Feed the Hurn and He Will Score . . .

. . . will be the lame quip should Gary Hurney turn out to be the new cult hero of Waterford hurling, or at least it would be if this were soccer. It smacks of desperation to plunge Hurney into the cauldron of Munster championship hurling without featuring at all during the League. But while it may have been an error not to blood a few more players in the League, there’s no point in compounding the error by churning through players who got the chance but didn’t take it. So credit to Justin and co for letting the dice fly. The rest of the team looks robust enough, so it’ll be a killer if we don’t win this one. Fatalism is all very well, but a team laden down with All Stars should be expecting to beat one which is rather light on them. Of course, if Sharon Stone is to be believed, there will be a lot of bad karma coming our way for that lame quip.

Prognostications and Procrastinations

No team is more aggressively evaluated at season’s end than Waterford. Perhaps it’s because we’re everyone’s favourite second team (a habit that, given you are expected to follow your local team but most of Ireland is a hurling desert, is a lot more virtuous that it is in soccer), perhaps it’s being the hope of the punditocracy to bring a new team to table of recent All-Ireland winners, or perhaps it’s a function of being the last best hope to break the recent Cork – Kilkenny duopoly. Whatever it is, Waterford are routinely accused of failing to live up to lofty expectations, and never more so than last year.

This is legitimate. Having ratcheted up expectations with a series of swashbuckling performances from the League quarter-final win over Tipperary through to the nerveless win over Cork in the All-Ireland quarter-final, the disappointment of the failure to Limerick was crushing, not least to the hacks such as Phil Space and Philippa Column who were drooling over the prospect of an epoch defining clash in September with the Cats. Last year was the first time that I felt we were truly ready for an All-Ireland final appearance – the defeats in 1998, 2002, 2004 and 2006 had a circular logic that said that if we couldn’t win the semi-final, we wouldn’t win the final; there was no such ‘comfort’ in 2007, which made it doubly heartbreaking. Even the thought that I would have missed out on going to the final was no solace.

Having said all that, there is a large slice of 20/20 hindsight to such condemnation. As Tom Humphries put it after the League final win, opinion on Justin McCarthy’s future in the winter of 2006/7 was divided between those who thought he had stayed one year too long and those who thought he had stayed two years too long. No one gave Waterford much of a chance in 2007, and it was also agreed by fat hacks sitting around the fire with brandy and cigars that we had missed the boat in 2006 – again, a harsh judgement on a team who were being dismissed out of hand having lost to Tipperary in the first round of the Munster championship, the biggest summer defeat we had suffered since the 1998 Munster final replay.

(Liam Dunne had no doubt in his Sunday Times article this week that Waterford should have dispensed with Justin McCarthy’s services, that Waterford needed freshening up and the County Board needed to be ruthless. This is superficially appealing, but it would have been sickening had Justin not been given another tilt after the excellence of so much of last season. To go from being universally accepted as the only team likely to stop Kilkenny’s march to less than nothing on the basis of one match would be a case of mistaking ruthlessness with vindictiveness.)

So in the interests of full disclosure, I’m going to commit to cyberspace my hopes and fears for 2008 before the season starts in earnest, thus allowing a realistic compare-and-contrast come September.

Before we look forward to where we want to go we got to look at how we got here, and it isn’t a pretty picture. There has been much sniggering at the manner in which Wexford have pursued their objection to their relegation from Division One of the NHL while Cork broke the rules and stayed up, waiting until after they had been relegated to raise their principled concerns. It’s easy to be dismissive of Wexford’s stance – they’d have had no problems if they had beaten Antrim – but the way the chips fell disguise how close their fate was to being that of Waterford. Picking up two walkover points over Cork meant we got a playoff against them. Seeing as we lost that match in Walsh Park it’s not a stretch to say we would have lost to them in Cork, which would have relegated us seeing as Wexford, had they been in our position on the fixture list, would have picked up the two walkover points instead of us. Can you imagine the turmoil we’d be in now if we had been relegated? We wouldn’t have been as badly off as Wexford are, what with them showing no sign that they can shake off their felinophobia, but even if you think the League isn’t worth much the bonus of two competitive games against Cork and Tipperary should stand to us.

