DAVE Downie was brilliant on this week’s The Coach Home. He was fascinating about Everton, eviscerating the mentality — or lack thereof — which leads to a football club crumbling from within; bilious, toxic, cycloptic — the idea that things can reach a point where there can be no coming back because thought processes about what’s achievable, desirable and reasonable block it.
The thing I most enjoyed was what he said about Neville Southall saying Everton’s target should be winning the league. He’s right. It should be. Thirty eight games in a season and Everton can win any one of those 38 games. That means they can win all 38 games. This is a thing which is possible. It may be very, very, very, very, very unlikely. But it is possible. Always try to do that and then see where you are.
Football as a sport has become increasingly real as the information age has boomed. We know almost as much as can possibly want. We know as much as we want about any of our opponents. We know as much as we want about ourselves. We know who is good and why. We can know whatever we want and therefore we know our limitations. We spend a load of time talking about what is reasonable and achievable.
The best thing about Liverpool’s performance against Manchester United was that they believed, down to 10 men and two behind and having been poorer for most of the game, that they could still get back into it. They had the mentality you need, both manager and players had the feeling that something was still achievable in the game.
The worst thing was that they had the mentality but they didn’t have the weaponry. Before a ball was kicked, Liverpool hadn’t looked like a side with enough goals in them. Before a goal was scored Liverpool weren’t carrying enough threat to push Manchester United back. Before a red card had been shown Liverpool weren’t opening their opposition up.
Goals are the thing. Goals are power. Goals change everything, they realign what is reasonable and achievable. Feeling like you always have a goal in you gives you power. It makes you something to be scared of. You always want your opponents to be scared of you. Liverpool have been formidable opposition since the turn of the year, in a sense the most formidable they have been for six years. But they haven’t been dangerous opposition. They haven’t been something to be scared of. Despite the fact that Liverpool have been on an excellent run and have played some good football, we haven’t seen enough chances created, enough fear spread in the last three months. We were scarier in March 2013 than we have been in March 2015.
When we were in Australia in the summer of 2013, we spoke to Brendan Rodgers and I asked him about goals. He said then that he wanted the number of goals we scored to go up significantly into the 2013-14 season. I felt at the time he was rigging the deck a little bit; we’d scored more in the second half of 2012-13 regardless. Yet we did increase the number of goals we scored very significantly, into a stratosphere we hadn’t seen before. Never mind rigging the deck, Liverpool and their arch pragmatist of a manager produced a fantastic season covered with, dripping with goals.
In the run Liverpool have been on that same arch-pragmatist of a manager has looked at what he has and decided he isn’t dripping with goals. Instead he’s set them up to be formidable, to be a very good side. But without goals you aren’t touching the stars. By aiming to be ‘very good’ Liverpool have acceded to reality; at what Liverpool have chosen to be very good at, they will always run into someone better at it. They aren’t changing the game; they’re not carrying the idea they can change the game in 19 minutes at home to Arsenal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JLa20uNJA0
Goals change football matches. Carrying the threat of goals changes football matches before they even begin. It places the opposition on the back foot, it creates fear, it creates space.
This isn’t a conversation about whether the Liverpool manager is right or wrong on a game-by-game basis — though there is a point to be made that domestically Liverpool haven’t looked like a side with three goals in them in any given game (with the possible exception of the one game they got three in against Tottenham Hotspur when Markovic played very, very close to Sturridge) or even one about how well he has done since December. That Liverpool have excelled since December isn’t up for debate. That it reflects well on this manager and this group of players shouldn’t be either.
But this is a conversation about winning the league. Which remains the conversation most worth having, the conversation Neville Southall reckons we should all have. I’m with Big Nev. I’m always with Big Nev. I can’t be bothered not being.
And it’s a conversation about reality. About how you escape it, how you look to redefine it. Any piece of Liverpool success redefines reality, all the realities we know about wage bill, transfer fees, FFP, previous achievement — all of those relationships between those things and success means for Liverpool to achieve success they need to redefine reality. As a football club, we’re far more able to do that than Dave Downie’s Everton. We’re suitably delusional to achieve things. But reality keeps on at you, worms its way in, wants you to do things in its way, on its terms. Build slowly, be sensible, don’t get ahead of yourself. All the while the reality you accede to gets harder to escape. It locks in further around you.
Reality is Juan Mata opening the scoring, it’s a lad of £300,000 week coming off the bench to shore it up. Reality bangs and bangs and bangs on the door and the only thing that is its Kryptonite is goals. Broiling, shuddering, chaotic goals. Goals make reality shake in its expensive boots. If you can always score, you can always do anything.
Forty four league goals this season so far. We next play in April. Forty four. We’ve spent a season submitting far too much to reality. We’ve handed the keys to the crazy bus to the greybearded.
This manager has sat down before and thought about goals. Targetted goals. Made goals his goal. This summer it will be time to do that again.
He’ll need more of the weaponry and he’ll need our faith and maybe even some of his own. The arch-pragmatist may well have to become a little more idealistic. Big Nev is right. Big Nev will always be right. Prove him right.
Score goals.
