COS contributor Richard O’Toole is left scratching his head after a less than glorious start to a new Anfield managerial reign further compounds what has become a very poor era in the Merseyside club’s history.
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Picture the scene, it’s Wednesday the 25th of May 2005, Liverpool have just been crowned champions of Europe for a 5th time, a record for a British club, Stephen Gerrard is entering his peak years and in Rafael Benitez Liverpool have a young, talented and highly sought after manager. The future is surely bright. Fast forward a little over 5 years and the reality of the present looks anything but bright, Liverpool are now a club which has been brought to the brink of receivership by its incompetent, greedy American owners and have not won a trophy for 3 years. Add to this the acrimonious departure players such as Xabi Alonso, and Javier Masherano and a torrid summer of player unrest topped off with the sacking and subsequent replacement of the often unfathomable but unquestionably talented Rafael Benitez with the vastly experienced but unquestionably uninspiring Roy Hodgson and you have all the ingredients required for a club, far from having a bright future who are actually set for a potentially period of terminal decline.
Perhaps it is a little unfair to include Roy Hodgson when summarising and analysing the decline of this once great football club, after all he has barely had time to choose a parking space outside Melwood never mind build a football team worthy of the jerseys in which they play. However, sadly for fans of Liverpool football club the early signs that Roy Hodgson is the right man to take the club forward or even steady the ship are worryingly thin on the ground. His first move in the transfer market (aside from the free transfers of Joe Cole and Milan Jovanovic which were already in motion before Hodgson arrived at the club) is to move for Danish midfield enforcer Christian Poulsen, a player who at the age of 30 and on the back of a poor showing at the World Cup is now deemed surplus to requirements at Juventus, slightly worrying perhaps when taken into consideration the slower pace at which the game in Italy is played. It is my suspicion that Poulsen, who arrives at Anfield with a horrendous disciplinary record, is little more than a ‘hatchet man’ whose’ best’ years are now behind him.
Next, and hot on the heels of the exit of Javier Masherano came the signing for just over £11 million pounds of Raul Meireles, a player of undeniable quality and pedigree having won multiple titles with Porto of Portugal and being one of the Portuguese national teams star performers at the world cup. Meireles arrives at Anfield with the reputation of being an all action, box to box, goal scoring midfielder, fine, but as such does he really offer the team anything different to that being offered by Stephen Gerrard and Lucas Leiva?
Begging the further question: why, when there is only 1 recognised top class striker at the club, spend £11 million pounds on another box to box midfielder? Finally, and perhaps most disturbing of all to Liverpool fans is the signing of Paul Konchesky, a player whose very name symbolises and epitomises mediocrity. This is a player who has made a career of making up the numbers in the squads of mid to lower table clubs and has excelled only in his propensity for the average. Many fans of the club will feel that playing Paul Konchesky at left back as opposed to playing Daniel Agger, a centre half by trade, in that position is in fact a retrograde step and does not in any way represent strengthening of the team; a left back he may be, but he is a poor one. Signing players such as these will to many observers smack of a manager showing insufficient ambition and is perhaps indicative of a lack of understanding that Roy has for the club with which he has been entrusted. Players like these may be good enough for Fulham but this is Liverpool.
This brings me on to Roy Hodgsons team selections thus far in the campaign, despite only being 4 games in, there are already some question marks over his tactical wherewithal when selecting his team, the debacle at Eastlands may have been influenced somewhat by the off-field antics of Javier Masherano and his ultimate refusal to play but nonetheless, Hodgsons team selection was incorrect. The sensible thing to do would surely have been to directly replace Javier Mascherano with fully fit new signing Christian Poulsen. Instead Hodgson opted to shift, last minute from a 4-5-1 to a 4-4-2 with Lucas and Gerrard in the middle and were horribly outnumbered and out muscled in the middle of the park and meekly surrendered to a 3-0 defeat. Further evidence came in the drab 0-0 draw with Birmingham, a game that only thanks to heroics from Pepe Reina Liverpool did not lose. This time Poulsen and Lucas were the men in the middle of the field and were hopelessly inferior compared to a Birmingham midfield comprising the likes of Lee Bowyer and Barry Ferguson, Stephen Gerrard pushed higher up the field looked disconnected from the game and cut a frustrated figure, only when Meireles was introduced late on and Gerrard dropped back into the middle did Lverpool’s play appear to have any cohesion, by then Fernando Torres had descended so deeply into a sulk that he was almost tripping over his lower lip.
I would dearly love to be proven wrong about Roy Hodgson but I like many other Liverpool supporters are now asking, in more than the initial whisper, is Roy Hodgson is the right man for the job at Liverpool? Yes he is highly experienced but frankly that appears to be all he has to offer and some might even say he is merely a journeyman manager whose career actually amounts to very little having never won a trophy of any description in English domestic football or in European club competition with any team he has managed. Personally, I like Roy Hodgson but I feel he is badly under qualified and out of his depth in what remains one of the biggest jobs in world football, the manager’s job at Anfield.