Now for the looking forward part. Clare didn’t have any better a League than we did. They certainly needed to make a better showing seeing as there has been little sign of energy from that quarter for a number of years now. They were probably having a good old laugh when they got Limerick in last year’s All-Ireland quarter-finals while our reward for winning the Munster title was . . . well, the reward was winning the Munster title, something they haven’t done for ten years now, but they definitely got the soft(er) option while we had to endure another bruising encounter with Cork. This must have made it all the more galling when Limerick glided serenely past them, the same Limerick that they hammered out the gate in the qualifiers last year. Perhaps Clare have something kept under wraps. There’s still the ghosts which, despite the win in 2002, we have yet to exorcise. They also effectively have home advantage, an act of that I’m convinced is vengeance from our peers for siding with Cork and Kerry in the seeding of the football draw. For all of that, they look more vulnerable than they have for years. This is one we should be winning, and I think we will.

Which would bring us on to Limerick, whom I would like to state categorically are not vulnerable, are not being ignored in favour of a Munster final appearance and are not going to concede any goals to Dan Shanahan. Richie Bennis will not get any ammo from me to fire back at us. Except saying anything other than ‘me sorry Massa Limerick, me be good Toby‘ seems to be enough to get Richie into a lather of righteous indignation. So let’s say it straight: had we played Limerick one hundred times in last year’s All-Ireland semi-final, we would have won seventy times. At least. The Munster final was a better representation of the gap between the two teams, and Waterford should be able to take psychological succour from the fact that this was only the third time in the last decade that we won a match against a top county pulling up in the last few minutes, the other two being Tipperary in 2002 and Clare in 2004. Given we’ll have had the confidence boost of beating Clare if we’ve gotten to this point, I’ll take us to win this one too. So remember Richie, that’s d-e-i-s-. . .

At this point, let’s go off on a slight tangent, a little spot of philosophy a la deiseach. It is a rarely observed fact (probably because it’s a bit soft to really be a ‘fact’) that Waterford’s failings in 2002 and 2004 sowed the seeds of our failings in 2007. Back in 2002, Waterford rode into Croke Park on the crest of a wave. A very high wave but a very long one too, six weeks having passed since the euphoria of 6/30, as they would say in America. No less a sage than Ger Loughnane warned Waterford that teams who had had a long break would hit the ground running but fade as the match went on. And this is exactly what happened. It was different two years later with Waterford starting cold and finishing strong, but the result was the same. The world and his partner-in-life agreed that the system had shafted Waterford, that they were punished for winning the Munster championship. So the powers-that-be decided to introduce the quarter-final to reduce the gap between the Munster final and the All-Ireland semi-final for the Munster champions. Unfortunately no one thought to a) wait until after the qualifiers had concluded to make the quarter-final draw, thereby making Waterford play Cork twice, and b) leave enough time for any replays, thereby making Waterford play three high-octane Croke Park clashes in fifteen days. This will be used to peddle all manner of agendas ranging from Waterford lacking bottle to the folly of any form of back door system, when it should tell us that we have not been good enough, whatever the system.

Onwards to the putative Munster final, and any assessment of the respective abilities of Waterford, Tipperary and Cork based on the evidence would lead one to conclude that Waterford are the weakest link. Speaking to a knowledgeable Tipperary man recently, he was dismissive of Waterford’s shambles of a League campaign, reasoning that Tipp are a team of energy-filled tyros who have been training since late last year and Waterford have yet to hit their stride. I don’t doubt his sincerity in this matter, but being in training for ages sounds like a positive, not a negative. Tipperary are the quintessential sleeping giant, and there are definite signs that they are stirring. As for Cork, they have shrugged off the embarrassment of their strike with characteristic brazenness – everyone out of step but us, boy. While their League campaign was a curate’s egg, it was chastening to see them get into any kind of rhythm after the infighting that briefly threatened to destroy their entire season. Both of them will feel that their semi-final clash is the real Munster final. Of course, they’d think that at the worst of times, but these are not the worst of times and you don’t need to know who will win that match to predict the winner would be capable of taking Waterford.

