In Defence of Chelski

Thank heavens for Andrew Flintoff. Quite apart from decisively contributing to the humbling of one of the most obnoxious collection of talent ever to assemble in a sporting arena – verily, so obnoxious were they that this committed little Irelander was wholeheartedly shouting for perfidious Albion – but his swashbuckling efforts and his chortlesome consumption of copious amounts of booze showed us all just how lazy, boring and grossly overpaid footballers are and how utterly boooooring the winter game really is. We couldn’t have done it without you, Freddie.

Except plenty of us knew football was boring to begin with. Someone who read a book where nothing happened for 95% of the time would either a) give it the Booker Prize, or b) demand their money back. If you want to appreciate a game of sport for its aesthetics, there have always been pursuits more elegant, more dramatic, more brutal, more exciting than football. Yet football has thrived because it is the only sport with a truly global reach, creating an at-times incomprehensible web of tribal loyalties that refresh the parts of the soul that other sports cannot reach. Not only would Northern Ireland (or their equivalent) be incinerated every time they met England in cricket, they’d never get the chance to play them in the first place. The cricket crowd may be crowing as the Greatest Test Series Ever remains in the memory, but the fiasco recently played out between Australia and the World XI should cause football fans to smirk at the cricket fans presumption. No football fan would ever assume that just because Liverpool and Milan played the Greatest Match Ever that it makes Everton v Wigan would look more lustrous by association.

Aha, claims the new-found lover of all things leather-against-willow, there is a new fly in the football ointment, and that is the Jeff Goldblum-like creation that is Chelsea. Derek Dohren has already made a spirited case for the prosecution for their cancerous effect on football and, more pertinently to Derek’s thesis, to themselves. But as someone who does not love football because he’s too busy loving Liverpool, it seems to me that a lot of the things Chelsea are accused of have been a part of football since the year dot, and will continue to be until the glaciers return. To whit, let’s look at some of the atrocities Chelsea are accused of visiting on humanity and give the contrarian point of view.

Abramovich’s money is dodgier than a Lada.

Few would say with a straight face that the manner by which Roman Abramovich came upon his cash was kosher. He was part of what is tactfully called an oligarchy which bought up the assets that were previously owned by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for the equivalent of a bag of magic beans. Less tactfully, an article in Time (all right, get all the jeering out of your system) once memorably described Russia post-Gorbachev as a ‘mobocracy’, plundered by a series of latter-day Al Capones who then installed their men in power to retrospectively legalise their grubby capital grab. Abramovich is most certainly part of that crew.

To which I say: so what? On a philosophical level, most elites are created out of the turmoil of revolution and in a few decades no one bats an eyelid. The Duke of Westminster is currently being feted for pouring millions into the regeneration of Liverpool city centre, yet if you were to ask him to demonstrate how he came by the ownership of the vast swathes of land that is the source of his wealth, he’d struggle to produce a receipt. Abramovich will be no different before long. On a more practical level, who among us would not take his cash? There were many expressions of concern when Taksin Shinawatra was sniffing around Anfield at his shady dealings in Thailand. But how many of you would have taken a principled stand and refused to follow Liverpool FC due to the iffy human rights record of the owner of the club? Two of you? That many? Banging in a few goals was enough for John Barnes to banish the racist core at the heart of the Kop forever. The less savoury side of such utilitarianism is that it would only take a few megastar signings for people to ignore Shinawatra’s foibles, and the same is true of Abramovich.

Their money is distorting football in a new and more menacing way.

