Saturday, October 28, 2006
IS MY OPTIMISM STILL WELL FOUNDED?
by Paul Tomkins
Number 19 has proved elusive, but it's been a very good decade so far; six major trophies, when other big clubs like Newcastle would kill for just one. Then there's been a return to regular Champions League football, with the Reds on the biggest stage after a dark decade in the wilderness. For three years running Rafa has overseen a successful group stage of the Champions League; it's not decided yet this year, but the Reds are in control, and that after just one home game.
But our expectations have been raised; and I'm no different. I had high hopes for this season.
I get labelled an optimist. If that's because I'm being compared with some real pessimists, then I'll accept that. I like to think I'm a realist. Then again, that's what the pessimists say of themselves. I guess we all see our own views as the true reality. Why would we think otherwise?
I personally find being pessimistic tiring. I'd rather look for the positives, but only if positives are there; I have no desire to invent them.
I do think I need those powers of optimism right now, and I'll admit I'm struggling a little. However, maybe it's my own mentality, from a lifetime in and around sport, but I don't see how focusing on the negatives helps. Of course, that's different from the club's manager ignoring the negatives; it's his job to identify problems and eradicate them (which is always easier said than done, and is why I don't like offering pithy solutions).
But I still have unswerving faith in the manager and this group of players. That's not always been the case during my lifetime, but while it's so I feel it's only a matter of time before the tide turns.
I'm generally more positive these days than when I went to 40+ games a season home and away, before I fell ill and had family commitments. I still get to games, but it's no longer possible to let going to the match dictate my life.
In my experience, going to the match can make bad results and/or performances hurt that bit more, but it can also cloud your judgement. My judgement is generally better these days. Maybe that's age and experience, but it's also not being around the negativity that can understandably swell at games when it's not champagne football. I personally think it helps me to be one step removed, as I'm not quite as obsessively invested in it; it helps me take a better overview – at least that's how I feel when comparing myself with how I was years ago. You miss things by not being at every game, of course, but you can escape the crowd mentality in your thinking.
I don't believe I've ever been a blind optimist. Was I optimistic in 1993-94? Not a chance. Was I optimistic exactly a decade later? Not at all. Indeed, was I optimistic at half-time in the Atatürk? Not in a million years (although I stayed to lift the lads in song, and prayed for a miracle, i.e. that we only lose 3-0).
It's difficult for a manager to intervene when players are lacking confidence; there's no easy fix. When the collective confidence dips, it nearly always needs something to happen on the field to boost it, while setbacks damage it yet further.
The Reds started well enough at Old Trafford, but the first goal was too big a mental blow for a team struggling to get results away from home; indeed, until this weekend's reversal, away performances hadn't been too bad on the whole. When they're confident, you know this team is easily capable of coming back from a goal down (and even two or three), but at the moment, away from home, it's killing the confidence.
Fans often mistake low confidence for not trying. But when confidence is low, you can find yourself treading water, or thinking too hard. It stops being natural. Players become more inhibited, and more static, getting caught in two minds as to where to run. There's less movement as a result, so everyone plays the ball simply, but often too safely. It's the obverse of being confident, when everyone wants a touch, movement off the ball is rife, and it all seems natural to the players. Instinct takes over.
As ever in these situations, it can sometimes take just one good result, a moment of individual inspiration, or even just one piece of good fortune, to turn things around. Arsenal were in the bottom three a few weeks back and being written off, but now they're playing some sensational stuff. Of course it doesn't look like we're about to immediately turn the corner, but we were losing badly in October 2005, too. Sometimes an upward turn in form isn't signposted; it just turns on one single moment.
How many points the Reds need to make a belated title challenge depends on what the others rack up. If it's a total like 80-85 points, as opposed to 90-95, that instantly makes it more attainable. There's now less margin for error, of course, but also far less challenging fixtures (on paper, at least) than from this point 12 months ago. The big boys all have to come to Anfield, too. And this week a year ago we were six further points behind the leaders.
I don't want to clutch at straws, merely search out reasons why the future might prove more fruitful. But it won't happen without hard work, and something to spark the confidence.
I've recently been going through the hundreds of articles I've written since the year 2000, trying to edit the list down to the best for an anthology I'm working on. In amongst the woeful predictions and the wayward pronouncements, there are examples of where my optimism has proved well-founded, and indeed, at times didn't actually prove optimistic enough.
