Henry Ford. You wouldn’t want him on your pub quiz team but he certainly knew how to run a business. It must go forward. It must be evolving and improving constantly.
Football clubs are the same. Everyone knows Ford’s pithy history quote, but he regularly expanded on the subject to great effect. ‘We don’t want tradition,’ he said. ‘We want to live in the present and the only history worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.’
And this brings us to Javier Mascherano. Last month, when Liverpool were playing Manchester City in what some misguidedly believed was a decider for the fourth Champions League place, Mascherano had some interesting things to say. He joined in a familiar Anfield refrain and announced City had no history.
‘Maybe if City got into the top four they would build on that as Chelsea did,’ opined Mascherano. ‘But I will tell you one thing: you can buy players, but you cannot buy history. At Liverpool, we play with the history of the club. We don’t have the money they have, but we are proud to play for Liverpool. I don’t want to play for Manchester City.'
This is an increasingly popular theme at a club where history has been redefined along exactingly narrow parameters to mean not all events that happened in the past, but success attained in a previous existence.
Chelsea do not have history either, apparently, despite beating Liverpool to a European trophy by two years in 1971. Manchester City beat them into being by five years, to the FA Cup by 61 years, to the League Cup by 11 years and to a European trophy by three years.
Liverpool certainly made up for it after that but it is a bit disingenuous to regard history merely as events that took place over two specific decades. Every club has history, even Milton Keynes Dons.
It may not be a history that is particularly memorable — or in the case of MK Dons, palatable — it may not be worth a tinker’s damn as Ford would say, but it is there none the less.
Manchester City are trying to buy success and a slice of what Mascherano calls history, but this is hardly new. Of the 26 players who represented Liverpool in four European Cup finals between 1977 and 1984, only seven were home grown. The stellar names — Kenny Dalglish, Graeme Souness, Alan Hansen, Mark Lawrenson, Ian Rush — were bought. These were different times and many arrivals were relative bargains from smaller clubs but back then that was the way even the biggest teams operated in the transfer market.
The principles were the same. Liverpool bought the best players from Scotland, the smaller First Division clubs and the lower leagues, and the best players delivered the best history. Now City are trying to do the same, but the market has changed so the process is considerably more expensive and scouts now trawl only upmarket shops.
‘We have some very good players and we will fight to the end,’ Mascherano added, prior to the Manchester City game. ‘Then we will see what happens.’
What happened was that Liverpool and City played out one of the dullest goalless draws of the season, while on the same day Tottenham Hotspur defeated Wigan Athletic 3-0 and Aston Villa beat Burnley 5-2. Tottenham have subsequently taken three points off Everton, while Manchester City have achieved their marquee result under the stewardship of Roberto Mancini by winning 4-2 at league leaders Chelsea.
Liverpool squeaked past Blackburn Rovers at home and lost to Wigan away. They are a point behind Tottenham, who have a game in hand, a point behind Manchester City, who have two games in hand, and three points ahead of Aston Villa, who have three games in hand.
Tottenham meet Manchester City for their extra game, so the best-case scenario for Liverpool is that two teams are two points clear and the worst is that one team is six points clear and two are four points clear.
And the strangest twist in the plot is that Mascherano, the history man, is now talking about his career at Liverpool in vague terms. ‘I am very happy at Liverpool,’ he says, ‘but I want to know what the club’s plans are and then we will see if, at this moment in time, I can renew my contract.
Plans, Javier? Aren’t plans the stuff of the future? What about all that lovely history?
Shouldn’t the conversation go, ‘I know we appear to be travelling backwards; that lesser teams present a serious challenge to us, I know we were removed from the Champions League at the group stage and may not even qualify for the tournament next season but, hey — 11 league titles and four European Cups between 1973 and 1990, you can’t say fairer than that. Now, where do I sign?’
History today: Ford
History is more or less bunk, said Ford and, deep down, Mascherano must agree. Barcelona’s interest in him is well known and if he leaves he will no doubt couch his departure in terms that are consistent with his desire for substance and grandeur.
We know the reality, though.
Liverpool have history, yes, but Mascherano also fears they may be history unless the financial fortunes improve, and he has no desire to spend another season skirmishing in the Europa League — or even contemplating it.
Nobody is blaming him, just spare us the lofty dismissals of Manchester City, or any club that dares to have ambition. For a player whose arrival in English football involved him being parked at West Ham United while waiting for a bigger, richer employer to come along, Mascherano appears to have ascended very quickly to the high ground.
One imagines that in his disappointing first season, had Chelsea and not Liverpool expressed an interest, he would have dismissed these tiresome parvenus and returned to the welcoming arms of the West Ham reserve team, where he had been consigned by noted football genius Alan Curbishley.
The reason Mascherano can haughtily turn down Manchester City — apart from the fact that they have not tried to buy him — is that he knows he has a more substantial suitor in Spain.
Rafael Benitez, the Liverpool manager, mocked Sam Allardyce at Blackburn, saying Barcelona were looking to copy his style, but within days the joke rebounded.
Allardyce responded smartly by producing statistics that showed Blackburn’s pass completion rate was just 0.7 per cent less than Liverpool’s, and his players had spent more time in the attacking third, despite it being an away game.
According to the Prozone figures, Blackburn also had more shots on target, more crosses and more penalty area entries. Blackburn are no Barcelona but neither are Liverpool this season and they haven’t been for some while.
Liverpool play a direct style but with better players and there is not a person in football who would consider Mascherano to be taking a step down by swapping Anfield for Nou Camp. Even Benitez chose Barcelona as his reference point when he sought to belittle Allardyce. If he thoughtLiverpool’s football was in the same class he could have said ‘we’ are looking to copy Blackburn, instead.
There was a time when Liverpool were considered the acme of the European game. This is the era to which Mascherano refers, in which the club made history.
Unfortunately, nothing, even history, stands still. Since then, there has been more history, much of it less than glorious.
And even the events of Monday, March 8, 2010 are part of the annals now. It will go down as the night on which Liverpool lost to Wigan: for the first time in their history, in fact.
Martin-Samuel
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