CONTENTS
Introduction
1 Football in Liverpool – From the Very Beginning
2 Liverpool Out of Everton – One Seed, Two Clubs
3 Turning Ice Into Fire – The First Great Liverpool Manager
4 As Many Downs as Ups – The Topsy-Turvy 1900s
5 The First FA Cup Final – 1914 at the Palace, and Then War
6 The Roaring Twenties – Liverpool Back on the Title Trail
7 ‘Where’s Liverpool?’ – ‘Top of the League!’
8 They Shall Be Our Teachers – The First Internationalisation of Liverpool FC
9 Lisha! Lisha! – Elisha Scott and the Liverpool Kop
10 Football Life During Wartime – Surviving the Conflict and Emerging Stronger Emerging Stronger
11 1946–47, Champions Again – George Kay and the Willie and Albert Show Albert Show
12 The Almost Seasons – The Double Frustration of 1950
13 The Rocky Road to Glenbuck – The Bleak 1950s
14 Bill Shankly and the New Liverpool – Or How the Liverpool Board Finally Learned How to Spend Money
15 Ee-Aye-Addio, the FA Cup at Last! – Liverpool FC at Wembley and in Europe
16 Nothing but Blue Skies – Bob Paisley in Charge at Anfield
17 At the Dark End of the Street – Heysel and Hillsborough
18 Continental Drift – The New Liverpool Technocrats
19 There Must Be Some Way Out of Here – The Liverpool Ownership Crisis
Epilogue: Yanks Out . . . Yanks In
Bibliography – Sources and Useful Reading
About the Author
John Williams has been studying football as a sociologist for the past 30 years and is author of several books on Liverpool FC, including Rafa, Into the Red, Kennedy’s Way and The Miracle of Istanbul.
Liverpool Football Club
The Biography
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The first edition of this book took much longer to produce than I thought it would. I want to thank all those who had to wait so patiently for it to be born. I was also thrilled to receive such a positive reaction to the first edition from so many Liverpool supporters. The club’s history clearly means as much to them as it does to me – as I knew, of course, it would. Red Men also brought me into contact with a number of relatives and supporters of ex-players who were obviously delighted to learn more about their friends and family members who had once played for Liverpool. I feel privileged to have had this direct connection with the club’s past and to have stirred so many happy memories. Long may it continue.
In this new updated edition of Red Men, I am relieved to be able to record the departure from Anfield of Hicks and Gillett and the arrival of new American owners from the Fenway Sports Group, with promises of a much better future. We have cautious hopes that they will be responsible and caring patrons who understand exactly what this club means to those who follow Liverpool FC today and what it has meant to all who have cherished the club since 1892. I have also been able to comment, of course, on the return to Liverpool football club management in January 2011 of the extraordinary Kenny Dalglish. The Scot has been woven into the Anfield story for much of the last 30 years or more, so his reappearance in the Reds dugout at a spritely 60 years of age should have come as no surprise– or disappointment – to any Liverpudlian. As usual, the club owes Kenny a huge debt for serving its cause with such passion and dignity in difficult times. We can feel sure that Liverpool’s latest reinvention as a football club will have the Dalglish stamp on it, no matter what its future course.
But many more thanks are also in order here. Much of the research for this text was undertaken by ploughing through the Liverpool press and connected sources, and my dedicated researcher David Gould did as much of this crucial spadework as anyone else. I want to thank him for his excellent job, and I hope that his beloved Stoke City continue to survive – and more – in the heady Premier League. We both want to thank the staff at the Liverpool Central Library for looking after us so well during our many visits there between 2006 and 2008. I must also thank my dear friend Cathy Long for letting me stay over in her flat in Liverpool when I most needed to. I could not have completed this work without my Liverpool base.
