Back in the old routine

Shankly Gates has risen, phoenix-like, from the ashes. For anyone who chooses to pop over there based on my recommendation, apologies in advance for 4squares.

Cards on the table II

Last time online before the Clash of the Titan and Waterford, so what are we to expect from the game? Back in 2001, Liverpool were playing what felt like a cup final most midweeks and every weekend – in some cases they really were cup finals – and a character called scousertommy on the Shankly Gates message board would post up “I fear an almighty banana skin today / tonight (nt)” before the match. This made sense before playing Bradford – now that would be an unexpected slip – but it was hardly revelatory before playing Arsenal. Either way, as Liverpool kept on racking up victories people became almost obsessed at the possibility that he might not post his message. This was surely what was keeping up the run of success.

So having personally mitigated against disaster on Munster final day, my on-the-record attitude is that I fear an almighty banana skin tomorrow. Here endeth the lesson.

Update: in the course of writing this post, I have found that rivals.net is no more, and presumably ShanklyGates.co.uk with it. The owner of Shankly Gates has gone on to bigger and better things and presumably won’t be reviving it elsewhere. Just as well I archived everything here. I’m watching you, WordPress . . .

Update II 14/11/09: it’s back. And there was me deleting all the links in each Shankly Gates post. Now I’ll have to edit them all to reflect the new URL. Good to have ya back.

The Obligatory Sami Hyypia Hagiography

Several years ago, I read an aside in an article in Through the Wind And Rain where the writer wryly noted that the departure of John Barnes from Anfield merited as much comment in the fanzine as did the death of Bob Paisley – still the only manager to win the European Cup three times, folks! The writer wasn’t having a moan or chastising the global Kop for caring more for Digger than for Sir Bob, just highlighting how there are a number of Liverpool fans in recent years with a different subset of memories from those who followed the Reds before the club underwent a popularity supernova. Back in the day, the only way to have an authoritative view of the likes of Bob Paisley was to be regularly at the ground. The ubiquity of televised football and the internet means that everyone has the opportunity to have an informed opinion on the merits of John Barnes.

Whether that will lead to an informed opinion is another matter. So prepare for a potentially-informed-but-probably-not piece on the departure of a player of Barnes-esque proporions, one Sami Hyypia.

Anyone who has only been supporting Liverpool for the last decade, and is therefore lucky enough to only have mostly grey in their still partially hairy head, would probably be surprised to learn that there was a time when Liverpool had a reputation for having all the defensive skills of a slug on an army training ground. It is not an exaggeration to say that Liverpool’s reputation for clownish defending could be traced to the calamitous FA Cup semi-final defeat to Crystal Palace in 1990, a match where Palace seemed to score every time they chucked the ball into the box above waist height. Alan Hansen retired the following year, snuffing out forever that most elegant of double acts he had performed with Mark Lawrenson for seven glorious years in the 80’s.

From now on, Liverpool would become a byword for buffoonery in the box. Nothing we did and nobody we tried could solve the problem. You see Newcastle United now? That was us, that was. Mark Wright was the first of a succession of players signed generally to solve the defensive problems and specifically to be able to do such mundane things as defend corners. Players would be arrive, be touted as the new Hansen / Lawrenson after a few decent performances, then crumble as every gaffe was magnified tenfold under the increasingly relentless gaze of the media.

That’s not to blame the hacks. Everyone who signed up knew what they were letting themselves in for. It was up to them to have broad enough shoulders to cope. But cope they did not. Wright would soon be flapping around like a newly-caught trout and stinking up the place like an oldly-caught trout. Nicky Tanner, Torben Piechnik, Neil Ruddock, John Scales, Phil Babb, Rigobert Song, Bjorn Tore Kvarme . . . they all went through the revolving door of the Anfield central defence only to be spat out at the other side. The only period of stability in that time was when Roy Evans played three central defenders, which is akin to solving someone’s blindness by sticking another eyeball in the middle of their forehead.

Into this maelstrom in the summer of 1999 walked Sami Hyypia. Long of limb and square of jaw, he certainly looked the part and wails of despair followed in his wake from Tilburg where he had been the rock as Willem II secured their best league position in 50 years. Still, that gnawing sense of defensive inadequacy clung to the club and the initial signs were not promising as Hyypia’s Anfield debut saw him bamboozled by Tommy Mooney in 1-0 defeat to Watford. The team stumbled from one mediocre result to another for the next few weeks, and when Steve Staunton was the victim of a preposterous sending off (mistake identity for the first yellow then got a second one for breaking early from the wall when the free kick had already been taken) early at Villa Park, the razor blades were out.

