Issues that plague Roy Hodgson

Roy Hodgson is yet to dazzle in his managerial role at Anfield and he has made the worst start of a Liverpool manager since 1928. Even in trying, transitional times at Anfield, he has not presented a strong case that he can steady the ship.

Firstly, Hodgson could improve his communication skills. Describing Sunday's pitiful derby display as the best of his short Liverpool tenure was an insult to supporters trying to comprehend a passionless defeat and 19th place in the Premier League.

Fernando Torres frustration betrayed him against Everton. He told Jamie Carragher to "shut up" inside three minutes at Goodison Park and looked over-anxious in front of goal, but poor individual form is not only to blame. The service to the Spain international has been abysmal all season. Even fully fit and secure in his surroundings, Torres would struggle to prosper on a diet of long, hopeful punts towards the corner flag. He has been isolated tactically and personally under Liverpool's new manager. Steven Gerrard was supposed to provide Torres's main support against Everton but, along with his team-mates, was too deep to make an impact. Being singled out as the only Liverpool player with a confidence problem by his manager is also unlikely to help Torres. "I didn't see a lack of confidence in Maxi Rodríguez, Raul Meireles or Steven Gerrard," said Hodgson on Sunday. "Fernando is going through a bad time and if you are talking about him I'd have to agree, but there are not too many lacking confidence." Joe Cole has to start playing again. Liverpool's left flank was neither solid nor creative at Goodison, and Paul Konchesky and Joe Cole cannot be blamed on Rafael Benítez. Cole has endured a difficult start to his Anfield career and, now that Gerrard has returned to the central role he and the former Chelsea man prefer, the club's statement signing this summer is struggling to impress wide on the left. A lack of pace is telling but how to maximise the talents of Cole and Gerrard in the same team is a conundrum Hodgson has yet to solve.

Hodgson has not had any luck with his defenders. Daniel Agger, with whom the manager appears to have a fractious relationship, remains plagued by a serious back injury and Konchesky and Glen Johnson have also been sidelined. The England right-back has also suffered an alarming drop in form and looks a pale imitation of the £18m signing of last season, and even José Reina's commanding aura in goal has occasionally been misplaced. Liverpool's defence badly needs an injection of pace but many of its problems are self-inflicted. Hodgson pinpointed the number of games that Liverpool have had to chase this season as a reason for poor results, yet his gameplan – sitting deep at Everton, for example – invites trouble.

Edited from an article by Andy Hunter in The Guardian, Tuesday 19 October 2010

Tom Hicks blames Rafael Benítez after bitter Liverpool battle

Tom Hicks has hit out at the former Liverpool manager Rafael Benítez as he defended himself and his fellow former co-owner, George Gillett, against claims they did not provide the necessary financial support to the Spaniard during his Anfield tenure. "We spent £300m on players, £150m net – I think it's the second or third highest in the English Premier League," he said. "You never read about that in the media. I read a very interesting article in which Alex Ferguson [the Manchester United manager] said: 'Rafa had more money to spend than the rest of us, he just bought bad players. Rafa lost the club. We didn't finish at the top – that's not the fault of the owners, we spent good money. Rafa has to take accountability for his own results. When we finished second the year before, people weren't nearly as angry. Liverpool fans are just unbelievably strong supporters and they want to win. I'm not a novice, I've been in sport for almost 15 years. Whether it's hockey or baseball in the US or soccer fans in Liverpool, people want to win."

The club's chairman, Martin Broughton, and creditors Royal Bank of Scotland, also came under attack from Hicks, as he claimed in an interview with Sky Sports News that they had breached his trust. "This has been an organised conspiracy over many months," he said. "[Independent chairman] Martin Broughton wanted a good PR event in his life and be seen as the guy that got rid of those Americans – and he sold to another group of Americans. I can't go into the details but I can confirm the funds were available to pay off Royal Bank of Scotland entirely but between Royal Bank of Scotland, the chairman and the employees that conspired against us, they would not let us. They were people I thought were our friends, people I thought were loyal, and I was wrong."

