Michael Batson

The plaque at Liverpool’s airport contains an apt excerpt from the eponymous John Lennon’s song Imagine, ‘Above us only sky’.

 

In that football mad city, England’s most successful club side, Liverpool, the red half of Merseyside, is currently suffering its worst start to a season in decades.

 

Liverpudlians (colloquially known as “Scousers”) are as famous for their humour as they are for their football fervour and knowledge. Beneath the lyrical quote someone had handwritten “And below us only Wolves and West Ham”.

 

Once mighty Liverpool are enduring their worst start to a season in 50 years and find themselves for the first time in 26 years, in the bottom three, the relegation zone, though are unlikely to stay there for long. Last week’s win at Bolton, only their third for the season, saw them move up the table.

 

Proud supporters of a proud club could now be described as troubled fans of a troubled club. Up to the game at Bolton, Liverpool had only won twice this year in the Premiership and drawn six, and no club had drawn games more this season so far.

 

At the end of the Bolton match Liverpool fans before launching into the Kop anthem, extolled the virtues of Anfield Road, the home of the club. It was of little comfort to them then, that Bolton had not beaten Liverpool in over four years.

 

Liverpool recently appointed 62-year-old Roy Hodgson as the club’s first English manager in over a decade replacing his predecessor the Spaniard, Rafael Benitez, who left to take charge at Inter Milan. Hodgson has managed 16 clubs in eight countries in his career including the Switzerland national team, but Liverpool may prove his toughest and possibly last assignment, before retiring.

 

During the Bolton match Hodgson spent more time on his feet than on his seat. When seated he rocked, chewing his nails to the quick. He may have none left soon, despite the early season date this is already Liverpool’s 18th game of the season, when tallied with Europa Cup fixtures.

 

Liverpool are England's most successful club of the 20th century. All up Liverpool has won a joint-record 18 league titles, seven FA Cups and a record seven League Cups. Liverpool is the most successful English club in European competition having won five European Cups (now Champions League), the last in 2005 a famous come from behind victory in Istanbul, and three UEFA Cups, now the Europa Cup, and in which they are competing this year. The club currently ranks third in Europe and sixth in the world with the most international titles won, alongside clubs such as Boca Juniors, AC Milan and Real Madrid.

 

Traditionally, each new manager at Liverpool has been viewed inevitably as an inheritor of the Bill Shankly tradition; to be a brilliant comedian, statesman, team-builder and moral patriarch. Shankly built the foundation on which the success of Liverpool was built in his period in charge from 1959, when they were a second-division side, until his retirement in 1974.

 

Shankly, of gritty Scottish mining pedigree (a worker not an owner) from Glenbuck in Ayrshire near the Larnarkshire border, spotted special virtues in the Scouse identity.

 

I wonder if the club’s foreign owners are familiar with those values; socialism, loyalty, unity and sober endeavour were the principles. He said “I knew the people of Liverpool were like the people where I come from. They've got fervour in them – and they've got pride.”

Shankly once rejected a player, a potential transfer to the club, after he had tested positive for a sexually transmitted disease during his medical. "I'm not having a philanderer here," he erupted. "This is a family club. Send him back." One can only imagine what he’d of made of players’ infidelities in today’s era.

 

Shankly harnessed when he arrived to find Melwood, the club’s training ground, “a wilderness” where “there were hills, there were hollows, there were trees, there was long grass”, and where a passive acceptance of mediocrity was the norm until a change in culture, in the early 1960s, provided the money to buy players the calibre of Ron Yeats and Ian St John.

 

The ultimate accolade for a Liverpool manager is to be compared favourably to Shankly. It is said that the stamp of doom is to be dismissed as a vandal to his legacy. Benitez struggled with the inevitable comparison in the latter stages of his tenure knowing his rotation of players’ policy was under increased scrutiny, he adopted the posture at press conferences of a captured airman being interrogated by the enemy.

 

Since Shankly opted to walk into his own wilderness over 35 years ago, Liverpool have been led by his legacy, three so-called “Boot Room” graduates - where the legendary coach met to discuss tactics both with colleagues and sometimes opposites (Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan and Roy Evans), two Anfield superstars (Kenny Dalglish and Souness) and two A-list European coaches who imported French (Gérard Houllier) and then Spanish cultures (Benitez).