Then a curious thing happened. Liverpool put in a magnificent rearguard performance, one where at the end the travelling Kop was singing YNWA. This may sound ludicrous for a 0-0 draw, but the fans were acknowledging that Villa could have been there all weekend and still wouldn’t have pierced the defence so splendidly marshalled by Hyypia. The sense that a corner had been turned was proven in the following months as Liverpool became a model of defensive solidity. There’s no doubt the moving of Stephane Henchoz in to the middle with Hyypia was a factor but anyone with eyes could see who was pulling the strings. He even weighed in with a few goals. The Reds imploded spectacularly at the end of the season and missed out on the Champions League, but the season had been an overall improvement on the previous one and qualifying for the Uefa Cup would have its fringe benefits. Best of all, the sense that the Liverpool defence was an rolling audition for the Keystone Cops was gone. And all it had taken was one man with broad enough shoulders to shrug off the burden.

There were wobbles along the way. He was a natural choice as captain in the old-school mould of Liverpool skippers, but a loss of form in 2004 was such that he lost that role. And the last few years have seen the muttering that he was seriously short of pace for the highest level reach levels where you, well, hear them clearly.

But that’s all they were – wobbles. There was never a sense that he was doing anything other than keeping the captain’s armband elastic before the inevitable coronation of Steven Gerrard, so it didn’t take much of a dip for him to lose the captaincy. His relationship with Stephane Henchoz was marvellous but with Henchoz prone to the occasional howler, particularly in big matches – Christ, how many heart attacks were induced by those tackles against Birmingham in the League Cup final or the handball against Arsenal in the FA Cup final? – the absence of such errors in Sami’s repertoire only served to make him look better. Suggestions that he had lost a yard of pace would be swiftly slapped down by his many acolytes saying  that he barely had a yard to begin with, and inevitably his performances would come back up to the previous level. Those who had doubted would always cheerfully admit to being wrong. No amount of good performances will convince the sceptics of the qualities of, say, Dirk Kuyt. But everyone was willing to apply to Sami the notion that form was temporary and class permanent.

Then there were the goals. I think it is correct to say that he scored at least one goal in each of his ten seasons at Anfield. It’s not that unusual for defenders to score goals, but he wasn’t restricted to beanpole headers from corners. I recall a game against Man Utd back in 2003, the infamous game where Diego Forlan scored not once but twice,  where  the strikers couldn’t have hit the target had the goalposts been stretched from corner flag to corner flag – always knew that Michael Owen was useless. Up stepped Sami to show them how it was down, firing a crisp shot from the edge of the penalty area through a forest of legs. Most memorable was his effort against Juventus, a delightful volley with his weak foot that any striker would have been proud of. Seeing him wheel away with delight after that goal, it seemed perfectly normal to see him do something so ridiculously precocious.

It didn’t have to end this season. Numerous command performances meant it looked like he would carry on. But when Daniel Agger abruptly signed a new contract after muttering for ages that he wanted away, it quickly became apparent that the quid pro quowould be Sam’s departure. The logic is impeccable, and it appeals to the grand Liverpool tradition of Clemence-esque ruthlessness which sees a player moved on just before he begins to fade rather than just after. Going to a club where the’s not likely to do us any harm helps too. But his departure is poignant. The overload of information referenced in that RAOTL article at the top of the page has gotten worse since the days of John Barnes and when a player spends ten years at a club you feel, however much of an illusion it is, that you know the player. And what we knew, we liked a lot.

So farewell then, Sami Hyypia. We might well see your likes again. But if we do, we will have been fortuante on the double.

That Was The Season That Was 2008/9

It’s been the best of the seasons and the worst of seasons and back to the best again. Twice we embarked on runs where we looked invincible, the first showing a doughty never-say-die spirit in just about every game and the second saw us not even giving chances to teams as they were swept away by an avalanche of goals. In between, we had a run where you began to wonder would we ever win a game. Happy were the days when I thought schizophrenia was a condition of having a split personality as I could have described the Reds as being schizophrenic. As it is, we’ll have to settle for the much less pithy observation that it was like the Reds had a split personality.

