Let’s get a couple of things out of the way. I’m gutted about being out of the Champions League – but the Europa League is still a trophy, so let’s win it. And I still want Rafa to stay.
But I’ve been thinking about just how abominable our form and also our luck has been this year. Late goals have gone in, in the Champions League especially, Inanimate objects have helped other teams beat us ( and I mean the beach ball, not Darren Bent ), the injury list is truly dreadful, and even those who have been on the pitch have been barely fit.
This isn’t an ordinary run of bad luck. In an ordinary season, even playing badly as we are, we’d have scraped a couple of draws from the defeats, or a win from the Birmingham game. I don’t think even the most hardened anti-Liverpool football fans would begrudge us a little bit of sympathy.
Why is this, do we think ?
Well, here’s a theory. And it really is just that, because I for one don’t believe in fate and the like. But the more this goes on, the more I feel like it’s some sort of payback. Liverpool Football Club hasn’t been well run in a long time. But recently it has become more and more difficult to like the club ( not the fans or the players, but the club. Consider, in the case for the prosecution
1. Not supporting the Royal British Legion on Remembrance Day. Yes, we have a red kit, yes we supported them on other ways. But can someone tell me why we didn’t see fit to support them in the same way that all the other Premier League teams except Man Utd ?
2. The PTS scheme. Now I’m a little bit biased about this, because I was on the PTS scheme. I do appreciate that there is now wider access to tickets and that is a good thing. But whatever way you look at it, the disbanding of that scheme was a shabby way to treat people who had been shelling out £50 for 6 years and buying match tickets.
3. Rafa. I wouldn’t swap him for anyone. But he treated Xabi badly. He isn’t close to the players. And he isn’t friendly with other managers. He is a brilliant manager, but he is also aloof and distant and single-minded.
4. David Moores. He sold out. I understand the reasons why, but it is nevertheless true that we went from being a family run club to a corporate entity, with all the good and bad that entails.
I love the club, and it’s the fans that are at the heart of it – that is something that won’t ever change, we won’t let it. But I really feel that the club as the institution has lost it’s heart of late, lost its joie de vivre. And that we are somehow being punished for that. Odd things are happening – how many teams have turned us round recently so that we attack the Kop End in the 1st half – Everton and Man U aside, I don’t remember that ever happening before. There is dressing room unrest and some pretty lost souls on the pitch. Quiet in the stands.
I understand this isn’t a fully formed argument, but it’s a feeling I’m trying to articulate that maybe we need to be a family again before we can share success.