The seeing stone gets murky after this. The range of possibilities are limited in Munster, and whether we have to plough through the qualifiers or get through to the quarter-finals as losing Munster finalists, the range is vast (in so far as hurling’s pool of competitive counties can ever said to be vast), whether it be the good (Offaly), the bad (Galway) or the ugly (Clare or Limerick again). So let’s cast a veil over proceedings and return to it after the Munster final. Whether we are in it or not will likely shape our expectations. Let’s hope they don’t limit them.

First blood

Defeat to Clare in the Munster championship will be a bitter pill for the Waterford team to swallow. Perhaps home advantage made a difference to Clare – the wins for Fermanagh and Limerick today suggest that it might make a difference between teams on the same level – but if Waterford were going to progress, and be seen to be making progress, they were going to need to put up a few wins against the likes of Clare, and they haven’t been able to do it. Waterford should still be serious contenders for the Tommy Murphy Cup, but it will test John Kiely’s motivational skills to the limit to keep them perked up for that.

Any pointers for next Sunday? Surely not . . .

Presentable Munsters

Saturday sees Munster attempt to win the Fizzy Dutch Pilsner Cup for the second time in Cardiff. The whole Munster phenomenon – and whatever you think of it, it’s certainly phenomenal – is endlessly discussed among Irish sports fans, with even well-known sports fan Vincent Browne weighing in on the subject, kicking Waterford out of Munster in the process. I’m not the least bit offended by Vincent’s cavalier ejection of us from the province because a) he’s only saying it as he sees it; he feels no provincial affinity with Waterford, any more than a Wexford person might be able to bond with a Longford person, and b) who cares what Vincenzo thinks anyway.

It used to matter, this Munster lark. When Ronan O’Gara knocked over a last-kick-of-the-game conversion away to Saracens in the 2000 group stages – one that famously went over the top of the post – to secure the win, I remember noting it on Aertel with pleasure. Not long after, I watched the tension-soaked return fixture at Thomond Park on RTÉ, when Mark Mapletoft scored with a few minutes to go to leave Munster needing a converted try to secure victory. Keith Wood barrelled over to leave Munster one point behind. As it happened, that was enough to secure qualification but few people had done the maths and it seemed like the conversion was necessary. O’Gara duly obliged via the paint on the inside of the post. Cue much rejoicing in Limerick and my living room. The excitement levels went into orbit after a titanic win over the mighty Toulouse in Bordeaux, so when Munster came up short against Northampton in the final, it felt as bad as any Waterford or Liverpool defeat before or since.

If all this seems like an excruciating level of detail about Munster’s exploits in 2000, it reflects just how deep Munster got under my skin. Yet between then and now, the sense of belonging has gotten to the point where it is only skin deep. It was winning the trophy in 2006, the end of a long journey – and when you reach the end of a journey, what do you do other than stop? It was the migration of live rugby to Sky Sports, which might be a warning to those (myself included) who are open to the idea of taking the Dirty Digger’s shilling. It was the nauseating sense of entitlement that attached itself to following Munster, partially demonstrated by the referenced Vinny Brawn article in the Irish Times this week but given its best outing by a hilarious epistle in the Sunday Times the day of the 2006 semi-final against Leinster when some alickadoo from the Munster Supporters Club (or whatever it’s called) basically said the Heineken Cup (or whatever it’s called) was nothing without Munster. Supporters of teams like Toulouse who have a long and proud history well before the ERC ever came into being, have done well to avoid scoffing too loudly at such nouveau riche pretentiousness.