The most remarkable thing about the Reds’ season was the grin smeared across Ray Houghton’s features on RTÉ mere moments after Benayoun’s last gasp winner against Fulham. Almost as remarkable is the way Robbie Keane has faded from the collective memory. Loath and all as I am to say ‘I told you so’, I did say we had “picked up a player past his peak, and paid top dollar for the privilege“. Keane hasn’t pulled up any trees since returning to White Hart Lane, where despite taking penalties he hasn’t managed many more goals per game than he did at Anfield. It’s nothing to be happy about, but it’s an immense relief. Having bragged about knowing he was a dud, now is the time to shamefacedly admit that I would have clung on to him, pathetically hoping that he would ‘come good’  in much the same manner I had hoped that Dean Saunders and Nigel Clough might come good (ask your grandparents). This would have been the easy way out for Rafa, so it is to his tremendous credit that he took the £3.5 million hit then rather than the £10-15 million one we’d be taking if we were trying to offload him now.

(Going off on a tangent, am I the only one irked by the self-conscious way in which players won’t celebrate when they score against their former club? I remember Gary Mac refused to do it when he scored the goal in 2001 that effectively relegated Coventry. You’re a professional, man. Either celebrate them all or celebrate none of them, these attempts at empathy with your former fans don’t wash. Okay, I’m the only one.)

Before choking on my own gloating, it should be noted that I got the other transfer saga of the summer of 2008 mostly wrong. Although you wouldn’t be able to tell from that link, any ruminations on the status of Gareth Barry were coloured by the notion that the time had come to move Xabi Alonso along. He’d gotten stale, and the £10 million figures being bandied around at a time when the football transfer market looked like it was about to tank with everything else in the global economy seemed like good business. With that, Alonso puts in what is probably his best season at Anfield and now figures of £20 million are being bandied around which looks like a terrible deal. Things could be worse: we might be linked with Barry again . . .

So it was the best / worst / best of seasons. Despite the lurking horror that was the Keane saga, and a flirtation with disaster in the Champions League that we will be mercifully spared in 2009/10, we really flew out of the blocks. Of all the cliches that people can point to about success, usually after the fact, two stand out: the notion that you can play badly and win, and putting together a championship winning run at a crucial stage of the season. We had both this year as the season started off with some tremendous comebacks in matches we probably should have lost – Middlesbrough, Wigan and most stirringly Man City, a game you never felt we were out of even when we were 2-0 down. Then there was the end to the season, which we finished like a train. Winning ten and drawing one of our last eleven games should have been enough to win the league. Certainly had you been told after the Middlesbrough defeat that we would only drop two points, including that astonishing win at Old Trafford, you’d have glanced at the league table and booked the title party in advance.

Galling as it is to admit, you have to congratulate the Mancs for matching us stride for stride. On several occasions we played ahead of them on the weekend and each time they held their nerve, most notably when finding themselves losing to Villa and Spurs. In the end, we gave ourselves too much of a mountain to climb and for that we must look to that shambolic mid-season funk when points were dropped like so much confetti. If you were looking for a single neat modernist reason for that bad run either side of Christmas, which included the depressing FA Cup exit at the Pit, it would be easy to look at Rafa’s rant at Demento. There’s no doubt it looked bad and got worse as time went on. But personally I prefer to look at the itch that we couldn’t scratch that was Robbie Keane.

I’m really labouring the point now, but when has that ever stopped me? It needs to be emphasised that this is nothing personal, that Keane conducted himself with tremendous dignity when his dream move – for that is what it was – went so spectacularly sour. It must have been utterly humiliating, and his refusal to bitch about his treatment was in stark contrast to the likes of Jermaine Pennant and only made you fret all the more as to whether we were doing the right thing in letting him go. But he was meant to be the final piece in the jigsaw, the 20-goal-a-season striker who was going to partner Torres and make us invincible. Instead his repeated failures to score heaped pressure not only on the player but on the club for failing to make that that swoop count. Man Utd could afford to pay big bucks for a relative mediocrity like Berbatov. Liverpool could not, and it hung around the club’s neck like an anchor.

Even now, it makes no sense that having sold a striker with a proven record Liverpool should start banging them in for fun. Yet Liverpool would soon be flattening teams with ruthless abandon. It helped that Kuyt started doing his share, and Benayoun – the most astonishingly improved player of the season – decided to make a habit of scoring goals at critical junctures. It was as if everyone felt liberated from having to justify the existence of Robbie Keane, not least the manager.