At the start of last season I felt we'd get 80 points in the league and that our best chance in Europe was the quarter-finals. I revised that to 75 points in October, but both proved too pessimistic. In the March of the season before I said we'd win the Champions League. During the two slumps last season I never lost faith, and always felt the confidence could quickly turn, as indeed it did.
I was actually tempted to try and pass off as new an article I dug up from precisely a year ago, to see if anyone noticed the difference. It could have been written in October 2006, so similar was the situation. We didn't go on to challenge for the title, of course, but we did have our best season, points wise, for 18 years. And won the FA Cup.
Perhaps in hindsight this was a season too soon for a title challenge. I think we're around the stage in Rafa's reign when things should be clicking strongly into gear. But there was still a lot of transitional work that took place this summer, and all of it was needed. Of course I felt we'd be doing better at this stage, but it also relied on the new signings settling very quickly, and a lack of injuries, and you can never guarantee that will happen. I don't see much rebuilding work still to be done next summer, but this round of changes needs time to gel.
We've seen flashes of quality from all of the new boys, not to mention the work ethic required, but not the consistency, nor the understanding with team-mates, which is understandable. It's just not clicking for 90 minutes. Kuyt has shown some great moments, but he's yet to find his scoring rhythm or fully come to terms with how much time he is allowed on the ball. Players have to work at creating a new sense confidence when they switch to a different environment.
There have been a greater number of niggling injuries this season, to disrupt the flow. Daniel Agger's broken hand came when he was the best defender in the league; Bellamy, whose pace would have caused United to defend very differently, had to pull out injured, just as he'd found his scoring boots; then Carragher's latest injury made it impossible for him to properly defend the cross that led to Ferdinand's killer goal.
On top of this, some key players just haven't been firing on all cylinders. It's easy to take the excellent standards of some of them for granted.
Perhaps players like Carragher and Gerrard are suffering from so much unrelenting high-pressure football in the last two years, and from maintaining incredibly high standards in that time. I don't wish to make excuses for them, but maybe there are extenuating circumstances at work.
Since the turn of 2005 they have played on the way to, and in, four cup finals (League Cup, Champions League, World Club Championship, FA Cup), and played at the World Cup finals with England, which was also psychologically tiring, given the team's struggles. (It was tiring watching, too). The 2004/05 season ended late, and the 2005/06 season began just a few weeks later for the Reds, and Japan clogged up the fixture list. This summer, thanks to events in Germany, there was little rest, too.
If either of these players gets rested, there follows criticisms of rotation. But beyond missing the odd game, they've not had a decent break in all that time; the Reds played 122 games in Rafa's first two seasons, compared with the 88 Spurs undertook, by way of an example. As the Reds' captain and vice-captain, and as locals, they perhaps feel the pressure more than most. As players who never go out to merely stroll, that too takes its toll.
Carra is playing okay, but he's so much better than okay. Last season he wasn't directly at fault for a single goal in the Premiership, a remarkable record. This year you could fault him in some way on three, maybe four. But the ones at Goodison and Old Trafford (two places where you don't want to be making mistakes) came when he wasn't 100% fit.
And Gerrard is doing well at times, but just not finding those goals that are an essential ingredient of the Reds' attacking prowess. His sharpness in front of goal isn't quite there, although he's been close on numerous occasions. You could blame shifting him between different positions, but last season his minutes were split pretty equally between the right, the centre and as a second striker. It never harmed him then.
So I'll continue to look for the positives, and make no apologies for that. Sometimes teams have bad seasons, for a number of reasons that converge and conspire to derail things, and it's happened to all the best managers. Arsenal had massive struggles in the league last year, and it was mostly away from home; Manchester United have had a few poor years by their 1990s standards. Both Wenger and Ferguson know the English game inside out. The key is to never have two bad seasons in a row.
It's not too late to turn this season around. But if Rafa can't fully revive this campaign, he's still the right man to take this club forward. After winning the league in his first season with Valencia the team slumped to 5th a year later. Was he a flash in the pan? The media thought so.
Lesser men might not have been able to reverse that trend, and would have let a rot set in. But he roused his team to win both the title and the Uefa Cup in his third season. That's an important indicator of how he works. To quote Iain Dowie, he has 'bouncebackability'.
Rafa's first season at Liverpool was a mix of the mediocre and the magnificent. His second, punctuated by two sluggish spells, was full of impressive records. Liverpool won a massive percentage of Premiership games, and the FA Cup provided a second piece of silverware. The team defended like marvels for much of the campaign. If it was capable of doing that, it can do it again.
