Red Liverpudlians breathe a sigh of relief

SIDELINE CUT:After a traumatic few weeks for the club and its supporters, Liverpool begin a new era under new owners tomorrow with a visit to, who else, Everton

WOULDN’T IT be easier had Paul McCartney bought Liverpool FC? Macca is the rarest of Liverpudlians: a born Everton supporter with a self-confessed soft spot for Liverpool. It is easy to see why. The Beatles and Liverpool FC are the city’s most famed cultural icons – A Flock of Seagulls notwithstanding.

If the Beatles reflected the independence and mordant wit of the city through their music and flinty attitude, then various Liverpool football teams have seemed duty-bound to somehow play themselves into highly-theatrical situations which fuel the club’s legacy and the notion that, as an English city, Liverpool is somehow different.

And so no manager was ever quite as sharp and of-the-people as Bill Shankly, no episode of stadium violence was as shocking as Heysel (because it unfolded on live television), no stadium disaster was as vivid and terrible Hillsborough (because it unfolded on live television), no league title was thrown away – “It’s up for grabs now!” – as unforgettably as that Friday night in 1989 when Liverpool were eclipsed by a schoolboy lapse in concentration and Michael Thomas’s injury time goal for Arsenal; no European Cup was won with such an outrageous show of carpe diem as Liverpool’s raid against AC Milan in Istanbul; no club has identified with its leading player quite as jealously and fiercely as Liverpool fans have with Steven Gerrard, no section of any other football stadium in England is as aware of its identity and voice as those who make up the Kop and no courtroom tussle for the soul of a football club has been quite as riveting and confusing and inevitable as that which has taken hold this week.

And, of course, with Liverpool’s flair for the melodramatic, the team will travel across the city to play Everton tomorrow afternoon. It wouldn’t do for them to have an anonymous away trip to Birmingham. It had to stay within the city.

All of these positions are subjective, of course. Liverpool FC and those who sail in her ship could easily be accused of exaggerating the mythology of the club and the effortless monopoly that Liverpool old boys seem to exert on primetime TV show couches must seem like something of a conspiracy to fans of other clubs.

What happens to all those Manchester United greats when they finally hang up the boots? Seldom do they feel the need to “forge a career in media” – although there are those of us who hold out the faint hope that Roy Keane might pass some idle time as a pundit, as his old mentor Brian Clough once did.

Liverpool’s slow decline and fall receives inordinate coverage on the television and radio, much more so than Leeds’s rapid fall from grace ever did or Newcastle’s volatile fortunes ever have.

It helped, of course, that they achieved their reputation through an extraordinary dense period of achievement and in a period when television was playing a growing part in football culture. The odd thing is that since television came to define English football, through the influence and money of Sky television, Liverpool have been a bewildered kind of franchise, caught between nostalgia and belief in the old way of doing things and a sense of commercial obligation to modernise, to grow bigger, to grow richer, etc.

A chasm has opened between what was and what might be and over the past week or so, it has threatened to swallow the club up whole.

In the space of two months, the question of whether Liverpool could, after all those years, offer up a sustained challenge for the league has been replaced with the more basic question of whether they would default on a bank loan and whether they might be relegated. It has made for a new kind of sports/news story.

For the last three days, the running commentary on the Guardian website has been the most popular story in that newspaper. People with no interest in Liverpool are inevitably drawn to a story that might result in the demise of an institution.

Following a football club is no longer as simple as buying season tickets or proudly displaying your old Shoot sticker albums. It now requires in-depth knowledge of the murky world of international finance. The running Guardian blogs have had entirely nothing to with football and yet have been infinitely more gripping than most of Liverpool’s on-field adventures this season.

To Liverpool fans of a certain vintage, it must seem nothing short of insane that yesterday’s court ruling in Dallas could play such a significant role in the future of the club. For a few hours, it was uncertain whether Liverpool would indeed be sold to John W Henry’s New England Sports Ventures company or whether it would stay under the control of Tom Hicks and George Gillett and almost certainly squeezed dry to feed debts the Americans have accrued. Either way, any pretence that control of the club remains in the city has long passed and further court battles lie ahead. “How long does it take before you think about winning it next year?” Kenny Dalglish was asked minutes after Liverpool had been crowned league champions in 1990. This was for a television crew in the Anfield dressingroom: you could see the clothes belonging to the players hanging on pegs.

“We’ve started already, I suppose,” he deadpanned.

Twenty years on and they have not stopped. The chase for a 19th league title has become more muddled and more desperate with each passing season.

The opportunity to bring Dalglish back to Anfield for this season may have looked hopelessly sentimental even by Liverpool standards but the impact he would have had on the fans and the team – even through the tumultuous battle for boardroom control – cannot be underestimated.

Current manager Roy Hodgson was regarded as safe hands and a sound coach but his management skills are too cautious to prevent Liverpool from repeating the same old mistakes this year.

Dalglish may have been rusty but his reputation alone may have been enough to whip up a mood of defiance in the dressingroom so that regardless of what was happening elsewhere, there would be something to shout about on the field.

The decision not to back his return was, like most of those taken at Anfield in recent years, the wrong one.

The root of this problem for Liverpool lies in those early years when Sky television money changed the landscape and players and agents came to call the shots. You look at highlights of the Premier League, with empty seats in many of the provincial clubs and struggle to understand how clubs continue to pay its players such inflated wages. You wonder at the folly of floating Manchester United and leaving it to be bought and sold and stripped and sold like any other business enterprise.

If United, the jewel in the Premier League crown, can be crippled by the new ways of running football clubs, what hope for a club like Portsmouth, facing its own financial melt down this weekend?

Liverpool became caught in a frenzied race just to stay in touch with Manchester United and they have paid the price. Expectations are more modest now. Third from bottom and belonging to new masters today, the Reds face a humbling welcome at Everton.

Even Macca won’t know who to cheer for tomorrow.