Whatever it was – and much as I’d like to pretend it was some high-minded scorn for bandwagon jumping, the absence of it from terrestrial television is probably the main reason – I’m only a casual Munster supporter these days. If they win on Saturday, great. If they don’t, attention will switch to Sunday week in the Gaelic Grounds without so much as a heartbeat being skipped, the only ‘Munster’ that truly matters.

Update: to see how much I bought into the Munster blarney back in the day, click here.

Bugger!

At times, I wonder whether subconsciously I hate Justin McCarthy. Much of what I say about him on this site is a bit scornful, whether it be his persistence with out-of-form players or his cavalier treatment of fringe squad players. Upon reflection, I like Justin McCarthy (although seeing as any hatred would be in my subconscious, I’m not the best person to pass judgment). These matters, and a few other trifles, are merely things that I disagree with him on. Ultimately he is the coach, the only one who has to worry about his musings actually being put to the test. As with Rafael Benitez, it’s important to keep that firmly in mind when criticising management, and I like to think that I keep any criticism of the reasonable variety. In addition, Justin is the only man to have ever won a senior title for Waterford in my lifetime. For that, he will always have my admiration and – dare I be so effusive – my affection.

However, his habit of engaging in what Jack Charlton once memorably described as ‘silly buggers‘ with respect to dealing with the media in general and the team line-ups in particular has always been a source of irritation. It’s a common trait among managers these days, the assumption being that opponents are going to be unsettled by the sudden appearance of such-and-such on the team sheet having been led to believe all week that he was at death’s door. This might have been true once upon a time when such tactics were innovative, but it’s become so common nowadays that everyone treats team sheets and reports of injuries with about as much seriousness as neocons trying to pretend that a nappy found in a bin in Baghdad is evidence of weapons of mass destruction.

The real problem with this is that real injuries really do come up on the blindside. So having wasted a few sacks of salt dealing with recent reports of injuries in the Waterford camp, the news that Ken McGrath requires keyhole surgery is a bombshell. The worst part is that I’ll cling to the hope that this is Justin and co. moving on to DEFCON 1 in their war with the media, i.e. outright lying as opposed to he’s-taken-a-knock-in-training-style mumbo jumbo. When he doesn’t turn up on June 1st, all those silly bugger games are going to royally blow up in our collective faces. Hopefully this will be the lesson needed to dispense with the mind games and just play the game.

Whither old hurler

Having not seen Waterford’s win over Kilkenny in the Tom Cheasty memorial tournament on Sunday night, I’ll refrain from saying too much as I’d only be repeating what match reports say. Just one observation, or a prediction. The man who scored more than half of Waterford’s points, including a sideline cut, will start on Sunday week against Clare, but this will only be because of the absence of Eoin Kelly. If things get a bit sticky, he will be hauled ashore and the free taking duties will be handed to Paul Flynn or Ken McGrath – although not before he knocks Justin McCarthy’s block off for making him the scapegoat for the umpteenth time (in fairness to Justin, Gerald McCarthy was equally culpable in that regard) for failure while more illustrious types stay on the field.

You read it here first.

It’s Our Trophy And We’ll Cry If We Want To

There have been many false dawns in the eighteen seasons since the Reds last laid claim to the League title. Would we have won the League in 1992 but for the injuries that plagued an ageing team? Twenty games without defeat in 1996 conspired to raise hopes that were dashed against the rock of the White Suits final, a match that should not be noted in infamy for any sartorial folly but for the bloated waistlines brought on by a leisurely stroll though the last few games of the league campaign as the title receded and players avoided injuries. In 1997 the Reds were top at the New Year and led 1-0 against Coventry with six games to go. Had they held on that day, they would have gone top. Instead, they were beaten by the Gary McAllister-inspired Sky Blues and suffered the ignominy of finishing fourth on goal difference behind Newcastle and Arsenal. In 2002 we won thirteen and drew one of our last fifteen matches. Unfortunately Arsenal won fourteen and drew one of their last fifteen. Some might have been sufficiently jaundiced not to extract too much optimism from any / all of the above positions, but it’s impossible for the rest of us not to get carried away by even the merest hint of winning the League – and there was more than a hint in any / all of the above.

