The PRoblem with Liverpool FC

Warm & cuddly on the outside. Hot & clammy within.

If Liverpool played as poorly on the pitch as they do off it they'd be relegated. They've learned nothing from the first Suarez Crisis, have badly mishandled the second and been left chasing the game.

Kenny Dalglish set the bar high with when he joined the players in wearing a tee-shirt supporting the Uruguayan following the racial fracas with Patrice Evra.

And King Kenny took it up a notch when he firstly failed to make sure Suarez shook hands with Evra at a subsequent game against Manchester United and then gave a churlish and childish post match-interview in which he claimed he had seen nothing.

Perhaps Dalglish would have given the benefit of the doubt but most of his interviews, pre- and post-match, were cut of a similar cloth.

Let us be clear about it. Dalglish won the League Cup and reached an FA Cup final. He was not fired because he was a poor manager; he went because he had no idea how to handle modern management and was a public relations liability.

Churlish, Childish, Dalglish

So Liverpool swept out the old regime, including their long standing press officer, and brought in a more forward facing (I believe that is the phrase) team.

Fat lot of good that did.

Before the club had a chance to bask in the rays of openness following the transmission of Channel 5's “Being Liverpool” they were turfed out of the deckchair when their new communications director threatened a blogger. Jen Chang, an American, lasted less than seven months before he was shown the door.

So far so idiotic.

Chang’s successor is Susan Black. Her appointment was announced on April 18th. Three days later Suarez bit Branislav Ivanovic.

The initial apology with quotes from Suarez, managing director Ian Ayre and Brendan Rodgers was a textbook response but as the Crisis unfolded Liverpool and Black have been caught out of position again and again.

They have made the same mistake they did last time of treating Suarez as special case. Everybody knows that if a fringe player had behaved in the same way Liverpool would have dismissed him instantly but, blinded by the short termism of protecting their investment, they mollycoddle the star and excuse his behaviour.

Brendan Rodgers comparing the Suarez bite to a tennis player smashing a racket was ludicrous. If Susan Black coached him or prompted him to say that she should be next out of the door.

Then Suarez, having been banned for ten matches, issues a statement with the mealy-mouthed whiff of victimization.

“.......whilst ten games is clearly greater than those bans given in the past where players have actually been seriously injured.....’” 

Ayre makes it a hat-trick of own goals, again presumably with Black’s input, by making it known that the club fine imposed on Suarez would be donated to the Hillsborough Family Support Group.

How crass. If in doubt let’s invoke the memory of Hillsborough as everybody sympathizes with us. Everybody that is, except the relatives of the victims of Heysel.

 

The writing's on the wall. Someone in football: help Gazza NOW.

The pace of Paul Gascoigne's decline is gathering pace. He's dying live on telly, in newspapers and radio news bulletins. He's burbling to taxi drivers and threatening suicide to hotel staff. Do we need anymore evidence of his struggle with life?

That's unless someone in a position of power in football, does something to help him.

It doesn't mean packing him off to the Priory and picking up the tab. It doesn't mean having him in as a guest in your club or on your show. It means giving him a job in your football club; one that'll give him a reason to live. Something with football at its heart.

Every fan loves him, everyone remembers his exploits. The World Cup semi-final sob, the flute playing at Rangers, the burp into the waiting reporters mike, the Cup semi free-kick which buried Arsenal, the overheated, deranged challenges on Parker and Charles which led to cruciate damage, smashing up the hotel room when Hoddle told him he'd rather have Rob Lee at France 98, The Sun's Dentist Chair and the accompanying celebration at Wembley against the Scots. EVERYTHING he did was wholehearted or funny - and usually both.

That's why someone - at Newcastle, Spurs, Lazio, Rangers, Middlesbrough, Everton, Burnley ... or Wolves should give him a job.Gazza loves kids, he loves football; can't someone think laterally? his job could be Youth Team training partner, handshaker, full-time autograph signer. Something that if he's not there one day, you'd shrug and say "don't worry, he'll be back next week". It'd be about giving this troubled man the support he's literally crying for.

Football owes a debt of gratitude to Gazza. He emerged as football did - from the ashes of Bradford and the tragedies of Heysel and Hillsborough - to the glory of Italia 90 and then the formation of the Premier League.

It's no co-incidence. People and personalities like him were the catalyst as football emerged from near extinction in the 80's.

George Best died a slow and inevitable death - why does it have to happen again? Gazza, a hero to millions and one of football's biggest figures of the last two decades.

If football people really mean it when they say, "I want to give something back to the game" - they should start by lending Gazza a hand.