My friends and colleagues David Gould, Andrew Ward, Stephen Hopkins, Neil Carter, Viet-Hai Phung and Alec McAulay all read early versions of some of these chapters and offered many useful comments and scholarly support. Andrew Ward, especially, is a terrific writer and researcher as well as being a very good friend. Andrew helped me restructure chapters when I was in danger of losing my way. I also ‘entertained’ some of my fellow Liverpool supporters in the Flat Iron pub in Liverpool with ad hoc and often obscure stories taken from the text, and even the occasional historical football quiz about Liverpool FC. I thank them, as always, for their tolerance, humour and interest. They are the very best of knowledgeable Liverpool supporters. Adrian Killen gave me great advice on pictures and Liverpool FC’s past, and Ken Rogers at Trinity Mirror was kind enough, initially, to ask me to write this book and had faith in the project. When the book transferred to Mainstream Publishing, Bill Campbell and Graeme Blaikie performed heroics in keeping the whole thing on track. Stephen Done at the Liverpool FC museum read an early version of the text, and he offered many priceless correctives and pieces of sound guidance and advice. He also allowed me to look at the surviving official Liverpool FC minute books (1914–56), for which I am eternally grateful. Eric Doig, a man who knows more than anyone alive about the facts and figures of Liverpool football club, gave me some of the benefits of his recent research on the club’s history for amendments for this second edition. I am deeply grateful for his care and interest. I also owe a considerable debt of thanks to an overseas Red, Matthew Baker from the Boston Magazine, who provided plenty of vital background material on the club’s new American owners just when I needed it.
At home, as I tried valiantly to pull all this material together, my partner Sylvia offered her usual love, patience and encouragement, and my precious toddler granddaughters, Millie and Sasha, kept me amused and full of energy when things started to flag. They were even joined later on in the piece by little Esmée. Despite her US heritage, Sasha will be well schooled by her mother in the Reds tradition, and at just three years of age Millie had learned whole sections of the Fernando Torres song and is now busy learning new material about Luis Suárez – though her sudden and strange obsession with sharks and other matters proved a distraction to her much more important Liverpool FC schooling. Her uncle Seb will help keep her focused on the main task.
I also want to say here that a number of sources, in particular, were completely invaluable as I tried to make sense of Liverpool FC’s extraordinary history. Tony Matthews’ Who’s Who of Liverpool is an excellent and comprehensive starting point for pen pictures of Liverpool players, going right back to the earliest days of the club. All Liverpool fans should own a copy. As he will no doubt notice, I used his research so frequently I could not always attribute it, and I give my heartfelt thanks (and sheepish apologies) to him here. Likewise, Brian Pead’s Liverpool: A Complete Record 1892–1990 is a very useful guide to the club’s early formations and playing records, and Eric Doig and Alex Murphy’s The Essential History of Liverpool is indispensable for its accuracy and detail. Vital too is the club website lfchistory.net for providing lots of crucial historical information about the club and its players.
The Football League Players’ Records 1888–1939 by Michael Joyce got me out of many tight spots in trying to establish the identities of early opponents of Liverpool football club and to track their careers, and Jack Rollin’s Rothman’s Book of Football Records did the same for crowd-data information and for relevant Football League tables. Simon Inglis’s terrific account of the history of the Football League, League Football and the Men Who Made It was exceptionally useful for keeping me up to date with wider developments in the game as we lurched, uncertainly, towards the present. Finally, John Belchem’s wonderful edited collection in celebration of the city of Liverpool, Liverpool 800: Culture, Character and History, gave me plenty to contemplate – and to rely upon – concerning history, culture and social change in the city. I hope I have done no gross disservice in the text to any of these indispensable works.
When I use a source directly and extensively, I have indicated this fact in the text, though I must reiterate I used the standard Liverpool FC reference books and sites rather more liberally than such formal referencing suggests. Finally, I have tried to report on events covered in this book quite critically, as a researcher, and not simply with a supporter’s feverish eye: the reader will have to judge how well (or how badly) I have done in this respect. Needless to say, all the errors in the text – though only some of the insights – are mine and mine alone.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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For the lost 135, Heysel and Hillsborough
EPILOGUE
YANKS OUT . . . YANKS IN
In a survey of UK stand-up comedians in April 2011, it emerged that comics least like playing in Liverpool because, they said, members of the audience always think they are funnier than the act. In the same way, there are tens of thousands of people on Merseyside who think they could do a better job than most elite football managers. Call it confidence. There is also a theory in the game that, like players, football managers can operate comfortably at a certain level in the sport but most are likely to be quickly found out as the pressures and demands of their role intensify. Managers and coaches find their own level. Whatever the reason, there quickly grew a perception among many supporters (and budding football managers) in Liverpool that, for all his decency and supposed ‘Anfield values’, Roy Hodgson was actually not the right man to revive Liverpool’s fortunes after all. Indeed, many were implacably opposed to his appointment right from the start.
