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Or, 'how I learned to stop worrying and love the Rafa...1. Change for Changes Sake:After any defeat, after any bad result, come the calls for ‘change’. These calls usually come into two categories: The banging of a well worn drum of personal fan preference, or an entirely reactive suggestion based solely on the match gone by. The first category will be wheeled out regardless, but only after a bad result or mediocre performance. Often it barges into the room loudly wearing an enormous ‘told you so’ hat. Some common themes:
- We should play 4-4-2.
- Zonal marking.
- Rotation.
- Wingers need to hug the touchline.
- Babel to play anywhere other than the position (LW/LF) he has spent most of his career in.
The beauty of this stance is that, with hindsight, it is always 100% correct. The Babel mover is apparently blind to Babel having looked every bit as shocking up front or down the right, or indeed the times he’s looked very dangerous down the left. The 4-4-2 fanatic never stops to consider why we (along with more or less the entire rest of the footballing world) abandoned this system long ago, what it’s limitations are, or indeed the problems this system can have when other teams apply it. I won’t go into them here, but suffice it to say I’ll be watching Man Utd with great interest, but I can also guarantee that very few pundits and fans would, at the end of the season, put any failure of theirs down to them switching to a 4-4-2. Nope, it will all be about Ronaldo – pure and simple. I can also guarantee that Rooney being switched to the middle will universally be regarded as a fantastic move, regardless of how he or Man Utd play.
Onto the second category, for me the more fun to watch. This is the category that sometimes produces some great and outlandish suggestions – Kuyt as a RB or DM, Agger as a DM, Gerrard or Babel as pretty much anything other than where they happened to play. Often this type of suggestion will be made in haste, briefly but enthusiastically discussed, then sadly forgotten, rarely to be spoken of again, as circumstances change. For example, calls for Gerrard to be moved to the right have largely been abandoned with Kuyt’s form in that role, but of course our current weakness in the centre means ‘Gerrard for CM’ is currently very much back in fashion. Of course, next time Gerrard actually does play CM (as he surely will at some point), you can guarantee that a bad result will lead to cries of ‘never again, Gerrard just isn’t a CM anymore...’ which will gain brief but enthusiastic attention, and round and round it goes again...
2. Innate Conservatism:One of the wonders of football fandom is how subheading 1, ‘change for change’s sake’ can be wholly compatible with 2, ‘Innate Conservatism’. It’s quite incredible really – and I’m sure you’ve all seen/heard/read this type of thing time and time again:
“It’s time Rafa stopped this rotation malarkey for good. He needs to settle on a side and a system and stick with it. I think he should go for *insert any formation that we don’t regularly play and change *insert names of regular players to either be dropped or shifted out of their preferred positions. He should then stick with that regardless, until either injury hits or our form becomes so appalling that I’m now fully satisfied that my idea won’t work after all.”
This aspect of fandom, it must be said, is particularly appalling in Great Britain. As a nation, we are completely obsessed with players, and have next to zero understanding of and appreciation for tactics. That’s not to say that there’s no appetite for it, but supply is sorely lacking. Considering the reams and reams written about football every single day, you will be lucky to find one decent article about tactics in any given month. Even then, these usually come in the form of interviews with coaches or sometimes players in the more geeky football publications, or a foreign paper/football magazine/program.
A lot of this feeds right into the kind of suggestions already mentioned in 1. People call for a 4-4-2 or and end to zonal marking largely because the media constantly paintthe former in a positive and the latter in a negative light, and very rarely look in depth at the strengths, weaknesses, assumptions and theories behind said system or formation or whatever. It’s simply taken as some kind of football gospel – until eventually the truth becomes so persuasive that even Man Utd start doing it openly and obviously, then it suddenly becomes the new orthodoxy. Undoubtedly rotation is getting this way – it’s in a state of transition. Where a mere two years ago it was the greatest evil and something Sir Fungus would never, ever do, footballing genius as he is. Two years of Fungus rotating like a member of a famously devout muslim sect (or dervish) now means rotation is the essential. Where two years ago it was all about your ‘best 11’, now it’s all about the ‘squad’ and ‘strength in depth’.