Hicks said he had identified a buyer he felt would be better to take Liverpool forward, but claimed his attempts to broker a deal had been undermined by people inside the club. "My family members and I have been working very hard to solve the issue," he added. "We know there are better owners out there for the Liverpool Football Club than the Boston Red Sox group.

"We knew who they were. We were just frustrated that every time we had conversations with them we had people in our own organisation who somehow had those things not work out. They conspired against us. The process was continually frustrated by chatter about financial distress coming out of RBS. The interested buyers that we knew would be the right type of buyers for the club – look what's happened to Manchester City now with their new ownership – that's the kind of buyer we were trying to find for Liverpool and those people were scared off by the distress chatter and the organised internet terrorism campaign that was directed against people involved. I just want the truth to come out in the courts. Our desire was to get Liverpool into the hands of an owner who would be able to build a stadium and make Liverpool the top club in the world they deserve to be."

The 64-year-old Texan admitted that the debt he and Gillett had saddled on the club was "a little too much", but he hit out at RBS for attempting to drive through a sale too quickly. Hicks said: "Liverpool is a very healthy performing club which covers its interest fine. It has a little bit too much debt, no question. But we were going to fix that and we were frustrated by others."

He conceded that his struggle to communicate with the fans since he took over in March 2007 had conspired to the bitterness surrounding his departure. "I accept that fact that something went wrong in my ability to communicate with the fans and I'm saddened by it. I wish more people had the accurate information. It [the debt] has been a millstone because of the fans' reaction to it. There's been so many inaccurate numbers about what our interest bill is – we've had plenty of operating income to cover our interest payments with a lot of room to spare. We've invested. George and I put in $270m into the club. We've spent nearly $300m gross on players. About $150m net on players and you never hear that in the media. That disappears in all the noise and anger."

From an article in The Guardian, Friday 15 October 2010

NESV completes £300m Liverpool takeover with promise to listen

At lunchtime on Sunday , in a somewhat dilapidated stadium in an unfavoured district of an old port city in the north-west of England, the teams lying 17th and 18th in the Premier League will meet for the 214th time in competitive football. Never, in a fixture dating back to 1893, have the stakes seemed higher for both Everton and Liverpool. These are desperate times and desperate teams, and this is one of the matches of the season.

Some of the edge was taken off Liverpool's desperation, however, at 4pm today, with the climax to the compelling, sometimes excruciatingly protracted saga of the club's change of ownership. When Steven Gerrard leads his team out to face Everton at Goodison Park, he will be representing an institution in new hands: those of John W Henry and his fellow investors in New England Sports Ventures.

After an often bewildering flurry of legal arguments in London, Dallas and New York, followed by the signing of a contract at the City offices of Slaughter and May, the owners of the Boston Red Sox now appear to be free to pay off around £200m of debts owing to the Royal Bank of Scotland, giving them control of a club whose honours include five European Cups and 18 English league championships.

A jubilant Martin Broughton, Liverpool's chairman, emerged with the contract signed and Henry alongside him. "Every Liverpool fan knows that the most nerve-racking way to win a football match is in a penalty shoot-out," Broughton said. "But as long as you get the right result, it's worth the wait. We've always known that we were in the right and now we've got justice."

Henry, greeted by the cheers of waiting fans, declared himself "proud and humbled" to be the club's new owner. "We have a lot of work to do and I can't tell you how happy I am that we've finally got to this point," he said. He was unwilling to commit himself on plans for investment in new players or in a new, larger stadium. "It's too early to say what we're going to do," he said, "but obviously we're here to win and we'll do whatever is necessary."

By contrast with the previous owners, his style seems to be one of understatement. There was no red scarf around his neck and no one from NESV will be present at Goodison Park on Sunday. "I think it's better for our first experience of the Liverpool supporters to be at home," he said. That opportunity will come when Blackburn Rovers visit Anfield a week on Sunday.

