4 April: who needs to find a millionaire?

Several reports this week have suggested that Liverpool are anxious to find an investor, so desperate that club chief executive Rick Parry has opened talks with Juan Villalonga, the former chair of Spain's Telefonica cartel and a man whose background and ambition remind you of no-one so much as Silvio Berlusconi. Despite the press coverage, it is likely that Villalonga's interest will be opposed by several Anfield insiders, including Rafael Benitez whose previous sufferings at the hands of an overactive Valencia board are legendary. Yet even if Villalonga goes quietly, the reporting of Liverpool's finances will continue.

The story was sparked this time by a report from management consultants Deloittes, remarking that unless Liverpool begin work on a new stadium soon, they risk falling yet further behind their three domestic rivals: each of whom can expect turnover to be in the region of £30-£40 million more than the Reds', chiefly as a result of higher gate receipts. Liverpool have had planning permission to build a new stadium close to the present one since July 2004, and the Liverpool website includes an interactive tour of the planned building. But the stadium, which has been planned since before the millennium, is years from completion. It is by no means clear to most fans that the board even now taken the decision to build.

Why has everything taken so long? The club tend to blame interference from government and the North West Development Agency who originally offered regional development money but then changed their mind, suggesting that support is now available only for a joint Liverpool-Everton stadium, something neither set of fans could tolerate. 

Much has also been made of the increased price of builders' wages on Merseyside since the successful bid for the City of Culture in 2008. 

At an earlier period, opposition from some local residents played its part. 

There's the still older story of Liverpool's financial demise, which I've always tended to blame on the rise of the national lottery. Before 1994, the bulk of Liverpool's money came through the Moores family, whose money came through the football pools. (Even now, David Moores remaind the majority shareholder). When this stopped being the nation's favourite form of gambling, their spare money was cut, and this decline coincided with the rise of footballing rivals, beginning with Man U.

During the Houllier era, many fans were hoping that local building tycoon Steve Morgan would win his boardroom struggle, and Morgan is even now rumoured to be working closely with Robbie Fowler: a player who took a massive pay cut to return to the team, and who is a substantial property tycoon in his own right: so much so that he has consistently come 1st in all recent surveys of the richest professional footballers in Britain. 'We all live in a Robbie Fowler house', or so the chant goes.

The much more interesting question for me is why everyone involved in the discussions seems to assume that Liverpool must always be dependent on a single major owner, some giant benefactor who will supposedly take the club to its new level, and all as a result of their personal largesse?

Once bitten, twice shy, and many clubs have been bitten. I was living in Oxford in the back end of 1999, during which time I witnessed a very public discussion among supporters there about how the club should be run. In the red corner was Justin Horton, then and for several years beforehand a regular contributor to the club fanzine. Justin pointed out as he had elsewhere that the crisis was caused by former owner Robert Maxwell, who traded players between Oxford and Derby, ripping up a previously successful team, and leaving the club ruined on his death.

What the team needed, Justin argued, was some version of the Barcelona ownership system: where the club is owned by a majority of supporters. If thousands of people can each be persuaded to give up relatively small amounts of money, large pots of capital can be accumulated, and the private tycoon displaced as the custodian of the clubs fortunes.

Justin won a large minority of his fellow-supporters, but there was never a clear enough alternative strategy, nor a large enough body of opinion, nor the cash nor the time to pull it off. Instead, a new tycoon was found, Firoz Kassam. I read in this Wednesday's issue of the Guardian that 'Kassam's six-and-a-half years as the owner of United, which ended last week with its sale to the United States-based businessman Nick Merry for £1, have left him with a shrewd profit banked from the sale of the old Manor Ground, and a £50m hotel, cinema and leisure development around the new, humbly named Kassam Stadium which he, not the club, owns.'

For every Abramovitch there have been a hundred Maxwells, and even Abramovitch, I'd suggest, is playing a long version of the tycoon's game. 