Roy Hodgson was soon, untypically and rather gracelessly, hounded by Reds fans whose own perceived collective strength had been reinforced by the battle to oust Hicks and Gillett. Hodgson was quickly seen locally as uncertain and defensive, essentially a mid-market manager who withered in the media glare and who had a patchy managerial record glossed by over-performance at his previous club, Fulham. He was also seen by some to be too much in thrall to Sir Alex at nearby Old Trafford Towers, never a popular position to hold on the Red half of Merseyside. According to this view, the new man was the unwise choice of a great football club that had suddenly been faced by severely limited options given the general malaise swirling around Anfield in the summer of 2010.
Some soothsayers may have been surprised, then, when the England international forward Joe Cole opted to come to Anfield from champions Chelsea in the close season in a deal which was seen, by the national press at least, as something of a coup and a vote of confidence in the new Liverpool manager. But Cole struggled at his new club and was even sent off in his first league appearance, thus setting in train a series of incidents that increasingly characterised the new manager’s misfortunes. Roy Hodgson’s task at Liverpool at any time would have been difficult enough without the absence of the sort of local public support needed for a new challenge on this scale. But it was made tougher still by five other problems he faced in his first few months at Anfield: first, the residual fan support which remained for the departed Rafa Benítez, allied to the worsening climate around the club generated by the ownership fiasco and the general lack of collective promise and direction it provoked; second, the immediate pressures produced by the departure of midfielder Javier Mascherano to Barcelona and a poor start to the season on the pitch, one which soon had Liverpool losing to moderate (or worse) opponents and struggling at the bottom of the Premier League rather than challenging at the top; third, some highly questionable purchases by the new manager, including from his old club Paul Konchesky, at best an ordinary and flawed left-back and at worst a defensive liability, and also Christian Poulsen, an experienced Danish international midfielder but one who now clearly lacked the basic pace, presence and aggression to survive in the Premier League; fourth, the lingering iconic presence in the Anfield corridors of a still ambitious Kenny Dalglish, a man who offered Reds supporters a ready and emotionally convincing managerial alternative to the soon floundering Hodgson; and finally, the barely concealed discontent of some of the club’s senior players, among them an ailing Fernando Torres, who had now added to his occasional reluctance away from home a visible unwillingness to buy into the new Liverpool project at pretty much any level. It transpired later that Torres had been thinking of leaving Liverpool at least since the summer of 2009.
A 0–3 rout at moneyed Manchester City in August 2010 simply stirred the simmering unrest, which continued to fester after league draws against Birmingham City and Sunderland, respectively. But it was the home elimination from the League Cup by lowly Northampton Town on 22 September, followed by defeats at Anfield by relegation favourites Blackpool and at Goodison by Everton on 17 October that marked Hodgson down as a man truly on the slide. Saying he thought that Liverpool had ‘played well’ in succumbing 0–2 at Goodison was not the smartest possible soundbite Hodgson could offer, and he was already beginning to fray at the edges when pressed for media comment after setbacks. When he started directly criticising the Liverpool fans in the national press, it was clear that all was just about lost.
Not that everything was the new manager’s fault, of course, though it was true that his teams generally lacked imagination, commitment and passion. The Liverpool reserve string that had been embarrassed in the League Cup was actually largely a Rafa Benítez-recruited side, and Hodgson, very reasonably, complained that he had been left a playing squad with little balance, adequate cover or quality. Indeed, the last major Benítez signing, the Serbian international forward Milan Jovanovic, was proving just as unconvincing as any of Hodgson’s new recruits. But in the eyes of many of the club’s supporters, these were excuses that simply did not wash. Liverpool was now stuck in a hole with a weak squad, neglectful owners and a fidgety, confused man who lacked a winner’s mentality and who looked increasingly haunted in the Anfield dugout. Kenny Dalglish meanwhile looked on silently from the Main Stand as the Kop chanted the Scot’s name. Things were not going well.
