Anyone else feel like we're groping around in the dark for a club ethos? "Pass and move" and "Keep it behind closed doors, it's the Liverpool Way" don't really seem to cut it as an overall strategy to me. And anything that FSG do will be undermined by their lack of football knowledge. Whoever they hire to inform them, their appointment will be undermined by something. If you look at the really successful clubs in Europe, there always seems to be a culture of the club's greats staying on as servants in an effective capacity.
We used to have that kind of tradition, but the bootroom days are long gone and you can't just establish one again, certainly not in the space of a season or two. At Barça and Bayern and Ajax and so on, many of their great players end up working back at the club, bringing their knowledge and legitimacy to the table. Ours seem to end up becoming shit media pundits who mainly play golf. Many of them of course still love the club, and there's nothing wrong with living that life it's worth noting, but in terms of taking the club forward it doesn't do much. Kenny's the last bastion of that time, but I think he's fighting a tough fight trying to keep it going. Worth noting that in Kenny's incredibly successful time as manager he was supported by the John Smith and Peter Robinson were were phenomenal football club men, the kind that have been sorely lacking from the backbone of the club for years under Hicks & Gillett and arguably under Parry and Moores (though they aren't in the same category as the cancers of course, just less competent than we wanted and needed). Even in his time as manager, you'd have to imagine that Kenny was more of a leader than a technical coach, as evidenced by anecdotes about his time at Blackburn that recently came out.
Perhaps Rafa was trying to build one when he finally got his contract and control of the youth system and Parry was gone, but everything else was collapsing all around him. Sad times for the club in general. Seem to have lost part of their identity and it will take time to build a new one and patience is forever in short supply when you haven't one a league for 20 something years and you're lurching from crisis to crisis and constantly "in a rebuilding phase"
Then again, perhaps this is unnecessarily bleak and a few more of those shots of the post go in, a few more of those pennos scored, we have 15 more points this season and things seem to be on track. Maybe the first teams results shouldn't dictate the entire state of the club? I just don't know.