Who needs to find a millionaire? We don't.

28 March: three Liverpool villains

Following on from my post about Djibril Cisse and Stan Collymore, I was trying to think of any other recent Liverpool players who have been so widely despised by the fans. I can remember players being picked on for poor games (one particularly rough taunting of Gary Ablett in the early 1990s springs to mind). Of course, I can also remember fans taking to players who were seen to lack the requisite skill, but who made up for that in effort: Erik Meijer 'the trier' and Ig-or Biscan being recent examples.

But alongside Cisse and Collymore, the nearest recent comparison is evidently El-Hadj Diouf, signed after the last world cup in 2002 with the proceeds of Liverpool's treble-winning triumph. With Owen and Gerrard settled in the team, it finally seemed that Liverpool were back. The purchase however of Diouf, however, was as fatal to Houllier's credibility as Collymore had been to Roy Evans. The stats don't lie: the player cost more than £10 million, played 80 games and scored just 6 goals.

Form is temporary, class the cliche runs is permanent: Diouf was twice African player of the year, had flourished in Senegal's triumph over France, and has been a good purchase more recently for Bolton. Reds fans might have grown to accept his failure to perform (like Cisse) stuck out of position on the right wing. What really hurt, however, was the incident at Celtic three years ago. In the run-up to the game, much was made of the bond between Liverpool and Celtic supporters, the Irish link, the fact that both clubs have You'll Never Walk Alone as their anthem. When Diouf spat into the face of the Celtic fans, he angered them and horrified us in equal measure: his sale at a considerable markdown became inevitable.

An observation: the three players I've mentioned so far as villains are all black. There's an old idea on Merseyside that Liverpool people are incapable of racism, so many of them being recent migrants themselves. The murder of Anthony Walker suggests a different picture, as does the recent abuse of Amir Khan, which a number of papers helpfully reported as having taken place in 'Everton', as if Everton was a separate city. 

Any one who knows the city will acknowledge that Liverpool is far whiter than people from outside tend to think. The decent-sized Somali and Caribbean communities in Granby and Liverpool 8 aren't matched by any other sizeable black populations as you travel away from the city centre. It's still depressingly easy to spend an entire Saturday afternoon in the city centre and not see a single black face.

Were any of these three players picked on for the colour of their skin? Diouf undoubtedly not: it was his behaviour on and off the pitch which made his reputation. But the others? Collymore has written about his treatment elsewhere. With Cisse, I suppose it's too early to say. 

John Barnes writes in his autobiography, about his first season, 'Fans kept approaching me in the street and saying "We love you". I appreciated the compliments but naivety had never featured in my make-up. I knew  Liverpool fans would have slaughtered me if I wasn't delivering.' The real, political, point of course is that all anti-racist traditions have to be made and remade and constantly remade.

21 March: Cisse's Liverpool

Callers to Five Live on Sunday were complaining that Djibril Cisse 'isn't a Liverpool player'. It's strange how quickly the fans' attitude has turned. Only last year, Cisse's  double-quick return from a broken leg was part of the Istanbul story. Here was a striker who seemed to have settled and who was desperate to perform. This season, by contrast, Cisse has been one of the main people blamed for Liverpool's abject goalscoring record. His first touch has been regularly poor. He has been caught out so often, that he's even lost the team points in having other player's goals disallowed. 

Not all of this is Cisse's fault. The manager's hope in signing Crouch was to find a player who could link midfield and attack. What Liverpool gain from Crouch, they lose also in pace: hence Liverpool are the team who have won the most corners in the premiership, but had scored fewer goals (before this week) than several bottom-half sides. 

Cisse would be most successful as Owen's cover in a team playing counter-attacking football, a team managed by someone like Gerard Houllier, the man who signed him. (Many people reading this will shudder at the thought of Ged's return, others will ask how Houllier was allowed to spend £14 million on an understudy?) Benitez has asked Cisse to play several times on the right wing, in an attempt to teach him the pace of the English game, the forward's staple of angling his runs. 