Rafa, Rafa, Rafa. On occasion in the past I have called for your head or given you less-than-fulsome support. I’m still not convinced it is all going to end in tears of joy, something that is really important should happen in 2010 now that Man Utd have drawn level with us in terms of titles won. Three years without a trophy and an unwanted record of being the only team to only lose two games and now in the Premier League. It’s not much of a CV. Yet once again, you’ve done just enough to earn a shot at redemption. Having masterminded the art of European football – failure to win the European Cup every year does not mean you don’t know what you are doing; it is, after all, a cup competition with all the vagaries inherent in that- there is tantalising evidence that you may have gotten English football licked at last. And most importantly, you’ve gotten under Alex Ferguson’s skin. Observe Demento’s recent best-of-friends act with Arsene Wenger and you’ll see a man who only likes you when he thinks he has you whipped. It may not be a sufficient condition for ultimate success but it’s a necessary one, and that represents progress from the season. Just no more Robbie Keanes – please.

Got to stop doing this . . .

. . . but I can’t help myself.

Hat tip once again to AnfieldReds.

Two captains living in just one mind

(Updated below)

There is nothing more anachronistic in the world of modern sport than the title of team captain. Many years ago I wrote a piece for Shankly Gates on the preposterousness that attaches itself to the choice of captain in most sports. A captain is important in cricket, less (and increasingly less) important in rugby and not at all important in any other team sport. Take a sport like American football. Once upon a time, the quarterback had a decisive roll in what the next play was going to be. Now they can barely sneeze without the say-so of the coach. As for the oft-referenced inspirational role that captains bring to a sport, are players any less influential for not being captain? It’s a splendid honuor to be captain, and you get to pick up the cup on the big day should your team be so fortunate. But the impact on a team’s performance in, say, hurling is zilch.

So why am I bothered by the suggestions that Waterford are going to have two captains for 2009? Why should I be bothered at such a decision if I think the role is so meaningless? It’s not that the honour is being diminished. Having the son of Vanessa and James McGarry play such a prominent part of the presentation of the 2007 McCarthy Cup  with Henry Shefflin didn’t diminish or enhance the captaincy one iota. The presentation of the trophy to two people has been quite common over the years, whether it be Kerry using two men in 2006 or Liverpool going through three seperate combos during their treble success of 2001. And for all the chutzpah of showing Messrs  Houllier and Evans above, there is not going to be confusion over demarcation or anything like that since the role has no function apart from collecting the gongs. So there’s no need to worry, right?

It’s the gimmick that bothers me. Having one captain from the Western Division and one from the Eastern Division makes it seem as if there is a sense of competition between the two halves of Waterford, a culchie / townie divide.  Maybe I’m being naive, but I haven’t noticed this in recent times. City players dominated the team for the the first half of this decade, with Mount Sion and Ballygunner in the ascendancy. But the last few years have seen things swing out Dungarvan way, with nine of the team that started against Kilkenny in the All-Ireland final coming from the west of the county. One of the perceived benefits of outside coaches is the elimination of parochial choices in the team. If Davy Fitz feels the need to bolster this, he’s obviously not doing one of his main functions properly.

There’s also the fear of ridicule. If Waterford win the All-Ireland, no one is going to think “jeez, having only one captain was clearly where they’ve being going wrong all these years!” But if – such a little if – they lose, the usual trolls will be scoffing at such ‘innovations’ taking precedence over developing better hurlers. And yes, these things matter. It’s important to fight, and be seen to fight, the good and dignified fight.

This may all just be a ball of smoke. There’s nothing on the web that says this is in the offing and I base it all on a report heard on WLR. But it’s a silly idea that needs to be nipped in the bud. Say it ain’t so, Davy!

Update: confirmation of the truth of this story. A strange affair, and no mistake.

Ode on the Uefa Cup

Sitting down at the telly last Tuesday for a short break from counting every grain of sand on a hurricane-whipped Welsh beach, I flicked to Eurosport for the draw for the group stages of the Uefa Cup. At the time it was obvious that Portsmouth were the big winners, pulling the plum that is Milan out of the pie. But even at the time it struck me how exotic and exciting the whole thing seemed. Villa were going to be playing PSG, which brought of memories of the tub-thumping Cup Winners Cup semi-final in 1997 when Liverpool came a whisker away from overturning a 3-0 first leg deficit. That game was certainly more memorable than our seemingly interminable games against Marseilles in recent years. And look at Spurs, playing Dinamo Zagreb. Their fans are mad, it would certainly be more fun playing them than PSV for the sixth time in only three seasons.

