Liverpool Vs Newcastle United at Anfield, Kick-Off 12:30pm
Ref: Andre Marriner
Liverpool against Newcastle is a preview that almost writes itself, doesn't it? A harking back to what you might call the last throes of naivety in the premier league. A time when owners could plausibly bankroll a team to the top of the league on the basis of a fortune made domestically alone, and when two teams could, in successive seasons, attack each other to a succession of 4-3s with barely a defender to be seen. And sure, we’ve had echoes of those days since then, in our ill-fated run to the runner’s up spot under Rodgers, in Leicester City’s almost certainly never to be repeated mission impossible (both not entirely coincidentally driven by a core of British players helped along the way by more domestic penalties in two seasons than Klopp’s had in his entire Premier League career so far) and even in the likes of Delia Smith getting her beloved Norwich promoted to the top division.
But the top division is, nevertheless, a very different animal now.
Off the field, the old owners are all but gone – no more Walkers, Halls or Moores. In their place are a mixture of international investment consortia, career asset-strippers who leverage debt to skim profits, with even reputation-laundering oligarchs rapidly being displaced by reputation-laundering countries seeking to use oil wealth to not only lubricate public perceptions but also to add trophies in the world’s biggest sport to their achievements in perhaps the plutocracy’s favourite passtime of all: extravagantly worthless dick-measuring.
On the field, however, you could argue that things have never been better. I don’t watch Liverpool – or any team – these days with any sense of nostalgia for the late 80s/early 90s football that I cut my teeth on. What I see these days are well-drilled, well-coached, tactically efficient and supremely fit teams in a range of leagues and at a range of levels. Just look at Kosovo last night – a decent system with the confidence to play it, a disparity in quality clear, but plenty enough about them that an England side from previous generations, lacking the kind of extreme penetration provided by Sterling and Sancho, might have ended up on the losing side. England have certainly lost to worse and, under Hodgson, have actively looked to play worse. The possible extinction of dinosaurs like him is a theme I’ll return to but for now, instead of looking back at the glory days of this fixture (and for Liverpool fans, there’s an Everton centenary DVD’s worth of highlights from the last 20 years of this match up alone) I’d like to go back to the moment that inspired me to take on this preview in the first place. A moment that, in my mind, simultaneously sums up much of what I hate about football, while also serving as a fantastic reminder of how far Liverpool have come in a relatively short space of time.
I’m talking about that goal. That fucking beach ball goal. A goal, deflected in, off a fucking beach ball.
That that goal was allowed to stand without at least a minor inquest into the state of Premier league refereeing really tells you almost all you need to know about Premier League refereeing. And unlike the football, the refereeing has, if anything, got worse from what should have been an approach-changing nadir. But no. An admittedly little used but nonetheless obvious, basic and interpretation-free rule that all referees should be able to judge and apply without a second’s hesitation was, completely inexplicably, ignored. But that wasn’t all that pissed me off about it. No. What really rubbed salt into the wound for me was the reaction of the then Sunderland and now Newcastle (and doesn’t that combination of clubs suggest a little something about what actually motivates this particular Football Man (TM)) manager, Steve Bruce, in suggesting that knowledge of such a rule would constitute a level of geekery that a Football Man couldn’t be expected to be reduced to.
Well fuck you, Bruce. Fuck you for not knowing the rules of a game that’s made you a millionaire (many times over if you’ve invested it wisely), and fuck you even more for wearing your ignorance about it as a badge of pride instead of just acknowledging that you got the mother of all lucky strokes to win that game.
The rawness I still feel about that incident can perhaps be explained if you look at my post history from that last year of Rafa’s. What you’d read is indicative of a young(er) man who’d invested too much of himself into this forum and this club, spending too much of my time fighting a losing battle against those I perceived to be against Rafa, and taking a lot of posts from a lot of sound posters far too personally, as if it were me they were attacking rather than a man who genuinely deserves that Football Man (TM) description so readily applied to mediocrities like Bruce. Mediocrities who have spent their entire career stealing a living based entirely on their jobs-for-the-boys connections within the game.
In Newcastle now, we can see something of the future that we managed to escape through a combination of passionate fans, concerted campaigning, a sleeping-giant of a brand and no small amount of luck. No-one should have any reason to dislike Newcastle or, more importantly, the kind of club and the kind of football that they represent. It does not feel like any kind of progress or justice to have a club like that owned by the worst kind of throwback to the early days of the Premier League – a ‘self-made-man’ of no substance, a fortune built on aggression, cost-cutting and who knows what else behind the scenes, now having found himself utterly out of his depth as a wannabe piranha among the real sharks of the international waters, doing everything he can to ensure that it’s the club, rather than he, who suffers the ill-effects of his hubris. Newcastle deserve better than Ashley, and they certainly deserve better than to have probably the best manager they could ever have hoped for in those circumstances – Rafa Benitez – eased out and replaced by a manager who doesn’t even know the rules of the game. We know something of that, of course, when Rafa was replaced by Hodgson. We know how it feels to look at the future of the club and feel no optimism at all, no direction to go but down, and without even some vague consolation of promoting youth from within or building some progressive style of play that we could build an identity around.
