12.
12 months ago to the day, 10 February 2013, I’d wager that many of us were sat around looking at the Premier League table and, aside from bemoaning the fact that Liverpool were 12 points off the Champions League places and just 12 points above 17th–place Aston Villa, we were trying to make sense of how this Manchester United vintage (more or less the same squad they have now) found themselves 12 points clear at the top of the table and coasting to another League Championship with 12 games to go. And just as it had been for years, it was as if they had a 12th man playing for them (no, not referees), some kind of extra dimension that allowed them to keep playing above expectations and picking up points at a rate that didn’t seem altogether possible. Hey, they were good, no doubt about it, but 12 points better than the billionaires in second place with an ageing core of Ferdinand, Vidic, Evra, Giggs, Carrick and Scholes, and younger players like Cleverley and Wellbeck who didn’t seem all that great then and still don’t a year later?
So what was it? Well if we didn’t know then, we certainly do now. Replacing Alex Ferguson and his innate ability to manage, organise and inspire those players, replacing the respect and fear he commanded which was forged and relentlessly cultivated over two and a half decades and, perhaps most of all, replacing that psychotic will to win was always going to prove difficult and was likely to see Manchester United slip a few rungs down the ladder, at least in the short-term. What the Old Trafford brain trust did in hiring David Moyes, however, as those of us who could barely hide our glee at the time suspected right from the off, was effectively sabotage their own efforts to maintain two decades of virtually uninterrupted success. They stood in the living-room, poured a gallon of petrol around their ankles, struck a match and let it dangle precariously from between a finger and thumb. Only time will tell just how far they set themselves back, although it’s likely to be cosmetic damage rather than a complete rebuild and those comparing Liverpool post-Souness to what Manchester United post-Moyes might look like are ignoring some key factors, the most glaring being the bafflingly dogged loyalty of David Moores to Souness that Moyes is unlikely to get from the Glazers to quite the same extent and the lack of business acumen of those in the Anfield boardroom that ultimately saw the club left far behind financially by the behemoth that eventually became Manchester United Football Club and, later, the oil barons of Chelsea and Manchester City, a fate that simply won’t befall them now regardless of what Moyes does.
What he has done is provided yet more compelling evidence of how important the manager of a football club truly is, a fact that Liverpool supporters seem to grasp more than most. The manager is everything. Once upon a time, not too long ago, those who sought to defend Roy Hodgson’s woeful approach to managing one of the biggest club’s in the world asked us to forget about the manager, the players were the ones at fault. That same mindset will undoubtedly manifest itself again (if it hasn’t already) as a means to excuse Moyes for not only failing to keep a team that won the League Championship by 11 points last season competitive for a top-four finish this campaign, but has actually taken them into the same kind of ugly mid-table struggle in which Everton typically existed during his time there. Manchester United isn’t Everton any more than Liverpool was Fulham, and yet the excuses will come for a man who, just like Hodgson, seems to be pig-headedly inflicting his small-minded, narrow footballing philosophy onto a club famed the world over for winning silverware, a combination proving to be every bit as appealing as a chalk and cheese wrap. Which is not to say that the squad of players bequeathed to him by his predecessor was perfect. Good managers, however, when presented with lemons, make lemonade. The great ones, of course, the Shanklys and the Paisleys to name two, go quite a bit further than that, producing a bottle of brandy from beneath their sleeve or perhaps a fine scotch whiskey and adding a few drops to the mix.
At what point do they become great? In truth, I think the best are probably born great, but mere mortals like us never see it until we’ve had a couple of sips of that lemonade and liked the taste. It almost always begins with a philosophy, a vision, that allows the players assembled underneath its blueprint to play to their ability both collectively and individually and coalesce into something too powerful to stop and too quick to catch. The irresistible force and immoveable object rolled into one, if you will. And eventually, it all becomes very easy, or at least that’s how it appears. Shankly called football a very simple game. It isn’t, but it may well have seemed that way to him. In 1964, or so we were told quite a bit over the weekend, Liverpool scored five goals against Arsenal on their way to their first League Championship under the great man. On Saturday it happened again, and I can’t be the only one who feels something a little more meaningful than simple coincidence at play here. It feels like we’re seeing the beginnings of something. If the best make it look easy, then what does it mean that Saturday’s performance felt like the footballing equivalent of Albert Einstein reciting his two-times tables? A once-off? A coincidence? A case of one team “showing up” while the other was presumably still sitting on the team bus? I hope not. I think not.
For me, and I’ve already said as much in the Round Table thread, arguably the most pleasing aspect of the game against Arsenal was that, as a team, Liverpool allowed them nothing, and for the first hour (not just twenty minutes, a full hour), every effort they made to get something, anything was punished, like a child having their wrist slapped or a lab rat reaching for a piece of cheese and getting a shock for its trouble. Many have said that Arsenal were simply rubbish, a bad day at the office from them. Make no mistake, they were poor, but the lion’s share of the credit for that absolutely must go to Liverpool. Özil had a poor game, but I doubt he’s been hustled and bullied like that for a long time, if ever. This is a player who can destroy any team in the world if allowed; Liverpool didn’t allow. His literal collapse onto the Anfield turf in the lead-up to the home side’s third was almost poetic, a physical manifestation of pure and utter submission. Like his team mates, he was under siege and buckling fast. Against maybe any other team in the league, he might have gotten away with the misplaced pass that Coutinho seized upon before blowing open the Gunners’ front door like so much semtex with just the tiniest wave of the wand otherwise known as his right foot and ushering Sturridge inside. And Koscielny and Mertesacker, responsible for protecting Szczęsny to the tune of more clean sheets than any other ‘keeper in the League before Saturday, suddenly looked like teenage boys promoted above their age group a little too soon. Yes, Mertesacker is, to put it kindly, a little shy of pace, but how many teams have had the nous and raw ability to effectively strip him naked for all the world to see like that? Not many if the League positions before Saturday afternoon were anything to go by. Just Manchester City and their billions a few weeks back. Who else? That’s because, regardless of Arsenal’s weaknesses, it hasn’t been an easy thing to do.
This team has the look of one to whom everything may soon come easy. The plan is there, the effort is there. The personnel still needs work and so too, therefore, does the ability, but the signs are good. Fulham away (bottom side, worst goal difference in the league but showing signs of life) is the precise kind of fixture that used to worry me, under Roy, under Ged, under Rafa, didn’t matter. I’m not so worried about this one, and that’s no disrespect to Fulham who showed on Sunday that they can give as good as they get against an aimless mass of crosses and bodies into which world-class talents like Van Persie, Rooney and Mata get sucked like some kind of relentlessly boring footballing black hole. What they’ll be confronted with on Wednesday is an entirely different proposition, almost a different sport, if truth be told. It’ll still be 11 vs. 11, there’ll still be four officials and a football, but they’ll be facing an organised, motivated group with goals on their mind and the ability to get them and, most of all, that 12th man on the sideline orchestrating it, the man with the vision under whose watchful gaze all things suddenly seem possible. I can't wait.