THE HIGH COURT – AND BOSTON TO THE RESCUE?
At least off the field critical changes were afoot at last, even as Roy Hodgson foundered on it. In October 2010, in a case that received a blitz of national and international press and television coverage, representatives of the Liverpool board appeared in the High Court in London. They were there resisting a legal challenge to their plans to sell the club for a reported £300 million to New England Sports Ventures, a conglomerate from the United States led by John W. Henry and ex-Harvard man Tom Werner. NESV own the Boston Red Sox baseball franchise in the USA and had successfully taken the Sox to recent two World Series triumphs (in 2004 and 2007) after 86 years in the baseball wilderness. Paradoxically (and gloriously for Liverpool’s frustrated and angry supporters), these plans for the proposed sale of Liverpool were being conducted explicitly against the expressed wishes of Tom Hicks and George Gillett, who reportedly valued the club at anything between £450 million and £600 million. The current owners also claimed to have possible buyers in tow at these sorts of prices from the Middle East and China, depending upon which press reports you favoured at the time and how much you believed Hicks and Gillett.
This was a tangled story indeed. The club’s owners had been forced to place legal responsibility for organising the sale of Liverpool to ‘responsible’ new buyers in the hands of its three British-born directors: emergency chairman Martin Broughton, Christian Purslow and Ian Ayre. Under intense financial pressure, Hicks and Gillett had themselves appointed the Chelsea-supporting Broughton in order to be able to secure the refinancing of a loan originally taken out from the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) in 2007 to purchase the club. To cover all eventualities, RBS had insisted that Broughton be hired explicitly to sell Liverpool, and there was little the Americans could do to resist. These three directors could now legally outvote their bosses Hicks and Gillett (3–2) in any decision to sell the club for what the independent directors judged to be a ‘reasonable’ offer. Hicks and Gillett wanted the three men sacked for attempting what they called an ‘epic swindle’ by selling Liverpool for a price well below what they considered to be market value – hence the visit to the High Court. The judges ruled that under the terms of the new RBS agreement the Americans could not sack the directors and, because of their financial problems, Hicks and Gillett had indeed signed contracts to cede any rights they had had to control the sale of their last remaining major sporting asset – Liverpool Football Club. These three directors were thus now exercising their legally given responsibility against the owners’ wishes and in a buyer’s market shaped by the global economic downturn.
If the NESV purchase of Liverpool had been legally blocked by Hicks and Gillett, it was still possible that Liverpool FC could have ended up being owned by the publicly funded RBS (whose loan was still outstanding and due to be settled on 15 October) and/or could even be docked nine points by the Premier League for falling into administration by dint of being unable to repay the debts the club had acquired under the inept leadership of Hicks and Gillett. What this Kafka-like state of affairs meant was that the future of this previously commercially and culturally successful and rather sober and much celebrated 128-year-old English football club – a globally recognised sporting ‘brand’ – briefly hung in the balance. As senior English judges – men with little or no sporting expertise, or affection – effectively decided the future of the club, some Liverpool fans from the Spirit of Shankly group anxiously demonstrated outside the court for the benefit of the TV cameras.
After a number of false starts and much media speculation, NESV had been identified by Broughton as the safest and best bet for the future. So hated were Hicks and Gillett in Liverpool by this stage that virtually any serious bid might have been contemplated by the club’s supporters as a step in the right direction, even this new money from the USA. So when on 15 October 2010 the High Court found against the current Liverpool owners and for the Boston group, celebrations were wild, if perhaps a little premature. How would the new American boys differ from the old ones?
One clue was that rather than being commercial strangers who had teamed up simply to buy an English ‘soccer’ club, Henry and Werner were actually successful and longstanding business partners in sport in the USA, and they also offered a nice balance of interests and expertise: Henry had excelled in the commodities futures business while Werner had a sparkling entertainment background as a producer of a number of hit US TV comedy series. On the face of it, this did not seem like the cobbled-together alliance of bloodless adventure capitalists that Hicks and Gillett had later been revealed to be. Nor did the new men have the relationship with money which meant that they might be tempted to substitute sheer weight of spending for the need for the careful development of the club over the long term.
