Going, Going, Gone
By F
Issue 65, Summer 2004
Cast your mind back to that press conference: Friday 14th May. Houllier, palpably upset, walks out. The hurt was present for all to hear in his voice. There was a man bewildered by the criticisms which had been levelled at him, yet all that was being put to him were the same issues everyone else had known about for ages: evidence of ‘progress’ visible only to those with a Hubble telescope and the mathematical ability to describe a parallel universe, and some stinking deals in the transfer market. Of that press conference, Sam Wallace in the Telegraph later wrote (in an article entitled Houllier Never Saw Past Statistics) “for the first time that afternoon, one reporter tried gently to explain to Houllier that his fondness for irrelevant statistics was not helping his cause. He barely listened”. So Houllier is a man obsessed by statistics? No. In fact, I’m now convinced that, actually, quite the opposite is true, and that is at the root of his downfall.
Rewind. We’d just beaten Boro at home. Ged said that, at 2-0, he’d told the team to sit back to protect the lead. I immediately thought of Jan Molby’s remark as a pundit - if Boro got a lucky goal, Liverpool could come unstuck; better to go for the jugular and finish ‘em off. Yet Ged said sit back. Now whatever else you can say about Houllier, he’s an intelligent man – so surely he was aware that, were Boro to score there could have been a spot of bother. What, therefore, is it that urges him to such a course, when attacking a team who were end-of-season fodder would have made more sense?
The answer lies in the different and unusual way that Houllier views the world. Whether we realise it or not, most of us largely accept that luck is woven seamlessly into the fabric of our lives. For Houllier it’s not the case. Luck, or ‘random events’ are not accommodated - either by contingency or otherwise - in his well-laid plans, rather they are the bane of them. Houllier is a footballing technophile who is incapable of escaping from the application of relentless analytical logic. He is a man who believes that it’s possible to out-think the opposition to victory (Old Trafford this season – oh yes, he had a plan to win, which worked, but he wasn’t going to tell anyone what it was). So rather than living with the inevitability of chance, Houllier seeks to alienate it. In his view of the world, on the one hand there are events that take place as a result of the cause which he has put into place to create them, and on the other, there is an impostor: luck, the purveyor of events whose occurrence is not to be tolerated. Accordingly his plans take no account of it.
So, sit back to protect the lead. We’re 2-0 up and if it turns out we don’t win it will either be because you have failed to follow my instructions - which is not my fault - or we concede an unlucky goal or two, which is also not my fault. And that, ladies and gents, is why I will become indignant at the post match interview – because I did my bit properly – but became a victim to luck. But what of good luck? Same thing. He has, on occasions, openly admitted that we may have won because of good luck. But a happier demeanour doesn’t alter the fundamentals of the proposition: it had no business affecting the outcome of the game because it was not part of his plans.
Such a mentality, it seems to me, can explain some of his more eccentric behaviour over the years:
1. Against Basle – ‘you can have the best plan in the world but if you concede a goal after five minutes it’s useless’. Anyone with a more normal view of the world accepts that, however good your team, chance events may intervene and cause you to concede at any time. So for us that means the plan is flawed because it fails to take account of that possibility. Not Houllier. Because his view of the world does not embrace the inevitability of chance events, he considers the plan to be perfect. It merely failed due to poor execution or bad refereeing, neither of which are his fault.
2. Second leg against Marseille. At half time, why on earth was Houllier in the TV room checking that Biscan shouldn’t have been sent off? Because by satisfying himself that it was as a result of an incorrect referring decision he was able to establish that he was dealing once again with an impostor – a random event. Cue the appearance of his outrage and indignation at the press conference, yet again for the ruination of another grand plan, whose superiority the world would once again be denied full view of due to the incompetence of a referee.
And there’s loads more where this came from: his reaction to David Ginola’s loss of possession playing for France against Bulgaria in 1994; continual reference to bad luck costing the team points this season (I droned on about this in the last issue); and over-dramatic reactions from the dugout to a bad decision from the ref – probably a way of telling the world, if you will, that Luck the Impostor had once more made an appearance to louse things up again.
I’ll stop there. If you’re not convinced yet, you’re not likely to be by more of the same. For me it’s as clear as day, and it provides me with an explanation for the puzzling nature of his tactics. For most of us, a team with an outstanding goalscorer and attacking midfielder, together with an increasingly creaky defence are going to be more likely to be successful attacking – it’s nothing more than playing to your strengths. But the problem with attacking play as we know it is that it requires the manager to liberate his team, and allow them to make decisions. Such a view does not compute in Houllian thinking. Liberating the players would engender a helpless feeling of lack of control within him, while the concept of ‘more likely’ just generates a Syntax error: “I don’t leave anything to chance, I plan not to concede goals”. Er, thing is though Ged, in the purely semantic sense, you can’t avoid leaving some things to chance – it’s the way the universe operates, from quantum mechanics all the way up to football matches.
So what to us appears to be incomprehensible caution, is simply planning to Houllier. It’s the application of an undoubtedly knowledgeable football brain to a problem whose solution can, in his way of thinking, be found by analysis alone. It is this approach that, even towards the end of a second consecutively poor season, lead him to feel justified to talk about progress - because he’s a man with a plan. The last two seasons have been nothing more than the unwanted and intolerable intrusion of chance events (eg injuries to key players and even players not playing to their ability) to interfere with that plan. To him, next season would have been different because, just as happened at the beginning of the last one, the possibility of random events intervening is not within his contemplation.
If any of this seems like a cheap shot I apologise; it’s purely an accident of my enthusiasm for what I regard as an epiphany about his psyche – all those years of struggling to understand what he was about. I mean no disrespect to a man who, quite literally, was prepared to give his all to the club. It should be acknowledged that his fastidiousness undoubtedly benefited Messrs Owen and Gerard, who owe him a lot for getting to the root of their predisposition to injuries. Nonetheless it remains an exceedingly cruel irony that, for one who appears to have become known to journalists for his continual reference to ‘statistics’, a fundamental flaw in his make-up as a football manager would appear to be his inability to deal with, and operate in, a statistical universe.
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