Paul Walsh Autobiography

[peterhague]

Really, going from one specific point to 'let's close down every interesting line of enquiry': it's hardly Pericles, is it? You really need to be more subtle than that if you're going to misrepresent someone else's argument. I think the drubbing you've had on the marriage/divorce thread must have left you a bit dazed and bitter.

Er but I'm always like that.

 

[leftpeg]

I didn't say we were amateurish. I said there were perturbing signs that we might have been.

There was absolutely no sign of amateurism at the Liverpool that Paul Walsh joined, where methods had been tried and tested through the 60s, 70s and early 80s. The success dried up when the personnel were no longer there to deploy their methods. New people tried new things that didn't work.

 

[peterhague]

There was absolutely no sign of amateurism at the Liverpool that Paul Walsh joined, where methods had been tried and tested through the 60s, 70s and early 80s. The success dried up when the personnel were no longer there to deploy their methods. New people tried new things that didn't work.

Sorry did I just imagine the quotes from the guy's book where he gives details of things redolent of amateurishness?

 

[leftpeg]

Sorry did I just imagine the quotes from the guy's book where he gives details of things redolent of amateurishness?

No you didn't. But either he was wrong or the ghostwriter used the wrong language. Seriously, Liverpool of that generation and those before, 'amateurish'? Come on.

 

[Actonian]

I think one of the problems for any successful organisation is knowing how to manage change, knowing what's important and shouldn't be changed and what does need to change. How did we go from being the first team to have shirt sponsorship to having the club shop closed the day after Istanbul? Was it closed minds or poor personnel in key positions. On the pitch from 1970 to 1990 we got very few transfers wrong, after 1990 we've got more wrong than right.

 

[Judge Jules]

I think one of the problems for any successful organisation is knowing how to manage change, knowing what's important and shouldn't be changed and what does need to change. How did we go from being the first team to have shirt sponsorship to having the club shop closed the day after Istanbul? Was it closed minds or poor personnel in key positions. On the pitch from 1970 to 1990 we got very few transfers wrong, after 1990 we've got more wrong than right.

Fundamentally the second of those options. The real root cause was Sir John Smith's replacement as chairman in the early 90s by David Moores who, sincere Red though he was and remains, was also an incompetent nincompoop who was never even close to being up to the job. His later appointment of Rick Parry as CEO deepened the problems because Parry, though he'd done well in the more bureaucratic set-up of the Premier League, never managed to bring that with him to LFC. To try and be fair to Parry, one has to admit we'll never know how much of his failure was due to his having to do Moores' job as well as his own because Moores was so utterly hopeless, but either way Parry himself didn't do well. For example, the bit about the club shop being closed the day after Istanbul (itself symptomatic of our total failure to capitalise on that miraculous night) was absolutely down to Parry as the commercial side was very much his pigeon. When this dynamic duo eventually sold the club to Hicks and Gillette the disaster was complete. Long-term systemic failure of this kind is bound to take a very long time to put right.