Perhaps the cruellest taunts of that period were those that raised the possibility that the Evil Empire that is Manchester United was about to fall and be buried in so much Ozymanidian sand. When Alex ‘Demento‘ Ferguson, the greatest manager of this generation – yeah, I said it – announced his intention to resign back in 2002, it was a source of much rejoicing. It didn’t happen, but in the five seasons between 2001 and 2006 they won one League title, hardly the stuff upon which legends are built. When the Glazers came along like an impersonation of Mom, Walt, Larry and Ignar from Futurama it seemed like they were vanish up the collective backside of the clowns who flounced off to form FC United of Manchester. Yet here we are, suffering under the yoke of them being the first club to successfully defend the League having won a hat-trick of titles sometime in the past – it’s a crummy trivia question, but somehow still manages to hurt.

It can get worse though, much worse come Wednesday night. My wife, good Red that she is, is torn as to whether to root for the Mancs or the Chavs. On the one hand, the Mancs are, well, the Mancs. On the other hand, as a veteran of our two European Cup wins over Chelsea and an enthusiastic singer of “F*** off Chelsea FC / You’ve got no history . . .”, she finds it hard to see someone new muscle in on Liverpool’s territory. Man Utd have won leagues and even European Cups in the recent past and we’ve coped. Chelsea joining us at the summit might lower the tone to the point of no return.

It’s not an opinion I share though. With Man U’s 17th League title under their belt, the gap between them and us domestically is tight. While in terms of numbers we are still ahead, not all trophies are equal. Their eleven FA Cups and two League Cups is probably worth more than our seven FA Cups and seven League Cups. Let’s assume for the sake of argument – not that we want to ‘argue’, fellow Red – that a League Cup is worth one point, an FA Cup worth two and a League title four points, i.e. an FA Cup is worth twice a League Cup and a League worth twice an FA Cup. That would leave them with 92 points and us with 93 points. Yep, perilously tight.

Even if some Manc hack was to come up with a metric that weighted success in such a way that they came out ahead, a decisive tiebreaker would be Europe. Our five European Cups and three Uefa Cups easily trump their two European Cups and one European Cup Winners Cup. Factor in that the ECWC was never very impressive despite being technically superior to the Uefa Cup – continental teams don’t take their cup competitions seriously leading to some God-awful representatives, and Uefa eventually put the competition out of the misery of having been won by the likes of West Ham and Man City – and we stomp all over Man Utd’s European record.

Every which way you turn it, Liverpool’s European performances make other teams Blue with envy. Even during the disappointments of the last two decades, Europe has been the supreme consolation. With the ECWC no longer available to provide English teams with soft European gongs, they’ve had to wade through the more robust fields of the European Cup and the Uefa Cup, and come up short. Since the oh-so-convenient cut-off point of the beginning of the 21st century, only one British team has won any European trophies, and Liverpool have won four. Think about it. One of our wins in the Super Cup, a souped-up Community Shield, is one more European win than every other team in Britain put together has managed in the Noughties. Watching Rangers stink the place up against Zenit St Petersburg, it was easy to preen ourselves at how much we have offered to European football compared to the rest of the island.

Alas, that proud record will end Wednesday. In the absence of hoping the English team loses to keep our bragging rights intact, it has to be issues closer to home that dominate. And no issue can be more piquant than our status viz. Man Utd. So come on Chelsea, put the lessons you learned in finally being able to overcome the mightiest British club to ever stride the playing fields of Europe and win the thing. You’ll be ever so glad you did.

