Back to Anfield South

Back to Anfield South

Back to Anfield South

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By Amy Eustace

There came a point at the beginning of last year when you simply knew it was coming.  Perhaps it was the infamous Roy Hodgson face rub – a sure sign that man had reached his last bastion of pure desperation – the previous December, or the penalty that Steven Gerrard sent soaring uncharacteristically over the bar against Blackburn the same month. We all sensed Roy Hodgson was a dead man walking, and the Kop didn’t need to chant “Hodgson out!” to stress the point.

More cruelly, they sang the name of another; a player whose sublime touch and silky footwork had led the Kop in song throughout the 1980s and a manager whose reign at the club had been the very antithesis of Liverpool’s past decade or two. Bountiful where the nineties and noughties had been barren, magical where the club had since been miserable - fans who had long forgotten how dominance felt craved a return to his tenure. Kenny Dalglish’s was a name synonymous with success in Liverpool. Roy Hodgson’s had become a buzz word for failure.

It’s a memory that seems to have been stowed away in some lost forgotten, filing cabinet in many supporters’ minds. You could put it down to the sheer pain of it all - the repressed notion of Roy Hodgson having ever took charge of Liverpool at all - if it wasn’t for the fact that the world at large seem to have forgotten too. The Merseyside club were in disarray - a whimpering, pathetic heap of a football club that had fallen so fast and hard from the pinnacle of club football to the scrap yard – by the time Dalglish abandoned his cruise ship holiday to rescue the sinking ship he had once skippered.

Dalglish found them in twelfth, hovering just four points above the relegation places. By the close of the season he had restored them to sixth. In fact, if the Premier League began on his arrival in January, Liverpool would have finished third, a mere three points off first. Granted, the Premier League doesn’t begin in January, but their revival was so quick and so extreme that few people recall exactly how dire Liverpool’s situation was before the King regained his throne.

The selective amnesia is so widespread that earlier in the season, with Liverpool having lost tempo and found themselves wanting in front of goal, a handful of statistics which compared Hodgson and Dalglish (and looked more favourable on the former than you would think) came into circulation. James Lawton put it best (and by best, I mean worst):

In all competitions, Hodgson won 13, drew 9, lost 9 with a winning percentage of 0.42. Dalglish emerges only a little to the good with figures of managed 37, won 19, drew 9, lost 9 and a percentage at 0.51.

Even statistics can be misleading, at least when proper context isn’t provided, so when you consider that Hodgson’s results are bloated by a remarkably forgettable run of games against poor sides in the Europa League qualifying rounds, his record doesn’t look quite as rosy. When Rob Gutmann did the sums on their first few games and removed the Europa League from the equation, Hodgson emerged with an unsatisfying win percentage of 33%, while Kenny came out with a more than respectable 55%. Dalglish had turned Liverpool’s declining fortunes on their head, made a victory out of the loss of their best striker since Rush, and put them back in contention for the European places in a matter of months.

All good things come to an end, mind, and the honeymoon period with the King didn’t last forever. His transfer market acumen during the summer left something to be desired, with millions shelled out on Premier League flavour-of-the-months and not a lot of success to show for it. Liverpool’s defence is as miserly as title chasers Manchester United’s, second only to their Manchester rivals, but their scoring record is as low as Wolves’, who are loitering in lowly 19th. They’ve lost Luis Suarez for nine games due to suspension, and Dalglish has hardly covered himself in glory with his response. All that said, Liverpool are in a far better place than they were twelve months back, which is the crux of the matter. League form and public relations may not be ideal, but they’ve managed to improve on one thing without question, and that is the probability of a trip to Wembley somewhere down the line.

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I say probability, but Liverpool’s tickets to London are already booked. With a League Cup run in which they had to see off both Premier League pole position team Manchester City and fourth placed Chelsea, nobody could argue that they had an easy time of it, but Kenny Dalglish has already seen to it that he’ll make a return to the ground which he and his teammates called a second home before he hung up his boots for good.

“Anfield South” was the term Dalglish christened Wembley in his latest autobiography. It was fitting that his old dressing room buddies – Alan Hansen, Phil Thompson, Ian Rush and Jan Molby – were present on Wednesday night when Liverpool’s passage to the league cup final was secured. In their glorious heyday, they had made it so that Liverpool’s trips to Wembley were like a yearly, team-building tradition. A bit like white-water rafting. Except on the Thames.

Their European Cup win under Wembley’s towers in 1978 (in which Dalglish scored the winner, goal pictured above) sparked the love affair, and in the early 1980s, Liverpool won four consecutive League Cups (though in 1981, the tie with West Ham went to a replay which Liverpool won at Villa Park, and in 1984 did the same at Maine Road). They were runners up in 1987. They were only slightly less prolific in the FA Cup, winning in 1986 and 1989 and coming second in 1988. They won the Charity Shield at Wembley in 1980, 1982, 1986, 1988 and 1989 and were runners up in 1983 and 1984. In fact, the only year in which Liverpool didn’t appear at Wembley during the 1980s was 1985, the year of the Heysel Stadium disaster.

Last year, Liverpool’s League Cup run ended with a disastrous and demoralising defeat to Northampton Town, while the FA Cup was out of the question after Dalglish’s first game – a 1-0 away loss to Manchester United. But on Saturday, the King managed to avoid a repeat of that by beating Sir Alex Ferguson’s side at Anfield, setting up a fifth round home clash with Brighton (who earned themselves a plucky victory over Newcastle to secure progression). In doing so, he set Liverpool supporters minds wandering to the thought of two Wembley appearances in 2012.

Ultimately, success in either of the domestic cups means that European football is a sure bet too, although few Liverpool fans would welcome the sight of the Europa League once more when Champions League football proves, yet again, elusive. But it’s one way – one hugely fulfilling way – that Dalglish can compensate for a league campaign that has been bereft of the miracles many sections of the supporters have come to expect from a man who was at the heart of so much of Liverpool’s eighties glory.

They have never won both domestic cups in Kenny Dalglish’s time as manager or player. That honour belongs only to Gérard Houllier, whose 2001 treble brought them to the Welsh capital instead. Some of Liverpool’s current squad have experienced club football at the new Wembley: Glen Johnson won the FA Cup final with Portsmouth in 2008; Stewart Downing’s Villa were beaten there by Manchester United in the League Cup final in 2010; and Charlie Adam scored there in the same year to see Blackpool through to the Premier League. But for Kenny Dalglish – and veterans like Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher – it’s high time that the new Liverpool re-established the new Wembley’s status as their London holiday home.