Their record in the USA also seemed reasonably reassuring. Initially, sports journalists in Boston had been scathing when Henry and Warner had stepped in to buy the loved and venerable Red Sox in December 2001 for a record $660 million. A key nationally reputed scribe Dan Shaughnessy from the Boston Globe had furiously called the new men ‘carpetbaggers’ and had lamented that: ‘The Red Sox are a public trust. They are the heart and soul of New England. They are as important as any local institution. And last night they changed hands for the first time in 68 years.’ The parallels with Liverpool FC, another important local sporting institution also based in an outlier city with a strong independent streak and pronounced Irish Catholic links, seemed clear enough.
After this rocky start, the Boston sportswriters were soon praising their new sports owners. In a telling story, the Red Sox were well known as an historic sporting club but one that had been saddled for decades with a notoriously unfriendly group of stars: they were nicknamed ‘25 Guys in 25 Cabs’ because the Sox players usually left the stadium alone immediately after games. That aloof dressing-room culture was completely turned around under Henry’s watch, partially because the new owners got personally involved in welcoming players and treating them like people, not numbers or employees. But it was also because Henry and Werner insisted on a more responsive player attitude and NESV eschewed signing the sort of prima donnas who collectively kill team spirit. The effect was immediate. In 2002, the Boston press was reporting that the Red Sox fans now viewed the new owners as ‘friendly, accessible and committed to winning. Players are raving about a management team that is in sharp contrast to the previous regime.’ These were all good signs, of course, for their Anfield future.
John Henry, in particular, was clearly no simple geeky money and numbers man, though he looked like a slightly owlish academic and was widely described by US commentators in the financial world as something of an eccentric genius. The son of an Illinois farmer, Henry had attended five colleges in California in the early 1970s without earning a degree; just like many ambitious, romantic young Liverpool men, he was actually pursuing a putative career as a singer-songwriter. When he later rose to Wall Street stardom in the 1980s, Henry quoted thinkers such as Carl Jung and cited Indian spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti in describing his business approach, claiming he would not have been successful in finance were it not for studying psychology and philosophy. ‘If you don’t understand yourself to some degree,’ he told the Wall Street Journal, ‘it’s difficult to make money.’ This was no ordinary business brain.
Shy and unassuming but with a good sense of humour, Henry would eventually learn to talk incessantly to anyone about one thing – apart from ideas and the global commodities markets – major league baseball. ‘We had a certain philosophy coming in,’ Henry said later about buying the Red Sox. ‘We had deep roots in being baseball fans ourselves – passionate about the game and passionate about the fan experience. We saw baseball in some ways as the centre of the universe, so to speak, in New England. We knew people would care as much about what we were trying to accomplish as we would.’
As both a responsible and passionate baseball club owner and a deep student of statistical trends in international markets, John Henry was determined to underpin his giddy love for sport with the sort of rational scientific analysis that could chronicle every player performance to ensure more effective recruitment. One New England paper described the Sox’s use of the ScoutAdvisor software package that collated data on thousands of baseball players, for example, as being like ‘human capital management on steroids’. This sort of minute attention to data and detail might not transfer easily (or usefully) to football in England, but nor did it smack of a group of fly-by-nights who were in sport simply to make a fast buck. Indeed, in 2008 when the Boston Herald wondered if it might be a good time for Henry and Werner to sell the Red Sox after its most recent World Series success in 2007 – the franchise was now valued at some $816 million – John Henry replied that he and Werner had planned for ‘20 great years’ but had actually only started counting in 2006. ‘So we think we have 18 left, including this season. That would be 24 in all, if we are so fortunate. We might as well shoot for 25. There isn’t anything we would rather be doing.’ The contrast between this statement about lengthy commitment and the predatory short-termism of Hicks and Gillett could hardly be greater.