Remember when all European draws had that frission of tension brought about by venturing into the unknown? When Liverpool tripped up against Bradford on the last day of the 1999/2000 season to miss out on the Champions League, I consoled myself with the idea that the implosion at the end of that season demonstrated we were incapable of having a tilt at the main prize and that the Uefa Cup might prove more fruitful.

And how fruitful was that? We did barely enough in the early rounds to suggest we were going to get past the inevitably improved teams we’d run into later on, but each time we did just enough to keep going. The excitement was almost overwhelming, to the point where the late drama against Roma at Anfield when the ref gave a penalty then changed his mind led me to quite literally go home from a night out and have a lie down. Six successive two-legged, winner-takes all ties against progressively harder teams from Rapid Bucharest to Barcelona, and it all culminated in that night in Dortmund when we roared to all of Europe that we were back.

It was ace, and an object lesson to the dreary sameiness of the Champions League in how Europe should be done, what it is that made European football so great. Naturally I’m not advocating we drop into this exciting cauldron. I want us to be at the very top, and the Uefa Cup is not the very top. But perhaps the expanded Europa League will invigorate the competition, make being in it less of a consolation prize and more something to relish. And it might even make this ditty (author sadly lost to the mists of time; please let me know via the forum if you know their identity) less poignant.

Where have you gone, Dynamo Dresden? (to the tune of ‘Mrs Robinson’ by Paul Simon)

And here’s to you, Slovan Liberec
Liverpool loves you more than you will know (wo ho ho)
God bless you please Rapid Bucharest
Liverpool holds a place for those we play,
(Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey)

Shanks took us into Europe back in 1965
A dodgy ref cost us the game
But Anfield’s famous songs they kept on belting out
As Inter shook to the Kop’s name

And here’s to you Paris Saint Germain
Bottles of wine just a pound a throw (wo ho ho)
God bless you please Dynamo Kiev
Expensive but the trip was worth the pay,
(Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey)

We got to know Ferencvaros and Eintracht Frankfurt fans
We helped them drink the night away.
Look around and all they’d see were banners made of red.
The famous Kopites singing off their heads.

Allez allez les vertes St Etienne,
Moenchengladbach, Bruges we so miss you (you hoo hoo)
Where are you now Polands’ Widzew Lodz
The teams Bob’s lads flew from Speke to play.
(Allez Allez Allez Allez)

Gerard had a Euro dream, the draw was never kind
Roma, Porto, Barca then Alaves
We could never beat those teams the papers always said
But we had Macca’s shiny baldy head

Joe Fagan and his Mighty Reds
Strode into Roma’s Lion’s den, (way back then)
But we had Brucie and his wobbly legs
And smokin’ Joe took the Treble away,
(hey hey hey… the Treble away)

Sitting on a sofa on a Thursday afternoon
Watching the Champions League draw on TV
Spanish, Swiss and Russian are the teams we’ll have to play
Till Sami lifts the European Cup for us in May

Where have you gone, Dynamo Dresden?
The red and white Kop still remembers you (you hoo hoo)
And we’ll sing You’ll Never Walk Alone
As Europe falls to Liverpool once again

Power to the People

Football fans are completely powerless to influence results, an observation whose most glaring exception – the Reds beating Chelsea in the 2005 European Cup; and will I ever get tired of referencing that night? I think not – only goes to prove the rule. We react to what we see on the pitch, not the other way round. The performances shape our hopes, fears and expectations. You only have to look at the way the ambitions of Newcastle United fans have crushed successive teams of managers and players, not lifted them up where eagles fly as the orthodoxy would have us believe happens, to see the truth of that.

So if you are looking for evidence that Liverpool are moving in the right direction, you could have done worse than observe my demeanour at half-time of the match against Manchester City at Eastlands. Anyone who read my pessimistic screed a few weeks back after beating Manchester United would have been forgiven for thinking I would have being slitting my wrists when Garrido rattled in that free kick. This isn’t to say that I wasn’t perturbed at the prospect of our decent start to the season coming to a crashing halt against the Premier League’s latest moneybags club. But mixed in with the despair was hope.