The media combined with the fans combined with, I’m afraid to say, a poor education system which shies away from actually teaching or often even discussing any type of critical thought (or the theories behind it) goes a long way towards creating a culture of ignorance. You see it everywhere, but it comes out more obviously in football than in most places. This is largely why 4-4-2 still reigns supreme in the national consciousness, even though it hasn’t reigned supreme on an actual football pitch for the best part of 40 years now.
3. Blame Culture:Of course, when knee-jerking it is not enough to merely spout one’s vitriol and leave it at that. The purple anger vein doesn’t get that uniquely satisfying throb-on unless there is a target – someone to blame. This generally comes down to the manager, though there are usually one or two players who become scapegoats for any bad performance, regardless of how they actually do. It used to be Kuyt, it’s currently Lucas – though Babel seems to have well and truly worn out his long standing credit and is in now serious danger of taking the young Brazilian’s place.
The striking thing about the blame culture is the lack of context, and again this is very much fueled by a media-culture which simply refuses to offer in depth explanations or reasoning for anything. If a concept can’t be expressed in an easy headline, then it won’t be expressed. Hence why you get: “Lucas was shite.” Rather than, for example: “The team around Lucas are still positioning themselves as if expecting those long balls from Xabi Alonso. The defence are also failing to take responsibility in that absence, and are hence hoofing it forwards rather than looking to build from the back, which leaves both Lucas and Mascherano isolated. This was compounded by poor performances up top, and the unwillingness of either Gerrard or Torres to step out of their usual roles a bit, coming closer to the midfield to receive the ball, but also enabling Lucas to go beyond them with his excellent ability to ghost into the box.” Or: “Rafa should have started player x and formation z, all our ills are his fault,” rather than: “Given the international break and our game coming up on Wednesday, Rafa picked player y and formation x, most likely to exploit z weakness in our opponents. Also, he couldn’t do this, that and the other, because of the many things happening off the pitch.”
That last is particularly staggering, and a real testament of the media and fans general inability to put things into context. Off pitch events, when they go on for long enough, simply cease to be a factor. In the short term: ‘Jol was undermined, no wonder their form suffered...’but in the longer term that somehow becomes ‘Rafa needs to concentrate on what happens on the pitch...’
Thus our off pitch situation becomes one of the main things fuelling the blame culture, of ‘Rafa should do xyz and is stupid for not doing it...’even though in this case, bizarrely, the real targets could not be more obvious, the real causes transparently clear. Still, it does make a kind of sense, when considered in the context of the weird ‘Pop-Idol’ era we are living in. To get rid of the owners is big, difficult, hard to see how it can be done – and even if it can be done, it’s a long process requiring sacrifice. The manager, however, even more so than the players, and far more than the owners, can provide a kind of immediate, instant gratification. Fans can get at the manager directly, and enough together can get a manager sacked very quickly indeed. This is of course a vicious and highly dangerous cycle – see Newcastle for potential consequences.
4. Ignorance and Arrogance:
Though these are, of course, very seperate states of mind they belong together here simply because they so often go together, like bacon and eggs. Whether it comes from insecurity or over-confidence remains unclear, but what is clear is this truth: “Empty vessels make the loudest noise.” One of those rare catch-phrases that is both informative and highly accurate.
By and large this article has steered clear of specifics, but for this section I simply have to turn to a particular thread on the main board because it sums up this particular issue to perfection:
“Why is it us fans can see the problems but Rafa cant”(sic).
First, Ignorance:
- The massive assumption that Rafa can’t see the problems that fans tend to make the most noise about, not least because these same problems tend to be plastered all over the Sunday/Monday newspapers in a massive typeface whenever we have a bad result or performance.
- The idea that Rafa’s proximity to the players and inner workings of the club doesn’t really mean that much, namely that ‘us fans’ can see as much, or enough of, what’s going on to have a comparable knowledge base to the manager.
- That Rafa isn’t, due to his ability as a manger and serious intelligence, able to see problems, or aspects to obvious problems, that the vast majority of fans wouldn’t have a clue even exist, let alone how to solve them – even on the rather large assumption that those fans could even understand the complexities of the issue.
Then, Arrogance:
- ‘Us’ fans can see the problems. ‘Us’ fans (meaning, obviously, the poster himself) know our stuff, ‘we’ are right, ergo Rafa must be ‘wrong’.
- ‘We’ are in a position to see all the problems. ‘We’ know everything/enough about the club that we know better than Rafa.