Bruce, like Hodgson, has no interest in doing any of these things. He has no interest in really learning how to coach a team to make it greater than the sum of its parts, no interest in learning what makes players and a squad tick and developing a mentality that can see them bridge at least some of the gap in quality that they’ll inevitably face. No interest in forensically scrutinising the strengths and weaknesses of an opponent in order to develop a game plan that might just bag an unexpected victory. No. Bruce’s entire MO for a club still dreaming of Keegan’s glory days, for a club that remembers having Bobby Robson propelling a clutch of developing young players to the heights of the division, for a club that hasn’t stopped grieving Rafa’s departure, is to set them up in two banks of four and try to frustrate the opposition, for which every point fortunately gained against a Chelsea will be more than balanced by the three consistently lost against teams around them that, while light years away from the top two, are nevertheless far more sophisticated than the dross Bruce’s teams were playing last time he could lay claim to anything resembling a genuine achievement.
So fuck him, and fuck Ashley too. I’ll be delighted at their inevitable relegation, and I can only hope that it continues to destroy what little reputation they and men like them have within the game, and that it continues to encourage clubs like Watford, Brighton (with respect to Chris Hughton who, if a traditionalist in terms of his approach, does seem like a genuinely decent man with a lot of love for the game) and Southampton to take more imaginative approaches to competing than just bringing in another ‘safe pair of hands’ from a merry-go-round of mediocrity that never brings anything other than the same pay offs to the same players and agents and managers who have long since stopped doing anything worthy of the earning of such money.
But Newcastle? As a club and as a fanbase? I sincerely hope they can start again and rebuild, with an ownership structure that respects the club and a managerial team who understand what a gift they have been given in that club, and what potential there would be to build a real team for, ahem, real Football People (TM).
As for Liverpool, well, we’ve got to be thankful, haven’t we? The Newcastle that we could have been are, in fact, the Liverpool that we’re privileged to be watching, every single week. The best Liverpool team, by far, that I’ve seen in my 38 years. The first team since our glory years that could genuinely lay claim to being the best in Europe (as opposed to being the best at playing in Europe). The first Liverpool team I’ve ever seen that looks set to compete for the league consistently, and the first one that I’ve ever seen which, petrodollar plutocrats aside, absolutely dominates the rest of the division, and indeed has done so over the last season to an extent never before witnessed even in our illustrious history.
We have a manager at the cutting edge playing football from the stars with a team of humble but extravagantly talented players who have been moulded into a ruthless winning machine with a mentality of iron. Behind that, we’ve got foundations that look real and solid, a way of thinking about the game that looks as sophisticated and sustainable for its time and its context as the boot room did back in the day. We’ve got everything any football fan could dare to dream of. In that context, we need to realise that the league title isn’t a be-all and end-all but the cherry on what is already a fantastic cake. And if we keep baking cakes like this, the cherry on top will be, in time, almost inevitable – assuming (and that’s a big assumption) – that the financial game doesn’t change again.
As for the game itself, this looks as inevitable a beating as you’ll ever see. The gulf in class between the two teams is colossal in every which way you could conceive of. Not only that, but Newcastle have been our bunnies in this league for as long as I can remember, with so many comfortable wins in so many situations and very, very few dropped points that I can remember. There’s something about Bruce that makes me fear a horrific snatch-and-grab raid but, in all honesty, I think that’s the beach ball speaking. I mean, where’s it going to come from? Set pieces? We defend them better than anyone else in the league, and break, terrifyingly, against any team that actually commits to using them as an attacking tactic. Open play? They haven’t got a single weapon that can conceivable hurt us, and even if they did, they haven’t got a manager who can work out a game plan to bring that weapon into play. Even Rafa got turned over here, and Bruce is to Rafa what an amoeba is to the Viennese Philharmonic Orchestra. The nature of football is that nothing is ever certain, but Bruce will come to try and frustrate us with his two banks of four that he doesn’t do as well as Hodgson does, and we will break them down with a team and a system and a set of players that have become extremely used to unparking much better buses than Bruce will bring.
In short, it’s a lovely fixture to have after the international break. And we're all buzzing for it, aren't we?