Henry, with his business head on, was focused on cutting costs and growing Liverpool FC markets via new media and in South-east Asia, but he was also apparently directly in tune with the local cultural significance of the club. He was calm and warm in his UK press conferences following the purchase of Liverpool, and he sensibly and quickly met with representatives of the two anti-Hicks-and-Gillett Liverpool supporter initiatives, Spirit of Shankly and Share Liverpool, to allay fears about replicating the mistakes of the previous owners. James McKenna for Spirit of Shankly was impressed. ‘I’m optimistic’ he said later, ‘the hangover from the previous regime is slowly clearing and with football people rather than bankers in charge, the club is heading in the right direction.’ Rogan Taylor for Share Liverpool had typically big ambitions for the future. He reasoned that the potential for perhaps a £50 million collective investment by global Reds fans in the club for a real say and influence on the Anfield board was now an exciting possibility again, especially given the apparently progressive attitudes of Henry and his fellow investors. Share Liverpool offered a ready-made mechanism for fan democracy, though this might be a step too far even for these benign new buyers. But at least John Henry was talking with Reds fans and he was also attending Liverpool matches, often alongside his eye-catching, Europe-loving young wife, Linda Pizzuti. Significantly, both looked happy and immediately at home in the Liverpool directors’ box.
On the crucial question of the stadium development, Henry had some previous form in the USA. Before investing in the Red Sox, he had sold the Florida Marlins baseball franchise partly because of his frustrations about barriers to raising investment to fund a much-needed new stadium. Unsurprisingly here, rather than risk investing up to £500 million in a new Liverpool venue – with possible naming rights to offset costs – he seemed to lean towards refurbishing Anfield, as he had managed to do at the historic Fenway Park stadium. But in Boston he had made the creaky old stadium pay by modernising and extending corporate facilities for the Boston elite, increasing general ticket prices and milking elite fans in the pricey so-called Green Monster seats. Sell-out crowds had limited local complaint. Would the same strategies be tried and could they work in Liverpool 4? ‘We were surprised at how beautiful Anfield was,’ he knowingly told FourFourTwo magazine in May 2011. ‘It would be hard to replicate that anywhere else. I was really surprised because we’ve heard so much about needing a new stadium.’ Beauty was one thing, but overcoming planning obstacles to redeveloping Anfield in a way that might challenge the match-day income at neighbours Manchester United and rivals Arsenal was quite another. These were issues that would have to be addressed sooner rather than later if the longer-term Boston ambitions for Liverpool were to be realised. But few Liverpool supporters were likely to argue against staying put in a bigger and better 55,000-capacity version of the club’s original home. Even airing the possibility was another potentially smart move by the new buyers.
THE RETURN OF KING KENNY
The more ordered and much more positive developments off the pitch at Anfield were now matched in late 2010 by some decent Reds home form under Roy Hodgson on it, but also by a series of tepid league reversals away from home. Losses at Stoke, Tottenham, Newcastle and Blackburn would eventually prove fatal for the bunkered manager, but the real nadir was probably the 0–1 home loss against relegation fodder Wolves on 29 December 2010. It was apparent in this non-event that senior Liverpool players (Torres in the van) were simply not trying, an inexcusable response and one from which no Liverpool manager could survive unscathed.
The inevitable happened. Early in January 2011, Roy Hodgson was dismissed and Kenny Dalglish was rushed home from a holiday cruise to take charge as caretaker manager. He saw his new team immediately dumped out of the FA Cup at Old Trafford before losing away to Blackpool – an unlikely league double for the Seasiders. But Jamie Carragher soon rooted out some DVDs to show the club’s untutored foreign players what their new boss had once achieved on the pitch, the experienced Steve Clarke was recruited as a coach, and the returned Liverpool favourite Dalglish soon began to re-find his managerial feet. He would need to act fast.
Late in the 2011 January transfer window, Dalglish was faced with his first big decision and what many supporters felt was quite unthinkable – selling the disillusioned Fernando Torres to Chelsea for £50 million. He reacted decisively and with vision by sanctioning the move. Roy Hodgson, of course, would have been castigated for doing the same. A deal to sign the brilliant young Ajax and Uruguay forward Luis Suárez had already been agreed by Liverpool and now the best available young English striker Andy Carroll, from Newcastle United, joined him in the Liverpool attack. Suddenly, it seemed less like the end of a period that had once shown great promise and more like the start of a fresh new era. As the caretaker manager insisted even as Torres departed, no single player in the club’s history – not Alex Raisbeck, or Elisha Scott, or Billy Liddell, or even Dalglish himself – could ever be bigger than the club.