"A very good day for the club," Roy Hodgson, the Liverpool manager, called today's events. And how badly he needed it, barely three months into the job and with only six points from a possible 21 – one win, three draws and three defeats – in his team's first seven league matches of the season. "It's a relief," he continued. "It's been a very difficult couple of weeks. We've had to live through a bad time. A big cloud will have been lifted from the football club."

But no one would expect a Texas gambler and a New York-based hedge fund to accept losses of more than £140m and melt away without putting up a fight. Tom Hicks and the hedge-fund managers at Mill Financial, the inheritors of George Gillett's 50% of Kop Holdings Ltd, have made clear their intention to sue for around £1bn in damages, but the legal position would now appear to allow Henry and NESV – and, presumably, a reconstituted board of directors – to assume the task of guiding Liverpool to a recovery from their worst start to a season since they returned to the top flight of English football under Bill Shankly in 1962, the point at which their modern history began.

Until recently, Everton's desperation seemed the more urgent. Trapped in a shabby home, the Toffees have effectively been for sale for several years, with no sign of a buyer willing to take the club off the hands of Bill Kenwright, the most benign of chairmen. Kenwright's only fault is that the business of filling theatres with plays and musicals does not raise the kind of money that Russian oligarchs and Arab sheiks are able to pour into their English football clubs, or that American investors can still borrow, even in the present economic climate.

Over the past few weeks, however, and particularly in the past 10 days, Liverpool's problems have taken precedence. This greatest of English clubs, in terms of aggregate results, found itself accelerating towards a precipice, increasingly out of control, and unsure how, and by whom, the brakes would be safely applied before the point of no return was reached.

Until the arrival of Hicks and his erstwhile partner Gillett less than four years ago, this was a club that might not have won the league title for a decade and a half but could still consider itself stable, solvent, reasonably well run and bursting with potential. But this week it veered perilously close to becoming a laughing stock to some and a sad example to others of what can happen when business imperatives and market forces are permitted to control the affairs of sport.

A resolution of the dispute over the ownership will remove an important excuse for poor performances. Apologists for the recent run of bad results can no longer claim that the players are depressed by the uncertainty hovering over the club, unable to deliver their best football and thus unusually prone to unexpected reverses like the shattering home defeat by humble Blackpool only two weeks ago.

"This comes on the back of a very bad result against Blackpool, something that would have set us back under all circumstances," Hodgson continued. "But if it's true that they [NESV] are taking over, it's very positive news. All clubs, all managers and players need stability. We've been a big, big story for the last few weeks but I'm hoping that the new owners will bring stability, give us a chance to concentrate on the football, and wipe out the debts, which will put us into a very different position."

The money that would have been spent on servicing the bank loans, he said, may now be freed to spend on players. "If that money was made available, we'd be quite wealthy. We've started the season badly, but luckily quite a few other teams have also started badly, so we're not entirely divorced at the bottom of the table."

Sunday's game, he added, is of crucial importance to both clubs. "I'm a great admirer of Everton. I think David Moyes has done a magnificent job there. We've only played seven games. It's 38 matches that count, and I'd be very surprised if Liverpool and Everton were fighting at the bottom at the end of the season. A local derby against our fiercest rivals is the best way to bounce back, if we're capable of doing so."

He will be hoping for an instant response from players such as Gerrard, Fernando Torres and Pepe Reina, the ones seemingly most affected by the recent turbulence, and whose continued presence on the playing staff would be most imperilled were the slump to continue. "As a manager at the moment I'm having some bad games and I'm trying to put that right," Hodgson said. "But I need the players to help me."

