I figured I'd do a post mortem on this season a bit prematurely. I was concerned about Kenny getting the job in the first place, but I couldn't have been more wrong. Hodgson was so wrong for the club, and it was a question of culture as much as his inept floundering. When Kenny came in he seemed to signal the end of what were some pretty awful times for the club.
He also was successful enough that people thought there would not be lingering effects from those times. But there were. Kenny did a better job with a given set of players than when he got the chance to start building his own team. What's even more bizarre to me, is that unlike Hodgson, he does seem to have a positive, effective style of play that he's trying to use. I can see a project there. I can even believe in it, perhaps with my heart rather than the evidence, but there's something there. He is encouraging us to play an attractive style of attacking football. He just bought all the wrong players to do it. Because there is almost no variation to our approach, it's even weirder. The reason there is such a split on the forums about our trajectory, is because of the cognitive dissonance that you get looking at us play. It's immensely frustrating. It's like we are some primitive that bought a gun only to proceed to bludgeon people with it.
So what of the weird purchases? I thought it was a good idea from the owners to look to overhaul the system a bit especially regarding purchases, which have so undermined our ability to compete. Even setting aside the bejowled one's tendency to horde all credit for his teams success, I was alarmed that these inexperienced new owners had made a somewhat impetuous decision to take in the smooth talking Comolli, but I was looking forward to see what would happen. While they didn't know football, they certainly do know sports, and I thought perhaps we'd see, if not money ball, which is impossible at this point, then a bit of common sense.
But instead, our decisions were as bizarre as ever, if not more so. And they were bizarre in the exact opposite way you'd expect, given the history of the players, and Comolli. Unlike most incoming managers Dalglish being out of the game, and not in a previous job, would not have his favourites and hidden gems. Perhaps there was some sense in going with what we knew, but I thought what we knew included a healthy amount of skepticism about the value of British players, and also a very accurate understanding of what the potential of mainstays like Downing are. And, since it's de rigueur to make lazy associations with moneyball, I do find it wierd that if we want to buy goals on some level, we are buying and fielding so many players who don't score them across our midfield. I didn't like seeing Comolli look so comfortable with the owners, even after winning the carling cup. He should be made to sweat at the very least. What the fuck is the point of him?
Now that Kenny has had a disastrous follow up, he'll still get another season if he wants it, I'd imagine. Of course if he wasn't Kenny, he wouldn't get that opportunity, he'd be getting excoriated. But he is Kenny, and I think that should matter, to some extent, if I'm to care about this whole Liverpool thing more than I care about the fact that I like Tilley as a hat manufacturer, with their canadian persnicketyness, or that I fucking hate Toshiba for the fact that my laptop has been in service for 4 fucking weeks, and I've had to take them to small claims court to get a mother fucking replacement sent out.
Encouraging Kenny to go would be a very hard decision for the owners to make, and isn't likely at all, especially if they don't have some significant amount of funds necessary to entice a quality manager to our project while also sorting out that whole stadium thing they are oh so patiently studying. Perhaps a harder decision is for them to figure out why exactly the changes they made to fix a blatant problem they identified were so ineffective, and how they can stop throwing good money at a bad process.
So far the owners haven't really done much of anything. Their best success so far has been the take over itself. They've just been a damn sight better than total oblivion. But it won't be long before their calming sense of patience, rightly or wrongly, will look like impotence, and the brain dead reporters who saw the movie moneyball will start doing brilliant clever things like writing articles that say "moneyball?" and then, I don't know, listing how much our transfers cost next to how many goals they've scored.
I'm eager to see what the owners do. It can't be nothing this summer. Spades in the ground and a meaningful rethink on our whole spray and pray acquisitions would do nicely. Kenny will get the latitude his legacy deserves, but now that we've got a director of football, we've got the opportunity to dictate purchasing, and that has to be done effectively. Or else the reality is we're just going to drift further and further away from relevance. It's an unforgiving game, far more unforgiving than baseball.
He also was successful enough that people thought there would not be lingering effects from those times. But there were. Kenny did a better job with a given set of players than when he got the chance to start building his own team. What's even more bizarre to me, is that unlike Hodgson, he does seem to have a positive, effective style of play that he's trying to use. I can see a project there. I can even believe in it, perhaps with my heart rather than the evidence, but there's something there. He is encouraging us to play an attractive style of attacking football. He just bought all the wrong players to do it. Because there is almost no variation to our approach, it's even weirder. The reason there is such a split on the forums about our trajectory, is because of the cognitive dissonance that you get looking at us play. It's immensely frustrating. It's like we are some primitive that bought a gun only to proceed to bludgeon people with it.
So what of the weird purchases? I thought it was a good idea from the owners to look to overhaul the system a bit especially regarding purchases, which have so undermined our ability to compete. Even setting aside the bejowled one's tendency to horde all credit for his teams success, I was alarmed that these inexperienced new owners had made a somewhat impetuous decision to take in the smooth talking Comolli, but I was looking forward to see what would happen. While they didn't know football, they certainly do know sports, and I thought perhaps we'd see, if not money ball, which is impossible at this point, then a bit of common sense.
But instead, our decisions were as bizarre as ever, if not more so. And they were bizarre in the exact opposite way you'd expect, given the history of the players, and Comolli. Unlike most incoming managers Dalglish being out of the game, and not in a previous job, would not have his favourites and hidden gems. Perhaps there was some sense in going with what we knew, but I thought what we knew included a healthy amount of skepticism about the value of British players, and also a very accurate understanding of what the potential of mainstays like Downing are. And, since it's de rigueur to make lazy associations with moneyball, I do find it wierd that if we want to buy goals on some level, we are buying and fielding so many players who don't score them across our midfield. I didn't like seeing Comolli look so comfortable with the owners, even after winning the carling cup. He should be made to sweat at the very least. What the fuck is the point of him?
Now that Kenny has had a disastrous follow up, he'll still get another season if he wants it, I'd imagine. Of course if he wasn't Kenny, he wouldn't get that opportunity, he'd be getting excoriated. But he is Kenny, and I think that should matter, to some extent, if I'm to care about this whole Liverpool thing more than I care about the fact that I like Tilley as a hat manufacturer, with their canadian persnicketyness, or that I fucking hate Toshiba for the fact that my laptop has been in service for 4 fucking weeks, and I've had to take them to small claims court to get a mother fucking replacement sent out.
Encouraging Kenny to go would be a very hard decision for the owners to make, and isn't likely at all, especially if they don't have some significant amount of funds necessary to entice a quality manager to our project while also sorting out that whole stadium thing they are oh so patiently studying. Perhaps a harder decision is for them to figure out why exactly the changes they made to fix a blatant problem they identified were so ineffective, and how they can stop throwing good money at a bad process.
So far the owners haven't really done much of anything. Their best success so far has been the take over itself. They've just been a damn sight better than total oblivion. But it won't be long before their calming sense of patience, rightly or wrongly, will look like impotence, and the brain dead reporters who saw the movie moneyball will start doing brilliant clever things like writing articles that say "moneyball?" and then, I don't know, listing how much our transfers cost next to how many goals they've scored.
I'm eager to see what the owners do. It can't be nothing this summer. Spades in the ground and a meaningful rethink on our whole spray and pray acquisitions would do nicely. Kenny will get the latitude his legacy deserves, but now that we've got a director of football, we've got the opportunity to dictate purchasing, and that has to be done effectively. Or else the reality is we're just going to drift further and further away from relevance. It's an unforgiving game, far more unforgiving than baseball.