Derek Dohren makes the case that Chelsea’s bottomless pit of money is more bottomless than previous owners of bottomless pits of money. I’m not so sure. Chelsea have had to travel a lot shorter a distance to the top than the previous team with a bottomless pit of money, Blackburn Rovers. When Jack Walker decided to start throwing money at his beloved club, they were languishing in the old First Division. And make no mistake, at the time the money they spent was thought of as anathema to the competitive spirit, a cancer in the game etc. The figures seem trifling now, but when Blackburn stumped up £5 million for Chris Sutton, the magazine 90 Minutes led with headline screaming “How MUCH?!?” We’ve had moneybags owners before – the Bank of England club, the Chequebook Champions – and we’ll have more in the future, yet football rumbled/rumbles inexorably forward. Okay, Chelsea are the most extreme example yet, but they’re the logical consequence of a system that refuses to treat each club as a protected franchise (Milton Keynes Dons excepted). Theoretically Roman Abramovich could have invested in Marine, or more implausibly, Everton, and nursed them to the top of the football tree. The only way to protect against such a scenario is to introduce American-style franchises, where a one-horse town like Green Bay can be a force in the NFL. But no one can ever be relegated or promoted. That’s the choice we have to make, and I think I know which most people would choose.

They’re boring.

Perhaps they are. It doesn’t matter. Winning, to quote a legendary coach of the aforementioned Green Bay Packers, isn’t everything – it’s the only thing. That’s not strictly true, but given the choice between winning ugly and losing pretty, there’s only one game in town as far as the fans are concerned, fans being the only group that a club’s staff owe anything to. When Martin Jol said that there was an obligation on Chelsea to be stirring and dynamic, what he meant was Chelsea should invest more effort in good football which would leave less energy to spend on, well, winning. Spurs fans in particular routinely talk up their love of ‘good football’, which is code for saying “we’re crap but at least we play ‘good football’”. Which in turn is code for “we’re crap.” Somehow I doubt Chelsea fans look enviously at all those teams that

They’re going to dominate football for decades.

Perhaps the greatest source of the chill passing through football today is the idea that the league title is taking up permanent residence for Stamford Bridge. This seems reasonable given their current rate of progress. But nothing lasts forever. Mourinho is a big part of Chelsea’s success. Perhaps he will get bored and move on to a new challenge. A time will certainly come when his methods become stale. Alex Ferguson is still the same man who swept the boards for Man United in the 1990’s, but his opponents are not the same. It must have galled him – oh, how it galled him! – to see Rafael Benitez waltz away with the European Cup in his first season. His tactical lesson for the young Spanish Turk was probably greeted by Rafa as if it were scrawled on papyrus, so antiquated must Ferguson’s philosophy seem to the modern generation of manager. Even the greatest teams can be upset by the departure of a couple of key players. Lost amidst the tumult of the Kop’s hammering of Chelsea in last season’s European Cup semi-final was Mourinho’s lame excuse that they were missing Arjen Robben and Damien Duff. So Chelsea were short two players and suddenly they were so toothless that they had to put Robert Huth up front. It was an astonishing admission for Mourinho, one that might have gotten more attention had it not been for his even more lame attempt to blame it all on the dodgy Garcia goal – which he, alone among the entire planet, knew was definitely not over the line. Perhaps Chelsea are a Petr Cech or a Claude Makalele injury away from finding the whole balance of their team knocked askew. You could argue that Chelsea will lob out another £30 million on a replacement, but what player worth that much who has not had a lobotomy would sign on the basis of being a short-term replacement, or what manner of effect on player morale would it be to have two world-class players like that squabbling over the one slot? There are so many ways for the Chelsea machine to go haywire that it is surely impossible that it won’t go wrong at some point in the future.

When will that point come? Impossible to say, and there are going to be a few more reversals akin to that walloping we recently received at Anfield to deal with. But the measure of any person and / or institution is not how it handles success but in how it handles failure. Milan took their soul-destroying defeat in Istanbul with a tremendous amount of grace – bolstered by the knowledge of a century of experience that while the pain will linger and never truly go away, it does ease over time. Remember when Arsenal plundered the league from under noses? It still causes a pang if you think about it too hard, but flick all mental processes into Istanbul mode and the endorphins wash away all the pain. It would be good as Liverpool fans if we could show the same poise living in Chelsea’s shadow as we expected others to show to us when we were the undisputed masters of football.