The raw and inexperienced England man Carroll was widely regarded as overpriced at a hefty £35 million, but the truth was that the wily Dalglish had recruited two of the highest-quality ambitious young international strikers in exchange for a misfiring and unhappy Torres and the departing Dutchman, Ryan Babel. It was actually excellent, enterprising business. Chelsea were even beaten by Liverpool at Stamford Bridge in Torres’s first game for his new club, ironically with the one decent Roy Hodgson signing, Portugal’s Raul Meireles, scoring the crucial goal. The Reds still struggled for consistency away from home and their European ambitions withered as a result. But on 6 March 2011, Luis Suárez almost single-handedly dismantled Manchester United at Anfield in a 3–1 win (a Kuyt hat-trick), and on 11 April Carroll did the same to Manchester City, with two extraordinary goals in a 3–0 victory. The caretaker manager was positively bursting with enthusiasm after the latter win, talking typically in press conferences about the deep ‘pride’ in the club and its fans now shown by hungry Liverpool players on the pitch. It felt remarkably like the old days at Anfield: a blend of imported new young stars and rising local talent meant the future for Liverpool FC seemed brighter once more. In the wake of new UEFA regulations on financial licensing and home-grown players – ideas supported by the Boston owners – the club’s academy was at last beginning to produce promising new material for the first team. For the first time, in fact, since Carragher, Gerrard and Michael Owen had all emerged from the Kirkby fields more than a decade before.
At the time of writing (June 2011), Liverpool has likeable, wealthy, ambitious and committed new owners (in March 2011 NESV was renamed Fenway Sports Group, with the New York Times, no less, revealed as a major shareholder) and a new management structure, with Ian Ayre as managing director, the ex-Spurs man Damien Comolli installed in November 2010 as director of football, and the smiling wise-cracking 60-year-old Kenny Dalglish remaining the popular local favourite who was appointed as Reds manager on a permanent basis. However, John Henry could not and would not act on sentiment here: there were other viable and much younger managerial candidates available and being touted abroad. Nor had any resolution yet been agreed concerning stadium matters, and Liverpool would not be playing in the Champions League in 2011–12. This meant a possible stall on new signings and even on the necessary funds for any major stadium work. Nevertheless, after the recent terrible pall of Hicks and Gillett, the depression of the later months of Rafa Benítez, and the very public failings and hounding of Roy Hodgson, the club and its supporters had good reason to feel vibrant and confident once more. Some dark clouds had been lifted. It was a case of back to the future with King Kenny, and people who really ought to know better were even beginning to talk about Liverpool winning league titles once again. More importantly, so was a certain soft-spoken sports-loving, US-based Liverpool supporter: John Henry, after all, had spent pretty much all of his life as a sports-mad winner.
INTRODUCTION
For the year 2008, and despite its many doubters, the city of Liverpool was a spectacularly successful European Capital of Culture. This was a fitting reason, in itself, for the writing of a book during that halcyon period that celebrates the history and cultural significance of football and of Liverpool Football Club in the city. Without doubt, football is as much a feature of the cultural heritage and artistic landscape of the city of Liverpool as any theatre production, media installation or art exhibition.
As many people have noted, Liverpool is something of a city on the edge, both geographically and culturally. Despite its considerable Welsh and Scottish in-migrations, Liverpool has typically looked westwards, to Ireland and the United States, rather than back to Britain or southwards to Continental Europe, for its inspiration and for much of its cultural history. It has many of the independent and distinctive characteristics of a city on the margins, a place at the end of the line even. Rather like other great peripheral cities of Europe that have football at their cultural heart, such as Marseille and Naples, Liverpool has an uneasy and shifting relationship with its national host, often preferring to look inwards rather than to national forms of identification. In this sense, T-shirts that describe Liverpool football supporters in the city as ‘Scouse not English’ are making rather more than a joke.
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