Torres will be the object of particularly close scrutiny in the coming weeks. In patchy form for Liverpool last season thanks to a series of injuries, he was almost unrecognisably subdued in Spain's colours at the World Cup finals and has only one goal to show for his appearances in all seven of this season's league fixtures. A revival of his characteristic effervescence on Sunday would be the clearest sign that the rebuilding of Liverpool will not be confined to the boardroom.

From an article by Richard Williams The Guardian, Friday 15 October 2010

9 Point Deduction Looms

The Premier League has given the go-ahead for New England Sports Ventures to complete a takeover of Liverpool. The move means only the high court action by the current owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett stands in the way of the £300m deal by the American company, owners of the Boston Red Sox, going through.

If the takeover is not completed by next Friday then the Royal Bank of Scotland could put Kop Holdings, the company owned by Hicks and Gillett, into administration over its unpaid £280m debt. If that happens, Liverpool would be at risk of a nine-point deduction.

Initially it had been thought the Premier League would not penalise the club for Kop Holdings becoming insolvent, but now the threat of a points deduction has become a serious one.

Under Premier League rules, the fact that the holding company is solely concerned with the ownership of Liverpool and football-related matters could trigger the nine-point penalty.

West Ham had been used as an example of why the Anfield club might escape a deduction if administration goes ahead when it was owned by the Icelandic bank Straumur. The London club, however, was a solvent part of a whole portfolio of different companies while Kop Holdings is solely concerned with Liverpool.

Boardroom Row Goes Public

The simmering war in the Liverpool boardroom between the American owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett, and the three other directors, broke dramatically into the open last night after Hicks and Gillett turned down two bids, described as "credible", to buy the club and attempted to remove two directors from the board.

One of the bids is understood to have come from John W Henry, the multi-millionaire owner of the Boston Red Sox Major League Baseball team, and the other from business interests in Asia.

An official statement from Liverpool, surely unprecedented in the history of a club which has always prided itself on keeping internal disagreements private, said the board was preparing to approve the sale yesterday. However, Hicks and Gillett sought to block that decision by ousting the managing director, Christian Purslow, and commercial director, Ian Ayre, and appointing instead Hicks's son and a close ally.

The three directors opposed to the owners – Purslow, Ayre and the chairman, Martin Broughton – who can outvote Hicks and Gillett, clearly approved the release of the statement. It suggested they believed both bids were solid enough to approve because they would "repay all [Liverpool's] long-term debt" and they were preparing to do so.

However, Hicks and Gillett, the statement said, not only opposed the offers, apparently because they would not provide them with a satisfactory enough profit for their shares, but tried to replace Purslow and Ayre with Hicks's son, Mack, and Lori Kay McCutcheon, the financial controller at the Texan's company Hicks Holdings. That would have given the Americans a majority on the board.

The other three clearly resisted and Purslow and Ayre remained on the board last night, finally at odds publicly with Hicks and Gillett. The statement said of the balance of power in the boardroom: "The matter is now subject to legal review."

The statement left no doubt that Broughton, Purslow and Ayre, the majority, were in favour of accepting one of the offers and selling the club. "The board of directors have received two excellent financial offers to buy the club," it said. "A board meeting was called today to review these bids and approve a sale."

The clear implication was that, while both offers committed to clearing the £237m Liverpool owe Royal Bank of Scotland and Wachovia, which is due for repayment in nine days' time, they were not preparing to give Hicks and Gillett much for their shares. One source said the bids would repay Hicks and Gillett the money they have loaned into Liverpool, which stood at £144m at 31 July last year, but not pay them a personal profit for transferring ownership.

Gillett and Hicks have been holding out for a significant payment, even though Liverpool are sinking into crisis while they do not appear to be in a position to repay to the banks. One informed source described Henry as "extremely interested" in buying Liverpool, saying he has the means and expertise required, evidenced by Boston's two championships under his ownership and the iconic Fenway Park stadium.

Liverpool supporters will, however, be naturally suspicious of any US bid after the bitter experience with Hicks's and Gillett's "leveraged buy-out".