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Pics: David Rawcliffe-Propaganda
Well, yeah.
But there’s a bit of ‘Does the Pope…’ about this excellently, as always, written article.
Brendan has had to cut his cloth this season. Last season’s Saville Row suits have given way to this year’s Mr. Byrite’ s freckled slacks.
I sort of agree, in that I think *any* chance LFC have of winning the league in the foreseeable feature will probably require a season with a large slice of freakishness attached – like scoring 110 goals, for example – on the back of a significant gamble with transfer funds. Chelsea, City and Utd (and even Arsenal now) are operating on a different financial level and even with FFP it’s difficult to see how you challenge for first without taking a gigantic punt.
United are reportedly looking at bringing back Ronaldo for 80mill and will no doubt vie with Madrid/PSG/Chelsea/City for Pogba who’ll go for 60mill. Even Arsenal have bought two players in the last couple of seasons whose transfer fees obliterate anything we’ve ever paid (that’s even including the entirely false 35mill – Dalglish’s -15mill – we paid for Carroll).
I suppose if any team is the model then it’s Atletico Madrid…or us in 2013-14. So it’s doable, but it will take a significant gamble on Rodgers’ part to pay-off: plough all the money into a world top 10 player (assuming he’ll come), spend all the kitty on goals, etc.. The trouble with this policy is that if it fails – and the stats say it will – you look like a fool as we finish 7th or 8th. Football logic tells any current LFC manager to use his limited spending power to improve where we are weakest, raise the baseline quality of the squad, ultimately to aim to be better than 2 of the other top 5.
If Rodgers goes with the pragmatic approach, I won’t blame him. Succeed big or fail big is all very well when it’s not your job on the line.
It’s difficult to know how to achieve this without one of the top three players in the world (which we’d be very lucky to get) and without a crazy amount of set-piece goals.
We had both of these last season… not going to be easy to get that level of goalscoring back.
Hard to disagree with any of that.
How the likes of Torres and particularly Suarez weren’t seen as worth the risk by the mega rich just gets stranger with time. Forwards who score 31 in 33 and never get injured despite getting booted every game don’t even play for Chelsea, City, Arsenal or United never mind us. They play for Real, Barca and that’s it. If Aguero or Sturridge could ever get close to full seasons fit they’d be at one of Spain’s top 2 as well.
The set pieces point is huge too. A lot of the hidings handed out last year were opened up by early set piece goals (wasn’t Skrtel knocking on the door of double figures?!). First half of this season with Suarez gone and Sturridge out, Gerrard’s largely perfect dead ball delivery from the season before has deserted him. We had nothing to bail us out.
(Succumbing to the reality that we won’t be getting close to 100 goals again hard here. Soz Neil.)
Very good point re Skrtel – he scored 7 goals from set pieces last season whilst the whole squad only has three this season!
The strange thing is that we’re basically delivering corners to the same area we did last season, yet we aren’t scoring from them this season…. I think there’s a lot of luck involved in set pieces, and we had that in abundance last season but we don’t now.
And set pieces were key as you say. We played some fantastic stuff in the 5-1 Arsenal game for instance, but we almost certainly don’t win by that score without the two set piece goals in the first ten minutes.
Just to add… With 8 games to play, we’ve scored 23 fewer goals from set-plays than we did last season. Had we repeated that amount then we’d be amongst the league’s top scorers again, if not reaching the heights of 101 goals. So it would seem that it may be possible to be the league’s top scorers and solid at the back, but we’d need our 2013/14 luck on set plays back.
This finely-penned article has plunged me into lunchtime melancholy. Remember last season? The weekly shellacking of teams? The goalfests? The outrageous shorelines? The knowledge that the opposition would not just get beaten, but obliterated? That. God knows how we do it, but that. Again.
Scorelines, even. Outrageous Shorelines will be the name of my solo concept album…
Haha, poor Dave Downie. I listen to all his shows on City Talk. I don’t say this to gloat as a Liverpool fan but I think he’s brilliant. It’s got to the point where I actually want Everton to win because I sense how much it means to him and how gutted defeat makes him. I love the way he talks about how wank Everton were followed by how brilliant Liverpool were. I think he likes the torture of it all. In fairness though, he’s very good talking about both and he’s got a point regarding the mentality at Everton.
This summer will be interesting. I’m sick of saying but everyone at the club has made mistakes but I’m not really seeing them repeated. I think they do learn from them. Which strikers we end the summer with will tell us a lot about the club’s ambition. I’m convinced we can win the league soon. People still have a misguided belief that we’re miles behind. We’re not. Take the bad run out of the last 2 years and no one is noticeably better. We made mistakes last summer. No one has been better since Christmas. No one was better from last Christmas till the summer. Invest in strikers and win the league. Simple.
We naturally lost a lot of goals when Suarez left but the biggest mistake we made this season was not bringing in another striker who can score regularly.
We failed to do it in the summer and didn’t even attempt to do it in Jan and now we’re paying for it.
We could lose out on top 4 by just a few points but instead we gambled on mediocre striker, or in the case of Jan, not bringing in a striker at all.
Who would you have gone for in January?