And the same applies to the team as a whole. Form is temporary, class is permanent, and you have to trust that the class will shine through sooner or later.
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Number 19 has proved elusive, but it's been a very good decade so far; six major trophies, when other big clubs like Newcastle would kill for just one. Then there's been a return to regular Champions League football, with the Reds on the biggest stage after a dark decade in the wilderness. For three years running Rafa has overseen a successful group stage of the Champions League; it's not decided yet this year, but the Reds are in control, and that after just one home game.
But our expectations have been raised; and I'm no different. I had high hopes for this season.
I get labelled an optimist. If that's because I'm being compared with some real pessimists, then I'll accept that. I like to think I'm a realist. Then again, that's what the pessimists say of themselves. I guess we all see our own views as the true reality. Why would we think otherwise?
I personally find being pessimistic tiring. I'd rather look for the positives, but only if positives are there; I have no desire to invent them.
I do think I need those powers of optimism right now, and I'll admit I'm struggling a little. However, maybe it's my own mentality, from a lifetime in and around sport, but I don't see how focusing on the negatives helps. Of course, that's different from the club's manager ignoring the negatives; it's his job to identify problems and eradicate them (which is always easier said than done, and is why I don't like offering pithy solutions).
But I still have unswerving faith in the manager and this group of players. That's not always been the case during my lifetime, but while it's so I feel it's only a matter of time before the tide turns.
I'm generally more positive these days than when I went to 40+ games a season home and away, before I fell ill and had family commitments. I still get to games, but it's no longer possible to let going to the match dictate my life.
In my experience, going to the match can make bad results and/or performances hurt that bit more, but it can also cloud your judgement. My judgement is generally better these days. Maybe that's age and experience, but it's also not being around the negativity that can understandably swell at games when it's not champagne football. I personally think it helps me to be one step removed, as I'm not quite as obsessively invested in it; it helps me take a better overview – at least that's how I feel when comparing myself with how I was years ago. You miss things by not being at every game, of course, but you can escape the crowd mentality in your thinking.
I don't believe I've ever been a blind optimist. Was I optimistic in 1993-94? Not a chance. Was I optimistic exactly a decade later? Not at all. Indeed, was I optimistic at half-time in the Atatürk? Not in a million years (although I stayed to lift the lads in song, and prayed for a miracle, i.e. that we only lose 3-0).
It's difficult for a manager to intervene when players are lacking confidence; there's no easy fix. When the collective confidence dips, it nearly always needs something to happen on the field to boost it, while setbacks damage it yet further.
The Reds started well enough at Old Trafford, but the first goal was too big a mental blow for a team struggling to get results away from home; indeed, until this weekend's reversal, away performances hadn't been too bad on the whole. When they're confident, you know this team is easily capable of coming back from a goal down (and even two or three), but at the moment, away from home, it's killing the confidence.
Fans often mistake low confidence for not trying. But when confidence is low, you can find yourself treading water, or thinking too hard. It stops being natural. Players become more inhibited, and more static, getting caught in two minds as to where to run. There's less movement as a result, so everyone plays the ball simply, but often too safely. It's the obverse of being confident, when everyone wants a touch, movement off the ball is rife, and it all seems natural to the players. Instinct takes over.
As ever in these situations, it can sometimes take just one good result, a moment of individual inspiration, or even just one piece of good fortune, to turn things around. Arsenal were in the bottom three a few weeks back and being written off, but now they're playing some sensational stuff. Of course it doesn't look like we're about to immediately turn the corner, but we were losing badly in October 2005, too. Sometimes an upward turn in form isn't signposted; it just turns on one single moment.
How many points the Reds need to make a belated title challenge depends on what the others rack up. If it's a total like 80-85 points, as opposed to 90-95, that instantly makes it more attainable. There's now less margin for error, of course, but also far less challenging fixtures (on paper, at least) than from this point 12 months ago. The big boys all have to come to Anfield, too. And this week a year ago we were six further points behind the leaders.
I don't want to clutch at straws, merely search out reasons why the future might prove more fruitful. But it won't happen without hard work, and something to spark the confidence.
I've recently been going through the hundreds of articles I've written since the year 2000, trying to edit the list down to the best for an anthology I'm working on. In amongst the woeful predictions and the wayward pronouncements, there are examples of where my optimism has proved well-founded, and indeed, at times didn't actually prove optimistic enough.
At the start of last season I felt we'd get 80 points in the league and that our best chance in Europe was the quarter-finals. I revised that to 75 points in October, but both proved too pessimistic. In the March of the season before I said we'd win the Champions League. During the two slumps last season I never lost faith, and always felt the confidence could quickly turn, as indeed it did.
