesday – drew
1-1. Losing to Wimbledon – drew 2-2. Losing
to Newcastle – won an extraordinary game
4-3. Getting beat at Goodison – Fowler wiped
the smiles off their faces and we drew 1-1. Four
wins and six draws which, in the current climate,
would have been 9 defeats and 1 draw. Don’t
tell me this isn’t a vital part of the equation.
In fact, it’s worth mentioning that a little
apology is due to Roy Evans and the much-maligned
Spice Boys. There is a strange mythology taking
hold of Anfield that Houllier has introduced grit,
bottle, the right stuff – in fact, everything
that Roy lacked or was never able to instil in
his team(s). The ‘facts’ (those bothersome
little tykes!) don’t bear this out, I’m
afraid. In his first full season, Liverpool often
prized open the jaws of defeat and knocked its
bloody teeth out. Even in a game like Blackburn,
where a lot of the fans themselves didn’t
want us to win. Liverpool won 5 and draw 3 of
the league games they were losing that season.
Another 18 points which the current side would
have let slip.
Even Graeme Souness had his moments. True, work-rate
and fight were about the only qualities that had
survived his transition from player to manager.
The skill, the class, the slick passing, the ferocious
shooting – none of that was passed on to
his protégés, sadly. However, the
1992 FA Cup triumph was founded on the kind of
grit that marked The Beast as the greatest Liverpool
captain of all. The Reds were losing to Bristol
Rovers, Ipswich and Pompey (when we were down
to ten men and the manager was about to go into
hospital) before finally beating a poor Sunderland
team in the final. In case readers think I’m
trying to pull a fast one, ask yourself a question;
what do you think would happen to the current
side if they went 3 down to Man U in twenty minutes?
And if your answer was “we’d draw
3-3, obviously”, then get somebody to give
you a good slap.
Of course, the new team may well learn to rally
against the odds and start turning defeat into
victory. The all-purpose and (for Houllier) massively
convenient “period of transition”
perhaps comes into play here. The year before
they ended a 26-year wait for the title, United
lost 3 games in a week during the run-in –
one against already-relegated West Ham, who in
a wonderfully insane quote from Ferguson had “tried
too hard”. Liverpool lost three in a week
when Gerard was given the job to himself, but
it would be an idiot who tried to suggest that
we hadn’t made significant improvements
since.
Is the manager also on a learning curve? He has
made plenty of errors, and perhaps this fair weather
attitude in matches is a direct result of his
own caution and pessimism – filed, by a
cynic like myself, under the heading “job
preservation”. Houllier seems intent on
playing down any optimism at the club whatsoever,
just in case it undermines his position and creates
unreasonably ambitious targets. There was almost
a sense of relief that we hadn’t come third
last season. You got the feeling that the manager
was quite happy to play down the progress that
had been made thus far. From seventh to fourth
in a year? Why, that would mean with another rise
of three places this season we’d be………we’d
be………
Complete bollocks, of course. Liverpool were never
going to win this championship, and supporters
hell bent on taking the most optimistic of outlooks
really did need to be reigned in somewhat, but………what
if the players are taking all this stuff on board,
too? Confidence plays a major part in football,
and I’ve often wondered if Houllier’s
public caution was not solely confined to the
press room but was also seeping into the dressing
room. After a titanic win at Old Trafford and
the mauling of Arsenal, expectation was at fever
pitch. It’s only natural that the manager
would want to get that under control, but he seems
to have completely punctured the confidence that
those two outstanding victories should have brought.
Is it just possible that, as soon as the Middlesbrough
game became more difficult at 0-1, heads dropped
as though the players themselves were thinking
“he’s right, we’re not good
enough”?
In the stats that I’ve been using (pouring
over record books is a total obsession with me)
it’s only fair to point out one advantage
of Houllier’s over Evans; that Liverpool
are in fact finding themselves a goal down less
often, thus negating to a degree the need to fight
back. After all, if we were winning every game
my particular bugbear would have no relevance
whatsoever would it? It’s a bit like the
craving for clean sheets. If we can score 3 or
4 ourselves, who honestly gives a shit? But we’re
not winning every game, are we? Far from it, in
fact. This season alone has seen a lot of points
dropped in games that we’ve been winning.
Two at Southampton, two at West Ham, three at
Leeds, three at Spurs – there’s ten
points that could have put us right in the championship
race that Houllier keeps telling us we’ve
no part in. Our inability to make every lead count
brings our inability to equalise into a much sharper
focus.
It has to be said that this isn’t a fault
that our much-detested rivals suffer from. Who,
like me, was absolutely panic-stricken at the
end of the Old Trafford game that the bastards
were going to ‘do’ us again? Judging
by the close-ups of the away section on Sky Sports
that day, almost everyone. It was an agonising
half an hour or so, because we knew that if anyone
could break down our massed defence it was ‘them’.
The greatest season in their history was founded
on such comebacks, as we know to our great cost.
A season that may have brought them nothing instead
brought them everything.
Go through it; in the FA Cup, they were losing
to us with a minute to go. In the semi final,
they were facing Arsenal with ten men and facing
a penalty in injury time with the score 1-1. In
the league, on the final day, when the Kop was
full of Gooners (or sad twats, as I’d call
them) Man U were losing to Spurs while Arsenal
were winning their last game. In Europe, they
were 2 down away to Juventus (another night of
Kop realignment) and were 1 down to Bayern with
a minute to go. United won all of those games.
That season was an object lesson in fighting for
your club, until the whistle blows. That they
turned a season of no trophies into a season with
3 was hard to take. That they had done it with
a resilience and a spirit that once typified the
greatest teams of OUR club was almost too much
to bear.
We simply cannot ignore the importance of this
current failing. Fourteen months without such
a comeback would suggest that this is not something
to be taken lightly, or a freak occurrence, and
since we have already missed Champions League
qualification by two points in this Millennium
it would be the height of folly to pretend it’s
not important. What is the solution? Perhaps if
the manager stopped playing down and started building
up, that would be a start. Perhaps the fans need
to play their part. Odd, since we usually make
a lot of noise on our travels, but the grumbling
becomes louder when the opposition takes control.
That’s the moment when everyone connected
with the club has to stand up and be counted.
The man at the helm has to lead by example. Almost
any team can play well when things are going their
way, but it takes men of true quality to suffer
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and
then overcome them. Here are some very, very late
football results:
1960 European Cup final: Eintracht 1 Real Madrid
0
1966 World Cup final: England 0 West Germany 1
1976 League ‘decider’: Wolves 1 Liverpool
0
1976 UEFA Cup final 1st leg: Liverpool 0 Bruges
2
1977 European Cup qf: Liverpool 1 St Etienne 1
(agg 1-2)
1983 League Cup final: Manchester United 1 Liverpool
0
1986 FA Cup qf: Watford 1 Liverpool 0
1986 FA Cup final: Everton 1 Liverpool 0
1990 FA Cup semi final: Liverpool 3 Crystal Palace
2
1992 FA Cup semi final: Portsmouth 1 Liverpool
0
1996, “game of the century”: Liverpool
1 Newcastle 2
Winners make history – the losers just
make excuses.
|
