A day of change as Evans bows out

Liverpool yesterday entrusted their immediate future to Gerard Houllier and his French connections after abandoning their attempts to prove the worth of the twin-manager system.

Yesterday morning Liverpool announced that Houllier's partner Roy Evans was leaving Anfield after a remarkable one-club career which has spanned over 30 years.

Liverpool's chairman David Moores confirmed Evans had declined an invitation to stay on at the club in an unspecified capacity.

Evans said: "It would have been easy for me to stay around and become a ghost on the wall. To give Gerard and his team a real chance, I have to walk away."

Houllier was immediately handed sole responsibility for football matters at a club eliminated from the League Cup on Tuesday and struggling in the bottom half of the Premiership.

Evans's assistant, Doug Livermore, was the other major casualty on a day of change, which Liverpool were understandably anxious to promote as more watershed than messy upheaval.

Livermore was dismissed and will be replaced, surprisingly, by the former Liverpool and England captain Phil Thompson, whose Anfield career appeared to end in 1992 when he was sacked as reserve-team coach during the reign of Graeme Souness.

Thompson has a deserved reputation for being an outspoken disciplinarian and is likely to be asked to play bad cop to Houllier's good cop. "I think I have been brought in to add steel and discipline - to kick a few backsides," said Thompson.

Although Evans's departure was inevitably described as "amicable and friendly," it was not at all unexpected. His fate was almost certainly sealed last month when the team which he assembled at such vast expense - £40 million in less than five years - became marooned in wretched form.

In the nine weeks since Coventry were beaten in early September, Liverpool have overcome only three sides in 14 games - the Slovakian minnows Kosice (twice), Nottingham Forest and Fulham.

Despite reaching the last 16 of the UEFA Cup by defeating Valencia on away goals 10 days ago, the pressure had begun to mount on the Liverpool board to concede their experiment in shared responsibilities had failed.

The buck stopped at the desk of Moores, an admirer and confidant of Evans' for many years. Moores was initially reluctant to see his old friend go but once Evans insisted, in time-honoured manner, that his club must come first, a compromise deal which will involve substantial compensation was thrashed out.

"This is a desperately sad day for me because I have known and admired Roy for so many years," said Moores.

Evans said he realised several weeks ago that in football management two heads were definitely not better than one.

"It wasn't quite the right formula for the players," he said. "Perhaps they weren't sure who the boss was.

"The bigger mistake would have been for us to carry on as if it was working because that would have been to the detriment of the club.

"I went into the partnership with my eyes open, but I realised a few weeks ago that something wasn't quite right.

"I went to the people upstairs - people I class as friends - and simply told them I didn't think it was working."

Despite having spent his entire adult life working beneath one roof, Evans (50), insisted he still envisaged a future inside football.

"To be honest I can't envisage working for any other club but, having said that, I'm only 50 and not ready for the dustbin just yet," he explained.

Houllier, who boasts the same compassionate streak as Evans, said: "It is a strange feeling to be here on my own; this is my saddest day since I joined Liverpool. I accepted this job on the one condition that I would be working with Roy - that is how the dual managership thing started.

"But, after a few months we realised it was going to be difficult to work together. Our relationship was smashing but we realised it was proving difficult for the players."

With Liverpool not having invested a single penny in new talent since his arrival, Houllier will be handed substantial funds to create a squad in his own image. "We need some players, we know that," he said. "It won't be easy to get them because there's not a lot of quality around."