Parry's exit makes Hicks real winner

ENGLISH PREMIER LEAGUE:The power struggle at Liverpool takes a twist as Rick Parry announces his resignation, writes ANDY HUNTER

THERE IS a machiavellian side to Rafael Benitez and yet there is truth in his insistence that Rick Parry’s departure does not constitute a personal victory for the manager of Liverpool.

There is a winner from the first round of bloodletting in Anfield’s internal power struggle, however, and the man with his arm aloft is Tom Hicks.

While the chief executive’s influence over transfers at Anfield has long been a cause of frustration for Benitez, it is the club’s co-owner who has found the 54-year-old a more fundamental obstacle to his ambitions for Liverpool. The obstacle’s decision to step aside suggests Parry sees Hicks’s authority increasing – or at the very least, remaining – in the months ahead.

Parry is not only chief executive of Liverpool, he is on its board of directors. Unbeknown to Hicks and Gillett when they bought the club in February 2007, he and former chairman David Moores were able to block their plans to burden the club with the full cost of the €247 million takeover later that year. The clock has been ticking for him ever since.

Hicks is determined to meet Benitez’ contract wishes and Liverpool will attract a better asking price if a manager who guarantees Champions League riches is tied to the helm until 2013.

The Texan’s relationship with his chief executive, by contrast, is nonexistent and has been so since he called for Parry’s resignation last April and labelled his tenure “a disaster”.

In a parallel to yesterday’s announcement, it was just 48 hours after a momentous Champions league win, then over Arsenal in the quarter-finals, when Hicks sent a three-page letter to Anfield calling for the chief executive to resign. Two days after Liverpool’s defeat of Real Madrid, he finally got his wish.

Parry sat alongside Gillett for that Arsenal game and it was Hicks’s assertion that the chief executive had sided with his co-owner in the battle for power that increased his determination to drive him out. Parry’s admission early last year that the divided regime of Hicks and Gillett “is certainly not conducive to long-term planning and managing the club”, was prescient and further provocation for the Texan.

Hicks’s resignation request outlined Parry’s poor working relationship with Benitez and a failure to exploit Liverpool’s commercial potential to the full as principal reasons for why he should go. So aligned were Parry and Gillett against Hicks at that time, however, that the chief executive simply issued a swift and defiant retort, telling his employer, in the politest possible terms, where to stick his resignation request.

Unlike now, the pre-credit crunch Gillett was still plotting his own course to wrestle majority control from Hicks when the resignation issue erupted.

Without the compliance of Gillett, who holds a 50 per cent stake in Liverpool and has so far refused to sell even one per cent to Hicks for fear of the increased debt his business partner would saddle on to the club, Parry’s position was safe.

It is arguably the change in dynamics at the very top of Liverpool, more than Benitez’ insistence on obtaining more power from Parry over transfers, that has encouraged the chief executive to negotiate a way out of the club he supported as a boy.

Gillett is now under greater financial pressure to sell his stake than Hicks and he is the partner facing the greater struggle to repay the personal loans involved in their €395 million refinancing package, a deal that has to be repaid in July.

With Gillett determined to find a way out of Anfield and no longer resisting Hicks to the same degree as the July deadline approaches Parry’s support base has weakened. Then there is the increased probability that Hicks will remain at the helm for the long term and insist on Parry’s departure whether he becomes the majority shareholder or as conditions of diluting his holding.

That prospect renders Parry’s position untenable, but will also temper the relief among many Liverpool supporters that one part of the internal division at Anfield has been removed.

GuardianService