While a majority of Liverpool fans seem to have turned against Cisse, a small minority continue to argue his corner: their point is that he should be given a long run in the team. Benitez's approach is different. He watches training for evidence of form: there, as Benitez described this week, Morientes scores for fun. He plays Cisse irregularly, but enough: only two or three players have had more performances this season. In games where a team looks vulnerable, as against Newcastle, Benitez plays Cisse as a lone striker, hoping he can score and recover his form.

As well as underperforming in training, we know that Cisse has had well-documented problems off the pitch. The combination reminds me of no other previous Liverpool player as precisely as Stan Collymore. 

The best account of Collymore's time at Anfield can be found in Robbie Fowler's Autobiography: 'Stan Collymore was one of the most talented, charismatic footballers I've ever seen. Sometimes, especially in the early days, I'd watch him in training and think he could be anything with his natural ability and incredible athleticism ... Stan had the body for football, but not the mind ... he wanted to prove himself and he wanted to be admired at Liverpool, and from day one, he gave the impression that he needed to be the big star at the centre of things ... In the 1996-97 season Stan was dropped on no fewer than twenty occasions, and he was also taken off at half time four times ... There was one occasion, that he was selected for a reserve game at Tranmere and he refused to play. The stink that caused wounded the gaffer badly and I don't think the board ever forgot ... They were two wasted years when a group of talented, young international footballers lost their direction and lost time.' 

The signing of Collymore was so disastrous that the manager who signed him, Roy Evans, was sacked for this and other errors. There's no danger of Benitez going the same way. All the signs are, however, that the club are hoping to make Djibril Cisse some other club's summer bargain. 

As for the present: I've suggested before that one reason Fowler was signed was to act as a sort of coach or mentor. Benitez has told us many times that he enjoys reading Liverpool history, he watches games from past European campaigns, he has tried to steep himself in club lore. Did these passages in Fowler's autobiography contribute to his re-signing?

8 March 2006: why Liverpool lost

I have barely recovered from the misery of Liverpool's premature exit from the Champions League: having won the competition last year, most fans expected us to go further than the squad is capable. Even requiring three goals in the second half against Benfica, the likelihood of defeat never sank in and is more painful now. But why did we lose? I suspect the papers will concentrate on the failures of Liverpool to generate sufficient capital over many seasons (a failure amply demonstrated by the ongoing stadium problems), and on the failure of the team to find an in-form striker. The following are five factors, which I think contributed, and which I doubt will get much coverage in the papers tomorrow:

1. The loss of Momo Sissoko. Liverpool's least creative midfielder was also the key to the team's superb run of form before Xmas. With good reason Benitez does not believe that Hamann is capable of lasting 90 minutes at a high tempo. Playing Sissoko and Alonson in centre midfield, with Hamann as a substitute enabled Benitez to switch Gerrard to right midfield. This had two virtues: first, Liverpool were able to play as many of the best 11 players at once as they could. Second, although Gerrard has often been described as the complete midfielder (being able to pass, tackle and shoot), he has one key weakness which still threatens to take over his game. He simply wants to do too much, to be in too many places. By sticking Gerrard on the flank, Benitez was able to get the best out of him, and when Sissoko recovers that is where Gerrard should return.  

2. The absence of Riise at left back. In the course of this season, many of Riise's defensive weaknesses have been ironed out. When the team needs to attack, he along with Finnan is at least capable of dominating a wing. In tonight's match, Warnock did not dare press high enough, and Kewell was too often isolated as a result.

3. Sissoko and Riise excepted: a season-long absence of injuries or bans. This will sound perverse, but a manager does not mind losing a key player in October or November to a mild injury which does not recur. It's got to be the right kind of injury though! Not Owen's hamstring, not a broken leg, but a one-off strain. Like Kewell since the autumn, players side-lined with a one-off injury return to the team fresher than anyone else, Much of Liverpool's energy last season came from returning players: much of our fatigue this season is down to an absence of respites.

