Genuine fans should not enjoy Liverpool’s problems

I can’t remember whether it was Brian Glanville or Danny Baker but somebody once said that Britain needs a strong pound and a strong Liverpool.  You do not hear booing very often at Anfield but the crowd’s reaction to last night’s capitulation to a team lying perilously one place above the Championship relegation zone any real football fan – whatever their club loyalty – should have felt a slight shudder.

Reading are not Chelsea or Lyon.  Nor, frankly, are they Portsmouth yet they managed to look more than good value for an extra time victory.  In winning at Anfield they gave the FA Cup a much-needed shot in the arm but it was another dagger for the heart for – brace yourself, Mancunians – England’s most iconic sporting institution.

Admittedly, Liverpool were struck by misfortune.  By full time, Steven Gerrard, Fernando Torres, Pepe Reina, Javier Mascherano, Albert Riera and Glen Johnson were all absent nursing injuries.  Yossi Benayoun, normally an able player, dumbly conceded an injury time penalty then contrived to fire straight at the Reading goalkeeper when clean through at 2-1 down in extra time.

The excuses, though, are wearing thin.  Liverpool have become a rotten club, beset by indignity.  Statler and Waldorf have run the business into the ground.  The team are no longer competitive at the level one instinctively feels they should occupy.  A club director, while not unprovoked, has resigned after a profane response was sent to an e-mail correspondent.  A summer fire sale is not out of the question.  Supporters now treat any declaration from the club with several vigorous shakes of salt.  Nouveau riche clubs such as Chelsea and Manchester City have overtaken them on the pitch.

Whatever your personal allegiance, it is difficult to avoid the thought that if something is wrong with Liverpool then something must be wrong with football.  Not the game itself; there was little not to admire about last night’s match as a sporting contest.  Shane Long’s goal was brilliantly worked and Reading’s defensive display was admirable.  There is not a great deal wrong with a game, or a competition, which can provide entertainment such as Leeds Utd and Reading’s recent FA Cup heroics.

Rather, it is the controlling personnel who are letting the game down. Stockport County are having the last rites read following successive ownerships by people who were at best well-meaning but inept and at worst malevolent asset-strippers.  The parasitic Sale Sharks rugby club are treating them as second class citizens in their own stadium and relegation is certain.  Portsmouth are a basket case, Scarborough have disappeared and time-established institutions such as Notts County and Accrington Stanley have come close to being wound up.

Next to which, Liverpool appear in a position of strength.  There will always be enough people who care about the club for it to be kept a going concern, if not a top team.  However, there most be something wrong with a game which allows two co-chairmen to swan in, buy a club with money borrowed against wishful ‘future earnings’ and preside over such chaos.

It would be crass for Manchester Utd, Chelsea or Everton fans to carp in such circumstances; to do so would be to do English football a disservice.  Manchester Utd are themselves in financial trouble; this morning we read that their Carrington training base, or their best player Wayne Rooney, or even the Old Trafford stadium itself, may need to be flogged.  But with their revenue, Manchester Utd will always be a power.  Liverpool don’t have that commercial assuredness.  They remain a likable corner shop in a new world of megastores.

If the problem were merely that the team were playing badly and being overtaken by improving sides such as Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur or Aston Villa, so be it.  In a league where Champions League qualification has been a four-team procession in recent seasons, some variation would benefit the game.  Teams are entitled to play Liverpool at football and beat them.  Liverpool fans are not entitled to support a successful team.

They are, though, entitled to expect hope and dignity.  Liverpool Football Club should be in credit as far as the general football-loving English public are concerned.  Whatever those who fawn over Arsène Wenger would have you believe, Liverpool have given us the finest club side English football has ever seen.  Their 1987/88 season video, The Mighty Reds, should be compulsary viewing for any young player learning their trade.

That side’s 5-0 demolition of a good Nottingham Forest side on 13 April 1988 remains arguably the most devastatingly brilliant team performance in the history of league football in this country.  That season they provided us with moments of brilliance beyond number: John Barnes’s wonderful slalom goal against Queens Park Rangers; Steve McMahon’s extraordinary assist for a John Aldridge goal against Arsenal, where he save the ball on the touchline with his sole before feeding Peter Beardsley; Barnes’s through ball to Steve McMahon and backheel before Beardsley’s goal in the Merseyside derby at Anfield.

Those, too, were the days when Liverpool had not just a great team but were a wise club.  When Everton won the title in 1987, Ian Rush was sold to Juventus for £3.2 million.  That money was invested soundly on Newcastle Utd’s Peter Beardsley, Watford’s John Barnes and Oxford Utd’s John Aldridge.  The opening day of the season saw the three combine for the opening goal in a 2-1 win against Arsenal at Highbury.

The glory of the 70s and 80s means Liverpool, whether they want to be or not, are held as a standard-bearer by which the health of English football is judged.  Yet, in a season when even Newcastle Utd are getting on with the job quietly and with at least the appearance of method, Liverpool are in chaos.  The team appear incapable of turning one-off good results, such as the derby win at Goodison Park or the smash-and-grab at Villa Park, into stability and momentum.

The club have made a habit of jettisoning perfectly sound players.  Craig Bellamy, Peter Crouch and Robbie Keane have all fled, disillusioned after spells on the bench while Rafa Benítez – who is not the biggest problem at the club yet neither is he blameless – remains stubbornly wedded to the confounded 4-2-3-1 formation despite all evidence that it does not get the best out of the side’s strengths.  It is now not fanciful to imagine Steven Gerrard, for the club’s good as well as his own, leaving in the summer while he can still command a large transfer fee.

Where now is the wisdom at Anfield?  The air of serial competence; the sense that, even if the team are not very good, it is reasonable to believe good times are not far away.  Where, too, the quality of being admirable?  Even the club’s own fans don’t find it too difficult to despite what the club is now doing.

Until the owners depart, tails between briefcases, Liverpool will not be cured.  There is only one way the club is going under its current guise and that is down.  If you think the Premier League does not feel fully complete without Leeds Utd, Newcastle Utd, Nottingham Forest and at least one of the Sheffield clubs, just imagine it without Liverpool.  For now, sorting the club out off the pitch must take priority over any panicky short-term measures to get the team back into the Champions League, otherwise “You’ll Never Walk Alone” will be in danger of becoming Merseyside’s anthem for doomed youth.