 

During the nine seasons in which Paisley was manager (1974-83), Liverpool won an astonishing 21 trophies, including three European Cups, a UEFA Cup, six league titles and three consecutive League Cups, and sweeping all before them.

 

Shankly lived and breathed Liverpool FC. He was famous for his quotes. Making no deference to Liverpool’s cross-city rivals, Everton, he once said that there were only two teams in the city, Liverpool and Liverpool reserves. His most famous quote, and one adopted by some in other codes, there’s a Aussie Rules shop in Melbourne with an albeit truncated version on the side of the building; “Some people think football is a matter of life and death, but I’m very disappointed with that attitude, it’s much more serious than that.”

 

Liverpool’s troubles this year have been as much about what’s been happening off the pitch as on it, and the two are invariably connected. The club was bought last month by the US-based New England Sports Ventures, a business consortium led by John W Henry, after a bitter courtroom battle that went from tragedy to farce, to wrench the club from its then current owners, and fellow Americans, George Gillett and Tom Hicks.

 

Hicks and Gillett saddled the club with debt, failed to deliver a new stadium as promised, and were a source of ridicule to hardened Kopites, core Liverpool fans. “Built by Shanks, broke by Yanks” were what the banners were saying.

 

Boardroom dramas are nothing new at the club however. In his recently republished memoirs Shankly, Liverpool's spiritual father, remarks that the directors' room where he had to fight for funds was so dark and gloomy that he called it "the morgue" telling one commentator "Watch you don't trip over the coffins." But the advent of foreign ownership and global market players has added a whole new dimension to football finances since the days of Shankly, and not just at Liverpool either, with a myriad of English clubs now owned by wealthy offshore interests who have no ties to the fans or the communities from where the supporter derive.

 

Liverpool’s football history is rich and somewhat unique. Deep rivalry exists between the city’s two Premiership sides, however, unlike other cross-town rivals in England and Europe, the fans aren’t viciously opposed. At cup finals, the supporters are not segregated, as is the case with almost every other opposing set of fans. Families can be split between the two, and though sectarianism exists, it hasn’t risen, or sunk, to the depths found in the geographic divides of Belfast and Ireland, or in the Rangers versus Celtic schism in Glasgow.

 

The Kop enjoys a special relationship with visiting goalkeepers. A sterling first half performance will earn an away ‘keeper a standing ovation from the fans. Graham Taylor has managed Watford and England, these days he makes a living as a commentator. He recalls taking his struggling Watford side to Anfield during a brief foray back in the top flight. After a great performance, having outplayed Liverpool for much of the match, the Kop sung Watford’s accolades after the game, “I’ve never seen that anywhere else,” said Taylor, "they are true supporters."

 

Lee Dixon, Arsenal stalwart, was a Manchester City fan as a boy. Wanting to experience the Kop, he once stood there watching his City side play, his blue and white colours hidden. When City unexpectantly scored he couldn't contain himself, his identity revealed. "I remember this big guy bearing down on me" he recalled. "He looked me up and down and said 'you should always be proud of your colours son'."

 

It's not all sweetness and light however. Visiting Manchester United players have had bottles of urine flung in their direction after disembarking from the team bus, doubtless Shankly would've had something to say about that.

 

A New Zealand journalist visiting the city tried immersing himself in the local culture. Taking a taxi they engaged the driver commenting on the worth of the football team. “Which one?” Came the driver’s response. Caught off-guard and wary of causing offence, the visitor blundered, “er, Liverpool”. At which point the driver, an Evertonian, stopped the vehicle and order the dumbfounded passenger out of the car!

 

Liverpool play at Anfield built in 1884 on land adjacent to Stanley Park, the ground was originally used by Everton before they moved to Goodison Park after a dispute over rent. Liverpool was founded in 1892 and the club has played at Anfield since then. The club’s first match at the ground was attended by only 100 spectators attended Liverpool's first match at Anfield.

 

Twelve years later, the banked stand at one end of the ground was formally renamed the Spion Kop (the Kop hence “Kopite”) after a hill where many Liverpudlians from the Lancashire Regiment died during the Boer War. At its peak, the stand could hold 28,000 spectators, and was one of the largest single tier stands in the world. At its height Anfield could hold over 60,000 fans, and had a capacity of 55,000 until the 1990s.