4. Problems in training. I have no evidence for this, but everything in front of my eyes suggests something is wrong there. Why won't Benitez pick Djibril Cisse, the team's one out-and-out goalscorer? Why did Le Tallec and Sinama-Pongolle both have to go out on loan? In all three cases, I have a strong suspicion that the problems start in training: these players aren't impressing Benitez between matches, and he feels duty-bound to pick others (Morientes) who do the work where the fans can't see it.

5. The loaning out of Sinama-Pongolle and Neil Mellor. With the arrival of Robbie Fowler, it was inevitable that the chances for either player would be less: Mellor was probably the club's sixth-choice forward. But both offer attributes that none of the incumbents have: pace, a direct instinct for goal. Starting with Peter Crouch, Benitez has an over-abundance of forwards who because of their lack of pace are best played in the hole between the midfield and attack (Crouch, Fowler, Morientes: all three of Kewell, Garcia and Zenden could also be played in this role). Benitez must have nightmares about players like his old protege Aimar: if only he could find another one with pace to fit that position. Cisse has problems of attitude and confidence. For all their lack of practice or fitness or other weaknesses, Sinama-Pongolle and Mellor were competing not with Fowler but with Cisse for the out-and-out centre-forward position. Most Liverpool fans wish hope either will return from loan as finished players: more likely I suspect both will be sold. In the second half of the game, when what the team really needed was an Olympiakos performance, it was painful to remember who last season had scored the crucial first and second goals.

26 February: city versus country

I was reading yesterday John Barnes' autobiography, which has some strong sections on playing for England. 'I am fortunate my England career is now complete so I don't have to sound patriotic any more', he writes. 'Nationalism causes so many problems. I hate it.' Barnes describes the experience of being harassed by a group of National Front supporters, just days after scoring that 1984 goal against Brazil. 'I tried hard for England out of professional pride not patriotism - because I never felt any.'

2006 is world cup year, of course, and I wonder how many members of the current England team would admit ever to feeling the same? There's a drumbeat playing: England must win, England have to win. If Sven Goran Eriksson had not agreed already to step down after the tournament, it is easy to imagine the headlines that would have accompanied any result short of outright victory.

It's not only England where the pressure is felt, although the legacy of empire encourages our papers to greater heights of expectation, and worse lows when failure inevitably follows. I've seen socialists in Istanbul argue that football is a distraction. Marxists in Egypt, so confident a year ago, can hardly have welcomed the hype that surrounded this year's African Nations tournament. Far from being a celebration of football, the tournament represented its diminution: just look at the tiny numbers who turned out whenever any team other than Egypt were playing.

I remember when I first started going to Anfield at the end of the 1980s, the fanzines of the time and most our supporters would have been delighted that Barnes disliked England. We were a club side, not a national team. Hansen, Dalglish, Souness were all Scots: why should we support England against a team in which they all played? In the later Fowler-McManaman era, we lent our players to the English team uneagerly, hoping that none of them would be injured: Jamie Redknapp at Euro 96 was. That disaster ruined what should have been the best years of his career.

I've written elsewhere about the differences between regional and national identity. But there are two sides to the contradiction: first, the followers of regional teams are expected to admire their players, side with their national side. Second, some escape. Because the reasons for choosing a club are personal and often parochial; because regional identity is often defined in opposition to the metropolitan centre. Because regionalism can reflect all sorts of values, left or right. 

The self-identity of most Liverpool fans was of course untypical. The team was built on the support of the first- and second-generation Irish fans who used to live along the old Scotland Road. Like the team, many of the supporters held passports that weren't English. There was often a sort of tacit acquiescence in the old Miliant ideal of Liverpool against the world; people treated Hatton with scepticism, but that was as nothing for the venom they reserved for Heseltine and Thatcher. Those values held as long as Robbie Fowler's decision to wear a t-shirt for the dockers.

