The Decline & Fall

When did Liverpool become a selling club??!!!

This week Liverpool signed the paperwork which finally consigned itself to the rank of “feeder club” to the New World Order of Premiership teams by selling probably the greatest striker in the game today, Fernando Torres, to their rivals Chelsea. An act greeted by the football world with disbelief and shock.  

I grew up in the age when the benchmark was set by the team in all red, the team that my brother supported, the team that won things other English clubs weren’t even competing for...the team I should have hated.

But I didn’t. However much I wanted to dislike them and support their poorer Lancashire neighbours from Stretford, you couldn’t help yourself, because Liverpool deserved respect. Heck! They even defined the word as far as English football was concerned. They were the Yankees; they were the All Blacks, the Steelers, Carlton, Clay and Nicklaus. They had reached the space that surpassed form for they were all substance.

Then all of a sudden they stopped winning, generations of superstars left for punditry and management and the earth quietly shifted on its axis. The fans were not familiar with such a poor return and the pressure quickly mounted for a prodigal son, King Kenny tried but still the fans wanted more and the reality of where we are today in 2011 was formed off the back of a second prodigal son, one who had plans no more calculated than “open cheque book”, “grab pen”, “sign away your heritage”.

Not since the days of Malcolm Allison has such gay abandon been applied to the signing of players. When Man City went on the spree in the early 80’s it was vaunted that it would take 20 years to recover (and almost as many managers!), Liverpool are proving themselves to be the 2^nd coming of Man city for its almost 20 years since Souness took over and to this day the club has not fully recovered. Phenomenal one-off wins in the Champions League cannot disguise the sorry truth that the club of yesteryear has sunk without trace. It is hard to believe the fact that Liverpool won the European Cup when it was at its hardest to win and under the old format they wouldn’t have even played in it since that fateful May day at Heysel in the mid 1980’s.

To Liverpool fans everywhere in the world, I pay my respects to the ancestors, to Hughes, Keegan, Dalglish, Grobellar, Kennedy (both), Hansen, Whelan et al. I hope your relegation to the shadows is not permanent.  I hope to see you again feasting at the top table and proving the old adage that form is temporary but class is forever.