There's No Place Like Home (Or Fourth)

"There can be no failure to a man who has not lost his courage, his character, his self respect, or his self-confidence. He is still a King."

By the time I was born, Kenny Dalglish had wracked up a hundred and sixty four goals for Liverpool Football Club, had won everything there was to win as a player and was about to do the same as a manager. He would go on to do the double well before I had even learned to speak, an ability I misplaced somewhere in the middle of last week when the news came through that he had been sacked.

Football has an incredible power. It brings people together and divides them almost as powerfully. Barely a week passes without something happening that heralds the death of the beautiful game. I prefer stories like that of Antonio Di Natale, who will financially support the disabled sister of Piermario Morosini, the Livorno player who passed away sadly in April. People like Craig Bellamy and Didier Drogba get roundly criticized for their conduct on the pitch but seem to receive very little acknowledgement for all they do off it. For some reason however, if you allow yourself to be touched by moments like Fabrice Muamba's return to the pitch and his tears of joy at both sets of fans chanting his name then you open yourself up to criticism. Because there's no room for sentimentality in football.

I've long held the belief that as a supporter, you have a role to play in the success of your team. Like an unwritten contract, when my team needs me I am there to be called upon. Atmosphere affects performance - this I've seen first hand both positively and negatively - but it's about more than what goes on for nintey minutes on the pitch. When Tom Hicks and George Gillett had Liverpool Football Club on it's knees, we fought back. That didn't stop, even when Roy Hodgson was blaming us for the inept performances on the pitch. I find it so perplexing - cold even - that the Blackburn fans have been given such a hard time in the media recently. Are we supposed to sit back and watch as the club we hold so dear disappears around us?  Unfortunately the flaw lies not with ourselves or even the owners who are only in it to make money, but with the FA who are so quick to let these "businessmen" play a glorified game of roulette with our football clubs. Until the bubble bursts that's not going to change anytime soon and we'll be the ones left picking up the pieces.

The problems that arise with sacking Kenny Dalglish was that appointing him in the first place, John W Henry had to know what he was getting and that if it came to this, just how difficult it would be. Dalglish is as far removed from the modern footballer as you'd care to imagine. Very few of even your favourite players - if they are from your own club - don't at some point or another let you down. They never mean to, it's just the nature of football in that they're only ever ninety minutes away from a total change of perception. Many players and managers go from hero to villain like the toss of a coin. But not Kenny. He's above that and we all knew it. Therein lies the crux of it all. Their idea is a long term solution to a problem I'm not sure they know how to fix. I don't think Kenny was ever part of that, despite how much we all wanted it to be the case. You could accuse me of short term thinking but I would have rather given the "Kenny Dalglish experiment" one more season before pulling the plug on everything and starting again. FSG and John W Henry know that they've opened themselves up. From here on in it all falls on them and as much as anyone else, they need to get it right from now on.

I keep hearing and reading a lot about how Dalglish's antipathy toward the media is part of the reason why he was sacked. That scares me a little, in that it's become an accepted part of how a manager succeeds or fails is how good his "image" is.  I blame myself partly, for failing to realize this sooner.  Rafa Benitez still has a reputation of being some bumbling clown that took Liverpool back too the stone age in some parts of the country, all because of the way he was portrayed and Kenny Dalglish has today been unveiled today as one of Sky Sports' "villains of the season" with no mentions whatsoever to John Terry or Joey Barton.  I suppose Dalglish should have just banned the press like Ferguson, or swore at them like Redknapp. I'm not naive enough to think that the media plays no part in a managers remit but it shouldn't be quite to the extent that it plays a part in whether someone keeps their job or not. To some, Alex Ferguson will always be beyond reproach and to a large degree he has earned that but only so long as it's backed up by what's currently happening on the pitch. Ultimately, that's where Kenny Dalglish failed and not with a microphone in his face.

That anger that came form Dalglish's departure very quickly became fear. Fear of repeating the past, for the parallels between what happened this week and in 2010 seem awfully apparent. Any potential backlash toward Roberto Martinez is less to do with him and more to do with the almost identical fashion with which we were sold Roy Hodgson. Upon closer inspection however, while those comparisons seem valid, they are ultimately hollow. I find it hard to believe that any incoming manager would make quite as many mistakes as Hodgson and secondly this does at least appear to be part of a process rather than the thoughtless way in which Rafa was discarded.  In many ways, we are still suffering from what happened when Hicks & Gillett owned the club. FSG and the playing staff still have to rectify how far we've fallen on the pitch in the last few years while off the pitch as supporters we're very weary of being led down the same path. Once bitten, twice shy, the work that needs to be done in order to even think about a title challenge will be a lot harder given both the impatience of the modern football fan and the trust issues that will remain for a while yet.