 

Following the Hillsborough Tragedy, where many Liverpool fans died, Premier League regulations obliged all clubs to convert their stadiums to all-seating, thus reducing the current capacity to 45,276, the days of the mass-terraces were over.

 

The Kop is famous for players and fans alike. Long time Liverpool stalwart, Phil Thompson, a player and later a coach under Houllier, could always pick exactly where on the Kop his family were, as they always stood in the same place, and when taking the field in Liverpool red he’d acknowledge them, almost paying homage.

 

Other fans recall their time on the Kop, some of it less than salubrious. After pre-match hours spent in pubs drinking, toilet breaks were impossible once on the terraces due to the crush and lack of access to facilities. One youngster complained of the urgent need “to go” to his mates and was told to rollup the match programme and piss into the pocket of the bloke standing in front. “Don’t be stupid” he said, “he’ll notice.”

 

“Why” came the reply, “you didn’t!”

 

Famously nicknamed “the Reds” Liverpool have played in red shirts since 1894, adopting the city's symbol of the liver bird as the club's crest in 1901. It was Shankly who changed their strip to all red in 1964, wanting his players to be more distinctly dressed, and changing the white shorts and socks to red. The new colour scheme he thought, would carry psychological impact—red for danger, red for power.

 

Innovative, in a sport now dominated by sponsorship and reliant upon the revenues received from that source and the huge television rights that go with the game these days, Liverpool was the first English professional club to have a sponsor's logo on their shirts after agreeing a deal with Hitachi in 1979.

 

But where to now for England’s most successful club and what will new owners the NESV bring with them? Roy Hodgson will meet NESV to discuss the way forward and potential transfer targets in the January window.

 

Titular head of NESV, John W Henry has already made some moves, meeting with representative supporter groups, albeit understandably sceptical at one set of foreign owners replacing another, “we’re here to listen” he told reporters after a meeting. He has a record of vision, call it strategic thinking. A British broadsheet recently speculated on the likely and confirmed changes NESV will initiate.

 

Already confirmed is the appointment of Damien Comolli, as Director of Football Strategy at Liverpool. Comolli is already familiar with English football having worked with both Spurs and Arsenal. That he has been employed by Liverpool is no surprise. This has been a club crying out for long-term direction. Comolli’s job is to ensure the club is competing with the very best in 2015. Comolli is friends with Billy Beane, the baseball maverick who used a radical statistics-driven approach to achieve success in baseball (soon to be made into a film with Brad Pitt).

 

John W. Henry, Liverpool's new owner, tried to hire Beane when he took over the Red Sox and is an admirer of his methods. Henry is also an admirer of Arsene Wenger, having visited Arsenal before he bought Liverpool, who employed Comolli as his European scout between 1996 and 2003. Wenger has achieved huge successes with young talent during his long tenure as Arsenal manager.

 

It is suspected that Liverpool will set up a football board, like they have at Chelsea, in which key decisions can be made. Comolli and his team will identify players using an established scouting network and bring the best statistical analysis that football currently has to offer, designed to allow the manager to focus on coaching the first team. In the long term, he will help identify a young coach who can build a dynasty at the club.

 

Comolli, a Frenchman, helped design Spur’s new training ground, which is amongst the very best in Europe. Prompted by Gerard Houllier, once France football technical development director, Liverpool’s Melwood was redevelopment in 2001, but if Liverpool are truly to compete with their rivals they will need a state-of-the-art facility, like Chelsea, Arsenal, and Manchester United already possess.

 

English clubs have tried and failed to work with the concept of football managers previously, Comolli’s own stint at Spurs a case in point, after he left under a cloud with then Spanish boss Juan Ramos. But Hodgson has “been around” and is not unfamiliar with the European concept of devolving responsibility for high-level decisions among many heads. The days of the autocratic English manager may be numbered, and Hodgson given his previous European appointments may adapt to this better than others.

 

As for Liverpool’s new owner, NESV and John W Henry turned around his other sporting “investment” recently with his Boston Red Socks defeating bitter rivals the New York Yankees to the US baseball crown. Will history repeat itself? Sir Alex Ferguson was brought into lead Liverpool’s bitter rivals, Manchester United, with the express purpose of reversing Liverpool’s football dominance, he didn’t win a major trophy in his first four years and his first game in charge of the club was an away defeat to unfancied Oxford United.

 

The question is, will Hodgson or his successor, be given the opportunity to rediscover the club’s dominance?