I recall the World Cup of 2002, and the idea that flag-waiving could be rescued for the left. I recall also Gordon Brown's recent speeches on creating a national identity, so well satirised by Steve Bell in the Guardian. The football culture in which I was raised would have held such values in contempt. 'I loathe the fact that the England team embody and foster nationalism', Barnes writes. There's a key word, there foster: football doesn't just reflect the 'national values' of Queen and country, shoot to kill, it can deepen and strengthen the antagonism between people. If we let it. Reclaim football, certainly. Reclaim England, never.

23 February 2006: Memories of Istanbul

For Liverpool fans, probably in need of some cheering after the last game, I offer the following story from the official Liverpool site. I would not  normally repeat a story from such a public source. But this is so good, I thought I'd have to quote it in full: 

'A FEW WEEKS before the Champions League Final I spotted a bet we had laid back in the previous December. A customer had staked £500 on Liverpool to win the tournament at 80/1. Mm. A nice potential payout of £40,000. I wondered whether the chap who had placed the bet fancied talking about it. His account details had no telephone number with them so I dropped him a line to see whether he’d be agreeable to a little media attention on his unlikely long-shot. He rang me, we chatted and I asked him when – because by now Liverpool were in the Final – he would be hedging his bet with a few grand on AC Milan. He assured me he was going to do no such thing. As a loyal Liverpool fan who had followed them to European Cup glory in the past he had no intention of diluting his would-be winnings. It was all or nothing.' 

'I thought of David Bushell, a Preston solicitor, at half time of that Champions League game, when they were 3-0 down. ‘Bet he wishes he’d hedged now’ I observed to my son, explaining the bet. At the time I was doing this there was a Manchester United fan - Alan Fairhurst - sitting at home in, unusually for United fans, Manchester, deciding that he would rub Liverpool’s plight in well and truly by having a bet on AC Milan. Even though Milan were, at that time, 1/100 to win the game in 90 minutes play, he was going to shell out ten grand - £10,000 – just for the pleasure of being able to say he had backed them to lose, and to pick up a risk free hundred quid in the process. You’d have thought that a United fan might have thought back to his own team’s Champions League triumph a few seasons back when they overturned the odds with minutes to go, or of the day when they trailed Spurs by 3-0 yet came back to beat them 5-3.' 

'My own thoughts turned briefly to the long suppressed memory of a Luton Town match where we were three up against Wrexham, only to lose 4-3. You know the rest, of course, Bushell collected his forty thousand, minus no hedging money at all, returned to his home to find the media camped outside – well, I might have mentioned it to one or two members of the Fourth Estate in passing – and promptly took himself off to the South of France for a few days celebration. Our Mancunian – rather like the Norwegian who had the same bet for £10,167 – was left with the problem of how to explain to his mates that he’d managed to do ten thousand quid in some style, courtesy of the hated Anfield Reds.'

8 February: Playing in Red

Many thanks to a friend John McIlroy for encouraging me to read a fascinating article published last spring in the journal, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations. Written by Ralph Darlington, it is titled 'Workplace Union Militancy on Merseyside since the 1960s: extent, nature, causes, and decline' (HSIR 19, pp. 123-52). What the article addresses is the idea that Liverpool has long been an exceptionally militant region.

Now of course there have been many different versions of this claim. The footballer Robbie Fowler, for example, describes the 1981 Toxteth riots as a unique rebellion in British history. He writes that because he lived there, and because he could see the burned wrecks of buildings as he grew up. It's not at all obvious, though, that rioting in Liverpool 8 was actually different from the other 1981 riots in Manchester, Birmingham and London.

Another story holds that Liverpool was different because of its Militant councillors. Only last week, I was handed a leaflet distributed by the Socialist Party (Miliant's successor) to workers in London, which argued that the Lib Dems were untrustworthy, not because they had dumped their leader, nor because of their role in the war, but because they had ended the tradition of left-wing local government on Merseyside. I'm not terribly sure why these London workers were asked to see Liverpool as the centre of the universe. Nor can I forget that between Derek Hatton and today, there have been 20 unimpressive years of local government in between.