I was actually tempted to try and pass off as new an article I dug up from precisely a year ago, to see if anyone noticed the difference. It could have been written in October 2006, so similar was the situation. We didn't go on to challenge for the title, of course, but we did have our best season, points wise, for 18 years. And won the FA Cup.
Perhaps in hindsight this was a season too soon for a title challenge. I think we're around the stage in Rafa's reign when things should be clicking strongly into gear. But there was still a lot of transitional work that took place this summer, and all of it was needed. Of course I felt we'd be doing better at this stage, but it also relied on the new signings settling very quickly, and a lack of injuries, and you can never guarantee that will happen. I don't see much rebuilding work still to be done next summer, but this round of changes needs time to gel.
We've seen flashes of quality from all of the new boys, not to mention the work ethic required, but not the consistency, nor the understanding with team-mates, which is understandable. It's just not clicking for 90 minutes. Kuyt has shown some great moments, but he's yet to find his scoring rhythm or fully come to terms with how much time he is allowed on the ball. Players have to work at creating a new sense confidence when they switch to a different environment.
There have been a greater number of niggling injuries this season, to disrupt the flow. Daniel Agger's broken hand came when he was the best defender in the league; Bellamy, whose pace would have caused United to defend very differently, had to pull out injured, just as he'd found his scoring boots; then Carragher's latest injury made it impossible for him to properly defend the cross that led to Ferdinand's killer goal.
On top of this, some key players just haven't been firing on all cylinders. It's easy to take the excellent standards of some of them for granted.
Perhaps players like Carragher and Gerrard are suffering from so much unrelenting high-pressure football in the last two years, and from maintaining incredibly high standards in that time. I don't wish to make excuses for them, but maybe there are extenuating circumstances at work.
Since the turn of 2005 they have played on the way to, and in, four cup finals (League Cup, Champions League, World Club Championship, FA Cup), and played at the World Cup finals with England, which was also psychologically tiring, given the team's struggles. (It was tiring watching, too). The 2004/05 season ended late, and the 2005/06 season began just a few weeks later for the Reds, and Japan clogged up the fixture list. This summer, thanks to events in Germany, there was little rest, too.
If either of these players gets rested, there follows criticisms of rotation. But beyond missing the odd game, they've not had a decent break in all that time; the Reds played 122 games in Rafa's first two seasons, compared with the 88 Spurs undertook, by way of an example. As the Reds' captain and vice-captain, and as locals, they perhaps feel the pressure more than most. As players who never go out to merely stroll, that too takes its toll.
Carra is playing okay, but he's so much better than okay. Last season he wasn't directly at fault for a single goal in the Premiership, a remarkable record. This year you could fault him in some way on three, maybe four. But the ones at Goodison and Old Trafford (two places where you don't want to be making mistakes) came when he wasn't 100% fit.
And Gerrard is doing well at times, but just not finding those goals that are an essential ingredient of the Reds' attacking prowess. His sharpness in front of goal isn't quite there, although he's been close on numerous occasions. You could blame shifting him between different positions, but last season his minutes were split pretty equally between the right, the centre and as a second striker. It never harmed him then.
So I'll continue to look for the positives, and make no apologies for that. Sometimes teams have bad seasons, for a number of reasons that converge and conspire to derail things, and it's happened to all the best managers. Arsenal had massive struggles in the league last year, and it was mostly away from home; Manchester United have had a few poor years by their 1990s standards. Both Wenger and Ferguson know the English game inside out. The key is to never have two bad seasons in a row.
It's not too late to turn this season around. But if Rafa can't fully revive this campaign, he's still the right man to take this club forward. After winning the league in his first season with Valencia the team slumped to 5th a year later. Was he a flash in the pan? The media thought so.
Lesser men might not have been able to reverse that trend, and would have let a rot set in. But he roused his team to win both the title and the Uefa Cup in his third season. That's an important indicator of how he works. To quote Iain Dowie, he has 'bouncebackability'.
Rafa's first season at Liverpool was a mix of the mediocre and the magnificent. His second, punctuated by two sluggish spells, was full of impressive records. Liverpool won a massive percentage of Premiership games, and the FA Cup provided a second piece of silverware. The team defended like marvels for much of the campaign. If it was capable of doing that, it can do it again.
And the same applies to the team as a whole. Form is temporary, class is permanent, and you have to trust that the class will shine through sooner or later.
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