I understand completely that our league campaign this season was unacceptable but at the same time I don't like the idea of writing off a trophy because of it.  Does the pain derived from our league campaign lessen the joy I felt having won the league cup at Wembley or knocking Everton out in the semi-final? In order to move forward it's important to understand what went wrong, not just ignore everything that went well and focus on the failures. Up until Robin Van Persie scored a heartbreaking last minute winner at Anfield in March, we still had every chance of Champions League football and were given another lifeline a few weeks later against QPR only to incomprehensibly give away a two goal lead. Ultimately I believe that the gap between where we finished and where we wanted to finish isn't as far as some would have you believe but at the same time with Europa League football next year the margin for error is even finer. Whoever takes charge will have a lot to take in, which is why it's important to get someone with experience at the top level or at least have the structure in place to make sure that any "learning on the job" doesn't result in failure on the pitch. Given what's been defined as failure this year however, I'm not sure what that constitutes.

If first is first and second is nowhere, what is fourth? In the grand scheme of things, finishing fourth has become a platform - in much the same way winning trophies are/were meant to be. At this moment in time however, it's a false platform.  Not quite the deus ex machina it's being made out to be.  Neither Spurs nor Everton were able to make the most of their chance at the top table.  The only way to really get the best out of it is to have the right structure.  As there aren't many great examples of famous fourth places (I wonder why that is?) I'll take the last two World Cups for example.  Finishing fourth did very little for Portugal in 2006 while it may be argued that the starting point for a potential Uruguay triumph in Brazil will go back to their 2010 campaign. As far as winning trophies go it's a lot easier to look at domestic matters, winning the league cup last year put Birmingham in a place from which they ended up being relegated while collecting the FA Cup may have been a contributing factor for Manchester City being able to win the league this year.  City were able to use the platform of Champions League football to allow them to attract the players they could easily afford that would otherwise have shunned their advances.  In the case of Uruguay it's all to do with their setup.  They have a large amount of talented players coming through their system who have grown up together as a team and are now reaping those rewards.  Without the money that City have, it's imperative we get everything else right.  Neither winning trophies or finishing in the top four are direct answers.  One is a reward onto itself however.  Simply finishing fourth for one season - while heralded - will be about as useful long term as Everton in 2005.

Being in the top four has become like the Wizard of Oz. Who needs courage, brains and a heart when you can have Champions League revenue? Teams become so consumed with it, they lose focus of what they actually have in pursuit of it. Martin O'Neill did it by sending a reserve team to CSKA Moscow in the UEFA Cup, a tie Aston Villa had every chance of winning against a side that would go on to be champions. Harry Redknapp regularly shows a disdain for the Europa League, a line of thinking I've never really liked, given that both competitions count toward a coefficient and successive failures could one day leave England with only three Champions League places instead of four.

Meanwhile in Germany, Bourissia Dortmund missed out on Champions League football in 2010 by four points after dropping points in their last two matches and finishing fifth in the process. They have won the Bundesliga in the two seasons that followed and six of the team that lost to Freiburg on the last day of the 09/10 season started in their 5-2 German Cup final victory over Bayern just over a week ago.  Masterminding the whole thing was Jürgen Klopp, a manager who's previous work involved a seven year stint at Mainz during which he got them both promoted to the Bundesliga and relegated three seasons later although did gave them their first ever taste of European football through the German fair play league. This isn't to advocate the potential hiring of a Martinez, the kind of chance Dortmund took on Klopp doesn't always pay off. The point being that if you have the right pieces in place - as they did in 2010 - then it's possible to make the leap from pretenders to contenders. The problem is, we have to realize now that it's going to take time to get everything ready and even then you'd still then have to find yourself a Shinji Kagawa and Lewandowski, who were a snip at three hundred and fifty thousand euros and a clearly exorbitant four and a half million euros respectively.

The league table doesn't lie, so we're told. I'll buy that. But there has to be a better way of measuring progression. In the last three seasons Arsenal have finished third, fourth and third. Are they any better off now than in 2010? In the same time frame Wigan have gone from sixteenth in the 2009/2010 season, finished the same place a year later and fifteenth this year. Both teams are fairly stagnant and yet have achieve their respective goals every year be it top four or survival. Perhaps the problem lies within ambition, in that if you try too hard and fail, you'll have a Leeds United on your hands. I'd like to think that even with all the derision that comes with platitudes about our history, we're not in the business of playing it safe with regard to our objectives.  I can't imagine a Liverpool Football Club that would be satisfied with qualification for the Champions League alone, forsaking trophies along the way in order to make sure the cheques are balanced.  Pete Wylie told me there's no heart as big as Liverpool.  I still believe that.  I only hope when this is all over John W. Henry doesn't turn Anfield into a bunch of tin men.  If that is the case, he'll need more than a wizard.