Walk Off

By AM Thursday, November 4, 2010

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The speculators who took a club, on the verge of its second champions league title in three years, that was once again clad in the finery of Europe’s aristocracy, and dressed it up in paupers’ rags – Rory Smith, Irish Independent.

The change of hands at ownership level at Liverpool FC seems to have brought some success on the field, but it is early days. The opposition thus far overcome, Blackburn and Bolton, are not the most formidable adversaries a team must do battle with in the course of a season. Chelsea at the weekend will be a different proposition altogether. Still, the anomaly of Liverpool being in the relegation zone has been brought to a welcome end.

After a nine day rearguard action by the profiteers Tom Hicks and George Gillett, they finally lost their battle to sink the club while all the while disingenuously claiming to be saving it. They were the enormous iceberg that the titanic Merseyside outfit had the misfortune to run into on its journey to what it thought was terra firma and better times.

The ousted owners claimed that the sale to New England Sports Ventures was a swindle and sought to block it, on their reckless way inflicting more stress and strain on a creaking support base long disdainful of their avarice and broken promises. In the words of Hicks ‘this is a very valuable asset that was swindled away from me in an epic swindle. I'm very angry about it.’ Not half as angry as the thousands who felt swindled enough to protest that he and Gillett ever owned the club to begin with. Under their reign Liverpool FC were swindled out of every hope of success and ended up so far down the league table that the players seemed to be weighed down by cumbersome diving equipment each time they set foot on the pitch, delivering precision passing and finishing which only those with flippers could manage.

The two swaggering Americans even sought a big hat injunction in a Texan courtroom. But like everything else this duo engaged in it came to nought, just like the success they brought to the club. Big hat no cattle, as the saying has it. Their rigging, nobbling and manoeuvring was quickly recognised by the British judge handling their case who said ‘when they saw that the process was going against them they sought to renege on their agreement.’ In real terms their gripe amounted to little other than a feeling that they were out-swindled.

They then went on to try and dig their greedy claws into a sum of over a billion by way of compensation for their loss. That one action alone exposed who the real swindlers are in this drawn out and sordid soccer saga. Confirmation if it was needed of, what one sports writer has termed, ‘a new dynamic within the game: the final and total ascendancy of money.’ We may quibble over dating the dynamic but the point is clear.

Shortly after they took over in March 2007 Liverpool lost the Champions League final. From then the club flattered to deceive no one. Long time observers could see beyond the field of play, knew the writing was on the wall, and it read more like relegation than championship contenders.

When the Spirit of Shankly group said of the speculators, ‘if this is the end of them and their empty wallets and empty promises, it will have been a momentous day for this club’, it sounded like a collective Kop chant of ‘Walk Off, Walk Off.’