- ‘We’ have a comparable intelligence and football knowledge to Rafa, who has degrees in sports subjects, has worked in football his entire adult life and who has sought out and studied under the most talented managers In the modern era (like Sacchi).
- The problems ‘we’ can see are in fact the actual problems, and ‘our’ solutions would actually solve them.
To compound all this (as is so often the case) the article in question isn’t even well written. Now, I am by no means a grammar bore, and I personally can’t stand it when points get ignored because the poster has misplaced an apostrophe. On the other hand, those posters aren’t usually taking a very conscious ‘I know best’ position, and they are usually not writing articles either.
In this case, it just adds the icing to the cake that someone who, whether consciously or not, is basically accusing Rafa of being a moron who doesn’t even have the intelligence of the average fan, Rafa, who of course is highly educated, intelligent, literate, sharp and witty, leaves the apostrophe off ‘can’t’ and the question mark off the end of the sentence. In short, someone with a questionable grasp of the question mark sees no problem whatsoever in doubting the intelligence and ability of a man who has eat, slept and breathed football for almost half a century. The mind truly boggles.
5. I’m right, full stop:Perhaps most important of all, though, is the sense of certainty that comes across in nearly all knee-jerking type posts. Regardless of evidence, circumstance or precedent, the poster is always, always, always right. Even when they are completely wrong, they are right. The fanatic of ‘4-4-2 with Gerrard in the middle’ can’t be swayed by the disappearance of 4-4-2 in the rest of the footballing world. Our own less than stellar performances employing exactly this system with Gerrard in that role can be safely ignored – they simply didn’t happen. If a match is played with all the knee-jerking posters suggestions, and it goes horribly – does this force a rethink? Some kind of re-assessment? Never. In that case either some outside agency comes into play (the referee, poor individual performances, in short, all of the myriad reasons and explanations so vehemently rejected by the knee-jerker while they were advocating their pet theory suddenly take on paramount importance) or the whole episode is simply blacked out and forgotten about.
Regardless of the suggestion in question the most important thing is the unimpeachable ‘rightness’ of the poster. To admit mistakes, to admit one has areas where the bright light of footballing intellect does not reach, simply cannot be allowed. I’ve no idea why. Maybe being wrong reduces masculinity or something…perhaps by releasing Oestrogen into the bloodstream? Maybe a study could be carried out?
6. In conclusion:
Put simply, reactive thinking is rarely useful or productive. Even less productive is the mindset of having pre-conceived ideas about what should happen on a football pitch, against which any manager or player is judged. Of course, we all have preferences, but what I mean is that, for example, if someone is obsessed with us playing a 3-5-2 with Gerrard as a RWB and ‘Nando in the hole, (to take an obviously exaggerated example) then their Liverpool supporting life will be one of continual disappointment and quite possible anger.
Is it not preferable, instead of ‘telling’ Rafa what he ‘should’ be doing, to try and understand why he might be doing the things he is doing? In my case, a certain Paul Tomkins opened my mind to thinking like this about Rafa a number of years ago, especially in terms of things like rotation and zonal marking. Ever since, I’ve found supporting the team and manager a much less frustrating experience (as opposed to thinking about off pitch stuff, the fans and media which remains intensely frustrating). I’ve found that Liverpool’s development over the last few years, instead of being a series of disappointments, sources of anger and confusion and ‘shoulda, woulda, coulda’s’ has seemed perfectly coherent, a clear jigsaw taking shape where all it needed was someone to start me off with a corner piece. Also, by trying to understand Rafa’s methods, and trying to apply that thinking, defeats aren’t always a complete disaster, but can also be a learning experience, bringing up sets of questions rather than problems, and interesting potential solutions to ponder, rather than dark clouds on the horizon to worry about.
For me, it’s not about ‘In Rafa I Trust’, or ‘On Rafa I Lay the Blame’, neither makes me feel wholly comfortable. But, ‘About Rafa I Try to Learn…’ as a broad approach, has not only helped me feel better about what I see on the pitch from Liverpool, it’s massively increased my enjoyment of football on the whole, shifted my thinking to seeing potential weakness in systems and tactics rather than just ‘player x is better than player y’, and increased my contempt for the British media even further – and if there’s one thing in this world a person simply cannot have enough of – it’s contempt for the British media.