There but for the grace of God

The football championship started in earnest today, and served up a moment that doesn’t get any less jaw-dropping the more often you hear it. Wicklow won a senior championship match at Croke Park for the first time ever. The people from Wicklow who were at Croke Park today stand alone among every native of their county who has ever lived. The next time someone claims that Waterford have somehow come up short by failing to win the All-Ireland, slap them about the face with that dead fish of a factoid.

Guess Who’s Back, Back Again

The Sunday Game returned yesterday, and the totally justified gripes about Pat Spillane stinking the place up with his non-sequitur questions and his constant interruptions of answers were swept aside amidst the national euphoria at the return of the old James Last penned theme tune. RTÉ are claiming that it is a one-off thing to celebrate the 30^th anniversary of the show, to which a collective snort will go up from the great unwashed.

I’m not one of the inveterate RTÉ bashers that plague the intraweb. In an age where news coverage makes The Day Today look less like parody and more like prophecy, RTÉ are sober in reporting events. Their commitment to treating the audience like adults when it comes to movies – no sanitised version of Goodfellas to protect the ears of people who inexplicably don’t need to be protected from Billy Batt’s being chopped up like a hog in Henry Hill’s trunk – is refreshing. And their dedication to sport is admirable, especially when you see the Beeb so cowed by the slings and arrows of the Mail and the Murdoch press about the supposed misuse of public money that their sports coverage is reduced to Match of the Day and rugby league (only in the North of England, mind). While we can discuss the quality of their output (*cough* Spillane *cough*) there’s no denying the width, their determination to show anything and everything Championship demonstrated by giving over both channels to the Dublin – Meath replay and the Waterford – Cork Munster semi-final last summer. By standing up for sport on terrestrial television when all others are retreating in the face of the Dirty Digger’s onslaught, RTÉ can claim with a straight face to be providing something for everyone.

For all of that – this was never going to be all about praising RTÉ – the station has a stubborn streak as long as their broadcasting mast is tall. Decisions seems to be made out of a desire to act the maggot rather than any overriding need. When they axed the meteorologists from our screens to replace them with more telegenic actors, the decision was justified on the basis that, well, RTÉ reserves the right do what it pleases without reference to any external agent. Now, no one was saying that RTÉ shouldn’t be allowed do what it feels is right, but a reason would have been nice. The same rationale was deployed on the decision to change the theme tune of The Sunday Game – we did it because we could. So snotty was Glen Killane that in the end I came up with my own reason, that RTÉ was saving the licence payer a mint on royalty payments to Herr Last by getting an in-house composer to knock together a tune for a one-off payment thereby allowing more money for better outside broadcasting facilities / Pat Kenny’s court battles (delete as per cynicism). It made sense.

At least, it made sense until RTÉ quietly backtracked this week. Now the only explanation is that they were mulishly refusing to admit their miscalculation and waited long enough to make it look they were not backtracking before, um, backtracking. Kremlinology is nothing on Montroseology.

That Was The Season That Was 2007/8

In a season replete with shocks, one stands out like a woolly mammoth sitting on a Van de Graaff generator. No, not Portsmouth meeting Cardiff in the ‘English’ FA Cup final. It’s the horrible truth that letting your hair grow to, well, woolly mammoth proportions has no material impact on Liverpool’s progress through the European Cup. As the follicles hit the floor in the days after losing to Chelsea, they came to resemble a pile of ashes, thus making a very appropriate metaphor for Liverpool’s season.

Not that we could have had high ambitions for the season.

While lying in my hospital bed back in early August, a fellow Liverpool fan who was given the ward booby prize of being stranded beside someone who hadn’t the energy to talk to anyone or do anything – although at least he didn’t have to worry about them being flatulent or stealing his Fig Rolls. Anyway, said Liverpool fan was convinced that a) Fernando Torres was going to be top scorer, and b) Liverpool were going to win the League.

The worst thing about looking back over those predictions is that his belief in b) flowed from his belief in a). Had someone assured him that a) was going to come true, or close enough that if Torres had been taken the penalties it would still be a live issue going into the final day of the season, then it would have been no great leap to assume that b) was going to come true, or close enough that it would be still be a live issue going into the final day of the season. And yet, b) is not the case, and rarely looked like it.