The hope didn’t spring from some nonsense about the spirit of Istanbul – only three of the players who started that day lined up against Citeh, a remarkable enough stat in and of itself. It was simply that this team has shown themselves to be made of stern stuff in recent weeks. After the frustration of being denied repeatedly by a small club like Stoke they would have been forgiven at half time in the derby for thinking ‘oh no, not again’. But they seemed confident that if they kept chipping away that their superior football skills would be decisive, and so it proved as Fernando ‘doesn’t score much away from home’ Torres came up trumps. For all of my previous talk of reverting to the mean, it didn’t seem outrageous that we could come out in the second half and do a number on the Mancs.

Think of it this way. At 2-0, I was confident we’d get one back. At 2-1, that we’d equalise. When they had a man sent off, I was eagerly anticipating the Reds going for the jugular which they did in most impressive fashion. When we had won, it was heartening to think that we battered a team when we had the man advantage, not an accusation you could level against us in recent times. Then I found out that the third goal had come 10 v 10, which just made it better. Heck, nothing short of a long term injury could ruin this buzz!

Darn.

I’ve always been a fatalist, preparing for the worst and therefore being ready for it if it happens. On the other hand, I’ve always been determined to extract the best out of any situation. So you might be 2-0 down against Man City, but they’re probably better under Mark Hughes than most of us expect and losing there is no shame. Compare that to the legions of online Reds who went into complete meltdown when staring defeat in the face. People were already talking about defeat before it happened, oblivious to recent robustness, the harshness of the deficit in the context of the match or trivial things like, you know, every game lasting 90 minutes.

Those people will claim that they’ve seen decent starts to the season before only to have the Reds hit the wall in true marathon fashion. This is fair enough, and I’ve been saying to my wife (to the point where she has stopped listening to me) that we seem to be only one bad result from complete implosion. But that result hadn’t happened by half time against City and – get this! – it still hasn’t happened. To make matters worse, most of the Cassandras behaved post-match as if the result were a blip and that their half time prognostications were a more reasoned analysis of what had just happened.

There is a world of difference between sounding a note of caution after a great result, whether it be beating Man Utd or coming from 2-0 down away to beat any team you can think of, and braying that the world is coming to an end because you happen to be losing at half time. Who knows, if people could learn to appreciate the distinction they might enjoy following their team a little bit more.

In your face!

I don’t normally blog about the Reds here – Liverpool posts are an eternal record of the splendiferous goings on at Shankly Gates – but with this one I can’t resist. Hat tip to AnfieldReds.

Reversion to the Mean

How arl arse is this, sneaking back into the building after Rafa finally putting one over on Demento? Everyone else at ShanklyGates.co.uk puts in the hard graft week in week out keeping the site on the road, putting up with the outrageous slurs from fans of other clubs gloating at the close season turmoil at Anfield. Then along comes bucko here, the brilliance of the grin stitched to his face after that thumping performance against Man U only matched by the luminescence of the tan acquired from a summer of doing naff all. Nice work if you can get it.

But fear not! I come not to praise Liverpool but to bury them. Console yourself with the notion that the river of flame that will be diverted into my inbox as I dare to go off message should keep me going well into the wee hours for several weeks to come. For the joy of beating down on the Mancs does not cancel out the misery of a summer when Liverpool did, to my mind, so much wrong.

Let’s start with some positives. A while back I raged against Rafa’s habit of buying players on the cheap then selling them on quickly at a loss, the footballing equivalent of a lucky dip (cf Jan Kromkamp, Mark Gonzalez). He doesn’t seem to have rid himself of that habit. The likes of Dossena and Riera don’t inspire, players purchased not because they are brilliant but because they might be brilliant. It’s the Championship Manager school of management, scouring the leagues of Europe for undiscovered talent – except Rafa doesn’t seem to have the hit rate of A Geek with his PC, or even A Wenger with his MA. You don’t need a crystal ball to see Jermaine Pennant joining the carousel. The sight of Philippe Degen trundling in on a free while Andrei Voronin trundles away in the opposite direction having also being purchased on a free, looks like history repeating itself . It would make you weep at the notion that playing for the most successful club in England is meant to mean something.

Still, it’s not all bad on the to-ing and fro-ing front. While Rafa may have shuffled the pack with a few duds, he’s also managed to make the club a tidy sum in some surprising places. While Peter Crouch and Momo Sissoko were both decent players in their times at Anfield, it would have seemed nothing short of miraculous had someone wanted to pay an eight figure sum for their services. The mere act of a top club admitting that they are open to offers for players should be enough to see their price plummet. Yet both those players went off having made the club a substantial profit.