Both these events, the riots and the local elections, came at a moment when trade unions were being defeated. They were the expressions of a decline in previous habits of militancy. It is in this earlier period, from the early 1960s to around 1980s, that Darlington shows his interest. As a lifelong fan of a team than plays in Red, I am also struck that Liverpool's moment of advance was this same period: the era of Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Darlington argues, Merseyside was along with Clydeside, Tyneside and London one of four areas that saw more strikes than elsewhere in Britain. Between 1967 and 1969, the incidence of strikes was seven times higher in Liverpool than in Britain as a whole. Between 1968 and 1973, Merseyside saw 2.5 times more strikes than the national average, making it the most strike-prone region in Britain. Between 1974 and 1983 two thirds of strikes in Britain came from three industries, cars, ships, docks. The first and the last had large bases in Liverpool.

It is also this period in which Liverpool earned its cultural association with industrial militancy. Jim Allen's 1969 and 1971 films The Big Flame and The Rank and File played a role in associating Merseyside with new industries, strikes and hope, comparable to the role of Alan Bleesdale's Boys from the Black Stuff in attacking Liverpool to unemployment and despair.

Without choosing between them, Darlington gives five possible explanations for this long period of relative workplace trade union militancy: 1. the idea that Liverpool is a city of the dispossessed. Poor people are more likely to strike. 2. casual labour and the docks: dock labour has a long tradition of internationalism. 3. Size of plant: Liverpool's car plants were among the largest in the country. 4. Bureaucratic trade unionism: several of the strikes were preceded by long periods of rank-and-file campaigning against particularly corrupt local unions, including the NUS and TGWU. 5. A perhaps surprising point: the greater importance of stewards than political activists. Liverpool was a syndicalist, rather than a socialist centre.

De-industrialisation was rampant, Darlington argues, from the late 1970s onwards, with the closures of car-plants at Speke in 1978 and 1979 being a particular blow. Unemployed workers, of course, have few opportunities to strike. The present he characterises as one of 'islands of militancy', with relative strike-prone workers in the manual public sector, chiefly post and fire workers. Something, then, of the tradition remains even today.

6 February: Chelsea 2 - Liverpool 0

Most Liverpool fans' response to defeat at Chelsea will be to insist that our team deserved to win. I haven't seen the Optra figures but I'm sure that they'll show Liverpool dominated in all areas of the pitch, in terms of possession, in terms of corners, in terms of crosses. False explanations of defeat will therefore abound. Liverpool lost because Chelsea 'cheated': at corners, Carvalho and Gallas did seem to have their hands constantly around Liverpool players' necks. True, but no referee in such conditions would give a penalty at Stamford Bridge. Robben and Gudjonsen worked the officials to have Reina sent off. True, but by then the game was already lost. Liverpool showed the absence of a top finisher. True, but for two invincible months at the end of last year that absence didn't make any difference at all. For four games, Liverpool have seemed tired, like a team that has played too many games. True again, but Liverpool's problem last night was not an absence of high tempo football, but its presence: they played the game too fast, without thinking, and it could easily have been another thrashing.

Many players had poor games. Kewell was probably the most consistent threat, Morientes anonymous. Crouch played like he had early in the season: comfortable to hold possession around the half-way line, but with too little support and no goal threat. Finnan looked composed going forward, but was off-guard defensively. Warnock was content defending, but seemed nervous whenever he had the ball. Gerrard came in and out of the game. Alonso looked like he has for most of the season: too much of an enforcer and too little of a maestro. Sissoko had one of his worst games for Liverpool: he was routinely out of position, playing team-members into trouble, losing Chelsea players who showed the professional's ability to drift deep and hold the ball. When Chelsea were threatening, Sissoko was almost always somewhere else.