How could this be? We’ve been told for years that Liverpool were going nowhere until they secured the famed 20 goal a season striker. Along he comes, blowing us – and, more importantly, opposition defences – away with a string of spectacular goals. He even scored on the big occasions against Porto, Arsenal and Chelsea, thus negating any suggestions that he’s only any good at filling his boots against the likes of Derby. Factor in the now famous armband he wore for Athletico, an incident that spawned a chant so good that it had Anfield hopping for the visit of Reading – Reading! – and you surely have the recipe for success.

Yet here we are, one game to go and able to write a season review. For the first time under Rafa, we have nothing to play for going into the final game of the season. Defeat to Chelsea in the European Cup semi-final was not a source of bitterness. The players fought the good fight, battling back from a position of self-inflicted adversity and went down with all guns blazing, a stark contrast to Barcelona’s spineless capitulation to Man Utd the night before. To go toe-to-toe with a stronger team three times and come out ahead twice is a decent return, so there was no disgrace. What the result left was . . . nothing. A case of going from sixty to nought in the length of time it took for the referee to blow the final whistle at Stamford Bridge.

Economists can see trends of boom and bust in the post-Second World War developed world, and it is the Holy Grail of the dismal science to be able to discern a pattern from these cycles, the so-called Kondratieff cycle. Liverpool have had several booms and several busts under Rafael Benitez. The team can go eleven wins on the bounce, conceding one goal along the way, yet can go five league games without a win like they did at one point this season and looking nothing like a team going to win any more games outside of against nobodies in the FA Cup. A long term trend may be emerging, and it’s not a pretty one. Fifth, third, third, fourth. This season, depending on results at the weekend, we are 8-14 points ahead of fifth place but 7-13 points adrift of Arsenal.

Ah, Arsenal. Back in August when in my sick bed, about the only thing that could have stirred me from my torpor would have been the idea that Arsenal could finish ahead of us. Even if Torres only proved to be a ten goal a season striker, i.e. a failure, that would still represent an improvement on what we had before. There was no way Arsenal, having sunk all their cash into their stadium, were going to be able to compete with a team able to land the likes of Torres and Babel. If you stand still in football you end up going backwards, and Arsenal had lost Henry so there was no chance they could even stand still. Arsene Wenger’s season plan came apart at the end as injuries and tiredness took their toll – twenty minutes into their match against the Reds at Anfield in the European Cup as they tore us apart, I consoled myself with the thought that there was no way they could sustain that level of intensity for ninety minutes; for once, I was right – but they are a good 15-20 points up on their performance last season. When you look at the amounts they spent relative to the likes of Portsmouth, Man City, West Ham and even Everton, this was miraculous. It also put Liverpool’s efforts into context.
Looking back through that rant, it’s been a bleak season. It hasn’t been all bad though. We’ve had to some wonderful wins to set off against the dismal defeats. Winning the European Cup in 2005 means that a run through Europe doesn’t have the Sisyphean trauma that it did for, say, Valencia back at the start of the decade whose each step closer to the ultimate prize was marked by a sense of hysteria at the possibility of failure. For us, those wins over Besiktas, Porto, Marseilles and Inter could be enjoyed on their own merits because you could be confident at the time that they were going to be part of something special. The fact that it didn’t work out that way doesn’t invalidate the contemporaneous joy. Then there was Arsenal.

