As someone who tends to deal heavily in both, the Houllier business has found me immersed almost as deeply as I was with Hillsborough until the mid-nineties and several years ago with the campaign to stay at our Anfield home.
Earlier this season – indeed right up until Christmas time – I was as thoroughly pissed off and disillusioned as any other Red disgrunt with the tedium of our play. My critical faculties just about extended themselves to castigation of anybody I felt culpable from Phil Thompson’s seemingly counter-productive belligerence to Sammy Lee’s seemingly ineffectual exhortations. From the club doctor’s wildly mistaken analysis of Gregory Vignal’s broken bones to Gerard Houllier’s seemingly tactical and selection ineptitude.
Like most other passionate and caring Reds with the good of my team at heart my instincts told me all this. Considered judgements weren’t required. Basically, both team and manager were shite. Another season’s Premiership and Champion’s League were passing us by. Significantly, every fan seemed likewise joined at the hip in this shared frustration. No more than that though. Or so it seemed.
Then, at the turn of the year a sea change seemed to be emerging. Dare I say it but the tide appeared to turn. Fans began openly declaring a loss of confidence in the manager’s credentials. It was time for him to go they were saying. He’d taken us as far as he was ever going to be able.
What!!??
Now it may be that such an undercurrent was already widespread before I’d tuned into it. Certainly there had always been the snipers. After all there always are dissenters. Yet from where I stood the scale and impact of this was seismic. I had no problem with universal moaning and groaning. I actually ran night school classes for it at the local YMCA. This however, represented a shuddering leap of zero confidence in our manager the validity of which my instincts simply could not take on board.
Hang on guys, I mean a moan is a moan but surely…
In the space of a few startled days, spent absorbing the ramifications of what many internet fans were saying, my instincts had shifted round 180 degrees. My whinges had dissipated and my support for Gerard Houllier become rock solid. I’d listen to phone-ins and the same prevailing voice of discontent allied to disposal of our manager had taken centre stage. Those generously spirited fans granted him perhaps till the end of the season. Meanwhile those with altruistic bents to match Mother Theresa were extending the day of Madame Guillotine into the next season. I’d rub my eyes and ears in disbelief. Were these really my fellow reds? Had these guys not cavorted with me scarcely 18 months ago in Cardiff and Dortmund? Was this all on account of Houllier’s £6 million French wonder kids never washing behind their ears like he’d told them?
What days earlier had been mere carping now represented something altogether more ominous. A decent man’s future and reputation was on the line. So too was the future of our football club. I was confused and bemused.
My instincts weren’t though.
The first of my ensuing articles was despatched. It was of the appealing sort. The ‘Come on eh lads I know we’re playing shite and all that but surely you can’t be really serious about getting shut of Houllier? sort.
People were though. Deadly serious. And getting more serious with each crap performance. In fact, latterly, it was even after each decent performance. The mindset was that the end of the road had come for Houllier. Following on from the decree of a genuine sixties carat Shankly man like St John, Steve Kelly’s blessing, if not quite the equivalent of The Pontiff’s in Rome, was certainly all that some needed to display their subliminal sensibilities that Houllier was probably not up to the task.
The overwhelming perception – indelible in some minds – was that Houllier as a manager was incapable of anything other than a cautious approach that relied on robust defence and direct counter attack with little or no scope for fluid Liverpool style passing and movement football or imaginative flair. The man could never change and if it was not bringing the kind of top notch success we crave then there was no point in persevering with it. Or him. Two and two were adding up to four. The logic for jettisoning Houllier was nigh faultless.
Or was it?