When Liverpool beat Chelsea in the 2005 Champions League campaign, it was the victory of intelligent football, and of a script which players held to rigidly. Key then was the 0-0 result at Stamford Bridge. Chelsea as champions-elect in Britain knew they possessed a better first team and a deeper squad. They were favourites and expected to win comfortably. Liverpool played reserved, counter-attacking football, held the first leg, and even ended the first game sharper, as Chelsea faded. The second game, Liverpool scored in a brief blast of high-tempo football at the start. Similar tactics served Liverpool well in two games in this autumn's Champions' League. But in the first game of this season's premiership, Liverpool tried to blast Chelsea off their stride. Chelsea were the more cautious, counter-attacking formation, and won 4-1. The same problem was exhibited last night. Liverpool played like the old story of Benitez's complaint against Gerrard: with too much tempo, too much passion. Whenever Chelsea were playing the ball into Liverpool's territory, it was through wide men running at pace against stretched defenders. Liverpool's defence became reliabnt on the off-side trap, and Carragher and Hyppia held a poor line. When Liverpool had the possession, it was in dangerous enough areas, but slow, and the team became over-defendant on crosses aimed at Crouch and Moritentes. Liverpool's attack play became predictable, as it had in different circumstances, at Chelsea when we were thrashed before, in Japan in December, recently in Manchester.

The premiership table doesn't lie. Liverpool have been comfortably the second or third best league team of 2005-6. Against lesser opposition, they have the talent to overwhelm with attack play and win comfortably. Against the better teams, more 'European' tactics need to be employed, or more humiliations will inevitably result.

1 February: On re-signing Robbie Fowler

One Liverpool site has been running a poll on whether Rafael Benitez was right to re-sign Robbie Fowler. I was the 566th person to vote, with 538 in favour of the deal and just 28 pessimistic. The main Liverpool site is buzzing with many stories, few reporting anything more of substance than the sheer news of Robbie’s return. Fans are comparing the news to the Champions League triumph in Istanbul. People seem to have forgotten the considerable scepticism Liverpool fans showed towards Michael Owen’s recent triumphant landing in Newcastle, and the pride we showed then in claiming that Liverpool fans don’t make such a fuss, not for a mere signing.

This isn’t any normal transfer. By chance, I’ve only just finished reading Robbie’s autobiography, and it’s easy to see why what the deal means to him. The book is dedicated to Robbie’s upbringing on Upper Parliament Street and the fact of the Toxteth Riots: he was too small to remember the incidents, but grew up in an environment still shaped by its ruins. Liverpool is still his home, he makes clear. He wishes he’d never left. The book covers all those infamous moments, the accusations of drug-taking, the wearing of a t-shirt for the Liverpool dockers (not on strike, of course, but locked out). I haven’t counted too closely, but the 6 years Robbie Fowler spent playing for Liverpool seem to constitute some four-fifths of the book, with just a brief final fifth devoted to his 4 years at Leeds and then City.

It’s also easy to see why the fans have been so keen on his return. Small touches, like the text’s generous use of swear words or ‘my’ spelt ‘me’, show how Robbie still speaks and thinks Scouse, takes pride in the city where he grew up and identifies passionately with the club and its location. There are times when the author comes over as almost xenophobic in his distrust of such coaches as Houllier, who it is noted brought 40 new signings to Liverpool, nearly half of whom were French, and never cared for the team. The real theme isn’t national pride: contrast the relative brief pages given to Robbie’s appearances for England with the detailed ins and outs of his Anfield career. Rather it’s an intense identification with the city.

National pride, I’ve argued elsewhere is a ‘heavy’ ideology: it is anchored in relationships to the class and to the state. Unless in exceptional circumstances, its politics are destructive: as the saying goes, patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. But regional pride is something lighter, capable of different politics, left and right depending on the context, both Shankly’s pit socialism and Di Canio’s recent turn to Mussolini.