J’Accuse – The Houllier Haters

Enoch Powell observed that all political careers, unless abruptly cut short by early death, are doomed to end in failure. How right he was. When the dust had settled on the Irish Civil War, only one of the main leaders from the Troubles of 1916 – 1922 was left standing. Eamon de Valera would go on to be Taoiseach (Prime Minister) for twenty-one years and President for fourteen, yet is now dismissed as a doddering old backwoodsman who tried to keep Ireland in the Stone Age. Meanwhile Michael Collins, slain at the tender age of 31, is now portrayed as some manner of latter-day Jesus who would have led us into an era of peace, prosperity, religious tolerance and sexual liberation – if only he had lived. In British politics, Hugh Gaitskill (“a thousand years of [British] parliamentary democracy”) and John Smith are spoken of by Labour apparatchiks as the men who would have led Britain to the promised land of perfect democratic socialism, while Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher are respectively the recipients of much sotto voce gratitude that the old crank has finally croaked it / fervent wishes that the old bag would finally croak it. Truly the grass is always greener on the far side of the hill (or at the bottom of the hill past Stanley Park, mainly because they spread manure over the field every fortnight [read him his rights – the Bad Joke Police]).

Few men would appreciate this better than Gerard Houllier. Had the aortic dissection that struck him down in October 2001 proven to be fatal, the lamentations for our lost leader would still reverberate around Anfield to this day. As it is, he survived and was feted like royalty – or even someone worthwhile – on his return against Roma. Tediously documented in this column as the night from which all my happiness flows, it didn’t look like it would be any different for Gerard Houllier. The reception from the Kop was matched by a scorching performance on the pitch, one far superior in footballing terms to the doggedly-defend-a-dodgy-goal efforts against Chelsea last season (although the prize against the pride of Lahndahn was, in truth, slightly more weighty). The performance against Roma was one of potential European champions from a team sitting proudly at the top of the table. Viewed in that manner, it’s hard to credit that it all went wrong.

Yet go wrong it most spectacularly did. Spend a few hours on the message board and the contempt heaped on Foolier / Hoola Hoop is unending. Every problem that the club has is laid at his feet. The Academy isn’t producing because he was too busy buying crap from France. We’re broke because he spent all our money buying crap from France. He tore the Scouse heart out of the club to replace it with crap from you-know-where. Players, both past and present, seem to be queuing up to tell the world how he was beastly to them and how glad they are he’s gone.

It’s hard to defend him, and in some ways he isn’t worth defending. Any attempt to put his regime into context comes up against the immovable object of his sacking, the first time a Liverpool manager was definitively given his P45 since way back in 1959. Perhaps he wasn’t all that bad? He was that bad, otherwise he wouldn’t have been sacked. The treble season is unfairly denigrated by some, but while most will admit that it was great, they will reasonably argue that it shouldn’t excuse the decline that took place two and three seasons later. Even Rafa should not be immune from criticism and / or the sack should we find ourselves no better off in three seasons time – some seem to think three months is too long, but that’s another story. It’s a little trite to quote Enoch Powell as if that excuses the failure, because it shouldn’t disguise that he didn’t die, he did carry on and it did ultimately end in failure. To say otherwise is to become an Evertonian, selecting only those bits that support the argument and ignoring everything else.

Still, three things can be dredged up to keep Ged out of the Bastille. The first point in his favour – and it contradicts what went before, but it DID matter and it DID count – was the success we did enjoy under him. Success is not counted exclusively in league titles, and 2000/1 saw Liverpool achieve success that left most fans (not least that lot down the hill) sick with envy. It’s not been often in the last decade-and-a-half that we’ve been eagerly awaiting each and every game at the tail-end of the season, but that was true of that season. Game after game, Liverpool had to win and they invariably did, culminating in that giddy eight days when the FA Cup, Uefa Cup and Champions League qualification (our first appearance in nearly 20 years in that trophy that is the source of our greatest nights and our darkest hour) were secured. It was once put to Joseph Heller that he hadn’t written anything to rival Catch-22, to which he replied that neither has anyone else. It would be over-the-top to say the same of those triumphs of 2000/1, but there’s a grain of truth in it, and Houllier would be entitled to feel aggrieved that it is now being airbrushed in such a way that it looked like only a step in the journey rather than an entire journey in its own right.