There are a few lesser lights on which Rafa made silly money. Scott Carson proved to be a sound investment, the outrageous figure he was originally touted around for notwithstanding. And then there’s the case of John Arne Riise. A fond figure at the club thanks to his penchant for goals that were both brilliant and important, he had undergone a horrible loss of form last season culminating in that clanger against Chelsea. When it became clear that his days at the club were numbered – and again, bear in mind that you expect other clubs to be pointing out the bald tyres, the miles on the clock, the scratch on the bumper and just look at the alloy wheels and sunroof on that other model over there, mate – it didn’t seem possible that he would be anything other than a free. Yet we got €4 million for him, an absolutely fabulous piece of business. Factor in the sale of Luis Garcia, another cult figure at the club who proved instrumental in bagging a certain Fernando Torres, and look at some of the flops that have passed through the hands of A. Wenger – anyone remember Christopher Wreh? Sylvinho? Nelson Vivas? – then Rafa seems to be one of the smarter cookies in football.

So the swings and roundabouts of the mid-market signings can be said to be that for Rafa – swings and roundabouts. It is the big money deals that can make or break you as a manager though. The 20 million-plus signings are the ones that are meant to catapult you into the stratosphere, and if you get them wrong . . . Rafa got it spectacularly right in the summer of 2007, laying down big bucks for a player that half of the top clubs in Europe seemed to have sniffed around and passed on. 2008 doesn’t look like it’s been anywhere near as productive. The increasing sniffiness of the media about the start to his Anfield career can be dismissed as the usual Phil Space guff, but a decade watching the exploits of Robbie Keane have not been conducive to endearment, especially when you consider he is by some distance Ireland’s record scorer.

For someone with a spotless record off the pitch – quite an achievement in this day and age – he can be such an infuriating nark on the pitch. Some people might appreciate his constant moaning at refs for frees, his incessant insistence that he wasn’t offside or the habitual pained expression when a team mate fails to meet his lofty standards. But they’ve always left me cold. As top strikers go, he has an appalling habit of missing sitters – they all do it, but he does it more than most. He always looks like he’s just started playing football, brilliantly talented and should be great after a few years. Except that he’s been on the road for the best part of a decade. Paying c. £20 million for a 27 year old with five different clubs behind him seems excessive. You have to keep looking at his goalscoring record, which is very good indeed, to remind yourself that he’s a top player. But I can’t shake the feeling that we’re picking up a player who has passed his peak, and paid top dollar for the privilege.

At least we went for him and got him. No such pleasure can be derived from the Gareth Barry saga. Once upon a time, English internationals came from all kind of wacky clubs. Jimmy Bullard this week became the first Fulham player since George Cohen to play for England. Cohen happened to win the World Cup. But this was a time when the maximum wage and the fact that revenue was derived almost entirely from tuppence-a-head gate receipts meant there was little incentive to move clubs. Now, you are a loser if you’re not plying your trade in the Champions League. Yet Gareth Barry is still chugging away with the mediocrities that are Aston Villa. If he were that good, surely someone would have pounced on him long before this? We all thought that, and more pertinently so did the best-friends-forever (again) Gillett and Hicks. Even Roman Abramovich has drawn the line on paying over the odds for players. For Liverpool though, the line seems to be a lot lower than it is for Chelsea and Man United. So this is what we have learned from our pursuit of Gareth Barry – that we are chasing players who are not good enough, and then we can’t get them anyway. Marvellous.

Unless, of course, that spectacular win over the Mancs is closer to our mean performance than the first three games. I’m dubious that we are that good. The controlled ferociousness was a pleasant surprise – take a bow, Javier Mascherano – not least to Man U who were probably congratulating themselves in advance of another toothless Liverpool attempt at a comeback. Keep that up and we’ll do well, but we had to come good against them some time – again, reverting to the mean; we haven’t been as bad as the results suggested in recent times. Even more surprising was playing so well with Gerrard only playing quarter of the match and Whatisname from Spain not playing at all. We’ve surely got to take that reality with a large pinch of salt. Play that well in every game with their additional power and we’d be invincible – which is why we can’t expect that to be the mean.

Back in the mists of time, a time when the Reds were capable of winning leagues, a rate of two points out of three was enough to be a competitor for the title. We picked up 68.4% of the available points in 1990. Nowadays you need to be a bit better than that, probably closer to three points out of four. The Mancs got 76.3% of the points last season. So our excellent start to the season amounts to being a point ahead of the trend. The race has only just begun.