What about Liverpool: what will the club gain from the transfer? Benitez himself has spoken of Fowler’s passion to play: echoing this sense that the team needs Robbie’s intense local pride. But in cold footballing logic, I was more struck by a phrase that Fowler used in one interview, speaking of how his transfer might enable other strikers to blossom. I am sure the phrase was not just his but reflects a discussion with the manager. I wonder if Benitez isn’t trying (in part) to repeat what was in fact a failed experiment from last season? People will recall the signing of the former Valencia defender Pellegrino, too slow for English football, and used instead therefore almost as a coach. I think Benitez has the same idea for Fowler: to work with players such as Cisse, on such technique as timing runs, position, knowing where to strike the ball. Even if he scores not a single goal, the coach may have told himself, Fowler’s return could be justified.

27 January 2006: How far can Rafa's Liverpool go?

I've just finished reading two books on the history of Liverpool Football Club, Alan Hansen's A Matter of Opinion, and Guillem Balague's A Season on the Brink. The question Liverpool fans are still asking themselves, even now, is simply this: how good can the team get? Hansen argues that the best modern Liverpool team was the one of the late 1970s, which played with almost no natural attacking midfielders. Its strengths were in requiring every player, from the front forwards, to press when the other team had the ball. Possession was everything. Little interest was taken in playing the offside trap. Defenders prospered not on the basis of their skills in tackling or even in heading the ball, but above all for their positional sense.

None of this would matter, except for the message of Balague's book, which is that Rafael Benitez has modelled his team mainly on the Liverpool sides of the 1970s. How similar are they? The defensive priorities are parallel. The current Liverpool left-back Riise is perhaps more of a natural attacker: but Benitez inherited the player, and Riise defensive work has been stronger (anyway) since the departure of Houllier. In midfield, Benitez seems to have settled on the formula of two players deep, and two wide and forward. Kewell is flourishing at the moment, but has his long-term replacement in Gonzalez. Gerrard is in occupation on the right wing; and despite various rumours it seems that Liverpool are not going to purchase any cover for him this January. Garcia can be held back as cover for Gerrard or as one of Liverpool's many attacking options. Ironically, Liverpool seem to have a number of players who can perform in something like the old Kenny Dalglish role: Garcia, Morientes, Crouch, Zenden, Sinama-Pongolle, but the team still lacks any natural finishers beyond Cisse, whose positional sense and whose confidence have both gone.

A year ago, the press concentrated on a common criticism that by importing Spaniards Benitez had broken any residue of the old Liverpool spirit. Much as I hate to admit it, fragments of that criticism may apply: in Hansen's book, it is noticeable, that whenever possible the team always ate and drank together. From Balague's we learn that this applies at the training ground, but not in the team hotel, or not to the same extent, or not yet. We learn also that Benitez was unable to take any English lessons through his first tumultuous year, with the result that when players such as Gerrard suggested tactical changes, during half-time team talks, Benitez couldn't understand what he was saying. We also learn that Benitez sold Murphy and Owen to raise funds. It is ironic then that it is just in their two positions that Liverpool now seem short. Perhaps the last surprising admission in the book, for it is one written by a Spanish journalist with close ties evidently to the manager, is that Benitez was known at Valencia by some players as 'God', and the term was not meant as a compliment.

What I do know is that since Benitez arrived at Liverpool, a number of people (myself included) have found something in the team that before it lacked: an elan, an attacking purpose, a belief in doing the simple things well. Perhaps that was the real lesson of Liverpool's miraculous victory in this season's Champions League (a victory all the more extraordinary of course, because of the very weakness of the squad). It was a message expressed in Gerrard's turn to the crowd at 3-1: arms aloft and demanding that we cheer. The greatest change has not been in the team, but its support. The fans feel liberated. The sustained success of the 1970s and 1980s remains distant. But at least the old coffin of Houllier's Anfield is no more.