THE CORNER CUTTING THAT COST THE REDS
LIVERPOOL LOST THEIR WAY POST 1990, BUT KLOPP HAS RESTORED WINNING ETHOS
Graeme Souness has always remembered the day, in the 1990s, when Wimbledon came to anfield and Vinnie Jones stuck a piece of paper with the word ‘ Bothered’ over the famous ‘This is anfield’ sign which the players ran under on the way out to the pitch.
In the days when Liverpool won titles as a matter of routine, their players would have sought retribution for such an act of defilement as that.
‘We were too soft,’ Souness reflected in an interview for the book Men in White Suits, by Simon Hughes, which captures better than any the vital beginnings of the fall which took 30 years to fix. ‘In the eighties, we could beat a team by playing football. If the other team wanted a fight, we could beat them by fighting.’
Wimbledon won twice at anfield in 1992 and Souness’ side failed to beat them in any of their eight clashes between 1991 and 1994.
Though Souness has borne the brunt of criticism for the way the club fell away in the early 1990s, the point about the great sides under Bill Shankly, Bob Paisley and Kenny Dalglish is that they would self-police.
Cutting corners was never tolerated. Souness actually thumped full back alan Kennedy for a succession of long balls in one ’80s training session when Liverpool always played short.
The cream suits Liverpool paraded on the Wembley pitch before losing the Fa Cup final to manchester United in 1996 somehow epitomised the sense of entitlement, earning that generation the ‘ Spice Boys’ image they laboured under for years.
‘If I had been a senior player at Liverpool at the time I would have stopped that happening,’ Jamie Carragher reflected. ‘as a senior player, you have to be thinking of the bigger picture. What if we lose? I can’t believe nobody thought about that.’
In the glory years, Paisley even viewed signing southerners as a risk. Liverpool could get away with being tight-fisted payers, securing the best players on the back of the club’s reputation.
Unlike Paisley, Souness handled pay talks and was infuriated by older squad members wanting more of the money suddenly sloshing around in the early Premier League years. He let some go whom he might have kept.
While the Boot room philosophy enshrined a collectivism into buying players, there was less thought, more frenzy about how Liverpool went about rebuilding a team which had been allowed to age by the time Souness took over from Dalglish in 1991.
Men in White Suits relates the stories of how Peter Schmeichel actually wrote to the club. ‘I am a Danish goalkeeper who has been a Liverpool supporter all my life. I am willing to pay for my own travel expenses. Can I come to melwood for a week’s trial?’ But it was thought there would be scenes with Bruce Grobbelaar. The request was ignored.
When michel Platini approached
Souness after a UeFa Cup game against auxerre to tip him off about a brilliant, difficult French player who was available, Souness said he was ‘too busy fighting fire’ to take on more trouble. So the eric Cantona opportunity was passed up, too.
manchester United were more fleet of foot in every way. They were becoming a commercial juggernaut in a way that Liverpool were not.
Liverpool’s entrenched ways of doing things made it harder to modernise in the way that arsenal did with arsene Wenger’s arrival. The club found themselves stuck between the past and the present, unable to know which of the two to follow, even appointing roy evans and Gerard Houllier as joint managers for 18 games in 1998.
rafa Benitez restored the club’s self-belief from 2004, re-capturing the Champions League and building a team which, with Fernando Torres and Xabi alonso working in tandem with Steven Gerrard, offered the first serious threat to Ferguson in 2008.
The cataclysmic decision to sell the club to Tom Hicks and George Gillett during the Benitez years was certainly a major contributory factor to the road back being so long.
By 2010 the club were close to insolvency, with the americans struggling to refinance their loans.
The club’s re- birth under Fenway Sports Group has been rapid. Gregarious and demonstrative Jurgen Klopp could hardly differ more from gauche, uncommunicative Paisley but the German has restored many of the old Liverpool ways. Cutting corners is no longer acceptable.
Thoughts will turn to next season, Liverpool building a hegemony to last years and ensuring that this rise is not followed by a fall. They will be wise to guard against complacency.
‘Ferguson once claimed that his greatest achievement in football was knocking Liverpool Football Club off its perch but that isn’t really true,’ Carragher reflected in Men in White Suits.
‘Liverpool slipped away and United took advantage of the space at the top. The fall was self-inflicted.’