Another criticism of Houllier is that he supposedly left the club in ruins, stuffed to the gills with players who cost too much and are on contracts so cushy that they’d drive Tom Cruise to such fits of jealousy that he’d be driven to taking anti-depressants. Meanwhile the Academy is bursting with young talent but he was behaving like a British ex-pat driving through Provence, picking up any old tat that looked chic simply because it was French while the locals sniggered at him behind his back. There’s no doubt he bought some dross in his time, but he also bought some diamonds. The fact that eight of the team that won us the European Cup were bought by him is often dismissed as irrelevant without any good reason being offered as to precisely why it is irrelevant. It was he who stood by Jamie Carragher when the Kop was routinely howling for his head, a point conveniently forgotten by those who now chant about wanting a team of Carraghers. As for the failures of the Academy, the criticism amounts to a whispering campaign that would make New Labour spin doctors blush. A recent contributor to the message board wittered on about how his son was excluded and ignored by Houllier. The idea that his son wasn’t up to it is, of course, preposterous, although seemingly not as preposterous as the notion that the Academy hasn’t produced the goods to put into the first team. Perhaps you think the manager should take responsibility for that failure, in which case you should demand the head of Rupert Murdoch every time your satellite dish goes on the blink or the paper person doesn’t turn up with your copy of The Times (I trust you don’t buy the Dirty Digger’s other national daily).

The third plank of the Houllier bashers is the criticism levelled at him by footballers. This is probably the most worthless element of the assault on Ged because there is no group on this planet more self-serving, egotistical and one-eyed than those involved in professional sport. It is fair to say that few people have been as assiduous in deflecting blame from themselves than one Gerard Houllier, but his lame attempts to blame injuries, referees and the auguries contained within the goat entrails were scornfully – and justly – brushed off by one and all. Yet the likes of Djimi Traore, another player who owes his place at Anfield almost entirely to Ged, has the cheek to claim that the French players felt left out under Houllier. How this squares with those who claim he destroyed the club’s Scouse core – see above re the Academy – is a mystery. Better to dismiss both as moaning minnies looking to justify their own failings.

More sinister is the unquestioning manner in which Robbie Fowler’s comments have been swallowed by the media. It was almost universally accepted at the time that Fowler clashed regularly with Phil Thompson, yet now we are expected to believe that Phil was okay all along but was corrupted by the miasma of garlic. Perish the thought that Houllier might be given any credit for making a public arse of himself when he honestly attempted to defend Fowler’s line sniffing antics against Everton. No, anything that would suggest that Houllier had the best interests of the player and the club at heart must be purged from history. And while one appreciates Robbie’s affection for the club and his belligerent belief in his own ability (a necessary trait for a top footballer), nothing he has done since has suggested that Ged was wrong to take £11 million from Leeds United’s creditors. Manchester City fans who lament his miss at the death against Middlesbrough last season will sigh that there is no one they would have rathered take that penalty. Really? Was this the same Fowler who imploded against Man United in the 1996 FA Cup final, despite being indulged by Roy Evans to the extent that the much more dangerous looking Stan Collymore was hauled off to try and liven things up? Or the same Fowler who missed two one-on-one chances late in the 2001 final that would have saved us all a few heartbeats? I don’t expect Robbie Fowler to factor these things into account when casting a cold eye over his own career, but for other people to forget these things represents a total commitment to utilise any weapon against Gerard Houllier while refusing him a fair shield with which to defend himself.

Now that we’ve come to the end of this rant, it strikes me as perhaps being a wee bit too bitter (sez he, as if he didn’t write it. I confidently expect to claim at some point in the future that I was misquoted or quoted out of context). Liverpool and Gerard Houllier was a marriage that, despite some great times, didn’t work out. I don’t want to be seen as denouncing those who criticise or quibble about what happened. But the desire is often expressed by those in the vicinity of a divorce that the parties behave with a bit of dignity and respect for each other. Ged has followed that up, walking away with his wishes for a happy future reverberating gently in our ears. Accusing him of things for which he cannot be blamed, using childish labels like “Foolier” and inflicting death by a thousand Chinese whispers does not seem to be the best way to reciprocate.