A source close to the discussions said Broughton, Purslow and Ayre would not approve any bid which brought more debt to the club. In a clear act of defiance by those three non-owner directors, the board statement concluded: "Martin Broughton, Christian Purslow and Ian Ayre continue to explore every possible route to achieving a sale of the Club at the earliest opportunity."

Hicks and Gillett responded with a statement late last night confirming their "commitment to finding a buyer" but saying they will not accept bids which in their view "dramatically undervalue" the club which they said had nearly doubled its revenues since they took over.

 From an article by David Conn published in The Guardian 6 October 2010

Going From Bad To Worse

When Liverpool's fans called for Kenny Dalglish on Saturday, they were really calling for a restoration of lost values. The Kop's mournful chant during Liverpool's 2-1 defeat by Blackpool on Saturday of "Dalglish, Dalglish, Dalglish" was more than just a call for the Anfield icon to replace Roy Hodgson, last season's manager of the year, now so beleaguered just seven league games into the red maelstrom.

Yesterday's official club statement, in effect a public declaration of war on Hicks and Gillett by the majority non-owning directors, Martin Broughton, Christian Purslow and Ian Ayre, signalled the total exasperation of those three with the continued ownership by the Americans. It was in itself a previously unthinkable act, at the club where an integral part of the self-proclaimed "Liverpool Way" was to keep everything private, within the Anfield corridors.

Now the faithful, the fans who named their campaign group Spirit of Shankly knowing everybody will understand what that means, can add a final unravelling to the litany of what has been done to the club Shankly built. Hicks and Gillett famously promised they would not "do a Glazer", then did exactly what that Florida-based family engineered at Manchester United – borrowed the money to buy the club, then loaded the club with the responsibility of paying their debts.

The pair pledged they would have the stadium built, unveiled shiny plans but barely a sod has been disturbed. They did back Rafael Benítez with transfer funds of borrowed money and sank £144m in themselves – in loans – but the financial pressures of such indebtedness have caught up with them. This season supporters are finally witnessing a club unravelling, Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres bearing the haunted expressions of superstars lost already in a relegation zone. Even to say that Liverpool lost at home to Blackpool seems like a result from another age, around 1953 perhaps, when Liverpool last made a start worse than this one. But the tangerine team won on merit after 7,000 supporters marched outside Anfield against Hicks and Gillett.

As for what happens next in this endgame being played by Broughton, Purslow and Ayre against the bank deadline of 15 October, it is still in flux. Hicks and Gillett sought to remove Purslow and Ayre yesterday to prevent the three, as a majority, approving a sale of the club to John W Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox, or another, unnamed, Asian buyer. Neither, apparently, would have delivered a personal payday to the Americans. The statement said: "This matter is now subject to legal review." But the fact that the board meeting did not proceed and a sale was not approved strongly suggests that the non-owning three cannot force Hicks and Gillett to sell.

Hicks has tried to refinance, borrowing the money he and Gillett owe Royal Bank of Scotland from another finance house, which the other three directors opposed and which did not come off.

The power, everybody knows, rests with RBS, the collapsed bank now 84% owned by the British taxpayer who bailed it out. Yet the last thing the bank wants is to be in charge of a football club as high-profile, crisis-hit and emotionally volatile as Liverpool. All along, tThe possibility most pondered has been for RBS to reclaim the club on 15 October, if Hicks and Gillett do not pay up, with a buyer lined up for the bank immediately to sell to.

There are many twists lying in wait before so clinical a solution can be orchestrated, especially with the club's three directors having decided to make no secret of their opposition to Hicks and Gillett.

It is all a world away from the days when Dalglish was dinking the ball over the FC Bruges goalkeeper to win the 1978 European Cup or winning the double in 1986, his first season as manager. Hence, in contemplation of today's dreadful mess, the fans' plaintive cry for yesterday's hero.

Edited from an article by David Conn in The Guardian 6 October 2010