Ah, Arsenal. A Spurs fan who posts on another Internet forum went to the match at Anfield. This particular character may hate Arsenal, much as Evertonians hate Liverpool, but he has a peculiar hatred of Liverpool too, making a comment several years ago that Liverpool fans killed their own at Hillsborough, looted the bodies, urinated on policemen etc. When many irate people pointed out the error of his ways, he simply retreated behind the notion that the Taylor report was a cover-up, making it the first report in the history of the universe to take the side of the masses over the classes. This character then was not predisposed to say nice things about Liverpool, which gives his comments that the atmosphere that night at Anfield was “arguably the most fanatical I have ever experienced” the unmistakeable ring of truth. Watching it on the telly and reading about it afterwards, the best that could be said is that it made the top ten of Great European Nights at Anfield, at best. The atmosphere at the start wasn’t amazing, especially when Arsenal were running rings around the Reds. That would still make it the best atmosphere anywhere in football since, well, last season’s semi-final against Chelsea. Unusually, it was the team that ignited the crowd, Hyypia’s intervention completely against the run of play and Torres’ goal of preposterous precociousness leaving everyone gasping. And it was just one of those games that delight even the most hardened cynic about football, whether they be tired of the modern game or not like football in the first place. Being able to enjoy the last couple of minutes was a rare pleasure as well, one for which my heart was profoundly grateful.

The league wasn’t all bad either. The team finished the season superbly, putting together a great run of form just when everything looked like it was going completely to pot after the astonishing implosion against Barnsley, a game they not only lost but deserved to lose. We may have dropped a place in the league but that can be traded off against an 11/12/14 point improvement on last season, which suggest there might be something to build on next season (whether Rafa can do it or will even be allowed do it, we’ll get back to). They broke even against Chelsea and Arsenal, and might have done better but for the worst refereeing decision of the season – and yes, we got a few dodgy decisions ourselves, but all of them could be justified by the ref seeing it wrong in the heat of the moment; how Rob Styles saw that as a penalty at the time is anyone’s guess. While our performances against Man Utd continue to frustrate, these can be partly offset by wins home and away in the derbies, the former enjoyable for as wimpy a performance as the Toffees have managed in living memory and the latter for just about everything going our way and inducing collective apoplexy in the streets of Kirkby. Don’t you just love it? Finally on the credit side of the ledger, there is Torres. There are not enough bytes in cyberspace to emphasis how superlative he has been, so here is one I prepared earlier.

Looked at in isolation, it’s been a mixed season. Except no team is an island, and it’s impossible to look at Liverpool’s season without reference to the shenanigans at board level. Before the Anfield match against Everton, Mark O’Brien of WSAG wrote the ifithadinabinfor article that habitually accompanies these events – if that sounds a bit scornful, let us genuflect at the altar of the best metaphor of the year, where Mr O’Brien refers to “the Kopite capacity to deify a dog turd if its been trampled through the bootroom”. It’s funny because it’s true. He refers to the boardroom battles at Anfield and how they had reduced LFC to a pitiable laughing stock. At the time, I felt well able to snort derisively at such a comment. Sure, we had our problems, and the spectacle of Anfield engaging in the kind of Sack The Board stuff once the reserve of joke clubs was more than a little irritating. But it was rather rich for the fan of a club who once had Agent Johnson as their owner and now had Luvvie Kenwright bringing all the glamour of Blood Brothers at the Playhouse Theatre to the Pit to be scoffing at our boardroom foibles. Then Tom Hicks demanded that Rick Parry resign and any illusion that Liverpool’s troubles were akin to teething problems came apart like follicles under an electric clippers. The absurdity of the owner publicly demanding an employee resign was a humiliation too far. Who knows what indignities will be visited on our grand old club before the folly of the Gillett / Hicks junta is brought to an end. For end it must, something even they would acknowledge. But the form of the post-American club and the path to take to get there is a complete unknown. Any scenario can be entertained ranging from the al Maktoum’s buying Mutt and Jeff out and lavishing riches upon us beyond the dreams of avarice to Gillett and Hicks plundering the club and leaving a Wimbledon-like shell behind, and all points in between.

It is the uncertainty that hurts. Winning the European Cup would have given us something to hold on to, so when the curtain came down on the European run and with it the season, all we had left to look forward to was a club bobbing around on the tide of history like a piece of cork. We’ll wash up on some shore eventually. But where we’ll go in the meantime . . .