Liverpool's Plight, Neutral's Delight

LIVERPOOL Football Club are currently a wildebeest writhing on some desolate savanna in the clutch of a famished lion. Or a motorway wreckage, all twisted metal and flames, with a rescue crew scrabbling desperately for survivors.

For the neutral observer, it's a guilty treat.

This isn't what you think. I support Arsenal, and while I have no love for The Kop there is no malice to be found either. Only the occasional raised and slightly irritated eyebrow at an uncanny ability to win matches in the dying moments.

But Liverpool's unhappy plight is a thing of intrigue.

Despite not having won the league since 1990, a huge club will always be a huge club, and Liverpool are, well, freeking massive. Every season the expectation on the shoulders of Rafa Benitez to win silverware is enormous. He has delivered the Champions League trophy which has earned him a lengthy stay of execution, but his lifeline is running out.

The feelings of many football observers were echoed by former Anfield ace Ronny Whelan in a recent interview on Irish television:

"He wants to win the European Cup so he can get a job in Europe. For me, his days have got to be numbered at Liverpool.

"He's taken players off who are the only players who are going to give you a chance of winning the game.

"And he drags them all off because he's got a game on Wednesday.

"When I saw the team I thought he's not bothered about this game. He's putting all his eggs in one basket and I can't see why he's done it."

Benitez's Jenkyll and Hyde style of management can often be forgiven, laughed off or even saluted as quirky providing the latter stages of tournaments and the upper echelons of the top half of the table are reached.

But their last seven matches have seen league defeats dished out by Chelsea, Sunderland and Fulham, Champions League loses to Fiorentina and Lyon, an exit from the Carling Cup at the hands of Arsenal and only a victory over a United side who hardly turned up at Anfield in their favour.

So tomorrow night when Liverpool travel to Stade Georges Lyvet to take on Lyon for the second time in their Champions League qualifying group, us neutrals suddenly become savages, vultures, circling this wounded beast and hungry not for its flesh, but simply for the spectacle of it's demise.

The winds of change have blown strongly in the Premier League of late. The top four is in a state of flux, and many at the start of the season predicted, not entirely unjustly, that us Gunners would finally plunge from grace.

But where new defensive partnerships and Alex Song have given us a backbone, the loss of Alonso and injuries to Gerrard and Torres have robbed Liverpool of theirs.

If a new order is to be brought in, we won't know until Christmas at the very soonest, and not really until April. But the prospect of such a change fascinates us as fans of the sport, especially here in England where the status of the 'Big 4' is so deeply entrenched.

For me, in a more competitive season than we've experienced for a while and with Rafa's boys lying nine points adrift at the beginning of November, things are far from set in stone and Liverpool are not by any means out of the title race.

But defeat tomorrow would be catastrophic in terms of this season's Champions League bid and hugely demoralising for a club already in free fall.

There's something about watching bad things happen to other people that we find comforting, for better or worse. But a cornered animal is often at its most dangerous.


AP