TOMKINS: A CAUTIONARY TALE
Paul Tomkins 08 December 2008

In football, it doesn't matter what position in the league you are if you hit that inevitable sticky patch: as a result, confidence can wither away.
It may seem odd to have a confidence crisis when right at the top, but it's rare even for champions to not have at least one dodgy spell in a season when results don't go their way, and the football is less than inspiring. The positive from Liverpool's point of view is that games weren't lost, and another victory has subsequently been banked. I wouldn't go as far as to suggest that the Blackburn result, and the performance of the final 30 minutes, represents a corner turned, but it was encouraging to see the Reds hold on to top spot for another week in the face of pressure and criticism. Confidence really is the most important thing in football, and yet it's the least controllable. It can be affected in positive ways by a manager, but it cannot be conjured when absent or pinned down when present. If one aspect of the performance goes wrong, confidence in that part of a team's game can quickly crumble. And conversely, as we saw with the recent problem with scoring goals, once you get the first, the rest can soon follow with an ease that just wasn't possible minutes earlier. Confidence can change on a moment of genius, or, as we saw at Blackburn, a mis-hit Dirk Kuyt shot that fell to Alonso to trickle a shot over the line. The Reds had experienced another fairly difficult first half at Ewood Park, and while the second 45 wasn't vintage, it was more than good enough. The confidence had returned, and Yossi Benayoun's brilliant match-winning goal came out of a revival in the Reds' belief. The expression 'form is temporary, class is permanent' could almost relate purely to confidence; it is, after all, at the heart of a player's form. Take the example of Alonso. It looked like he might be sold in the summer, after a couple of seasons when, mostly due to injuries, he seemed to have lost his way a little. Then, over the summer, Alonso played an important role for Spain in their remarkable success. As '12th man', he came on in most games to help the eventual winners show their class. Still his future at Liverpool looked uncertain, but at his best he was always one of Rafa's key men, and I found it hard to believe he would leave. Now you could argue that it led to Alonso reaffirming his love of the club, and is playing the best football of his Liverpool career. He is imposing himself on matches once again with his exquisite vision, be it long range passes or the sort of short, simple and sensible kind that keep possession ticking over. He is also getting about the pitch, looking fit and aggressive, and has already scored two vital goals in league victories over Chelsea and Blackburn. As a manager, there's a fine line between the decisions that affect confidence and motivation. If you drop a player, does he lose confidence, compounding the issue? Or does he try harder to get back in the team? Often a manager wants a positive response of one kind or another, and that's another reason why Benitez tries to buy strong characters. It can take time to build confidence at a new club, too. If Robbie Keane is feeling down he need only look at Nicolas Anelka. The Frenchman, after successful stints at four previous Premiership clubs, had a miserable first six months at Chelsea, and missed the penalty that would have won them the Champions League. Hardly the platform to become the following season's star striker. But look at the stats. Not for the first time, I have a couple of issues with the country's highest profile pundits in their assessments of Liverpool, although to their credit, both Alan Hansen and Andy Gray do see the Reds as genuine title challengers. The problems I have are with the smaller details. First, Andy Gray was yet again criticising zonal marking. Four Liverpool players failed to notice a short corner at Ewood Park, so the set-piece defending failed. However, excluding the Carling Cup, Santa Cruz is the first opponent to score against the Reds this season from a corner or free-kick delivered into the box (Jamie Carragher scored the other). That’s 16 league games and seven in Europe. Every system has its flaws, so by all means point them out. But put them in context. Apart from last season, and the first few months of 2004/05, zonal marking has been a brilliant defensive system for Liverpool, as the hugely meaningful stats point out. Every week I see far more goals conceded through poor man-marking. Then there was the issue of the manager's cautiousness. In analysing Benitez's preferred system, Gray kept talking about two holding midfielders. My argument is that this is a case of needlessly negative semantics. For Liverpool, Javier Mascherano is always a holding midfielder. But Xabi Alonso isn't. He is a playmaker with licence to roam. One of the league's best passers, he also gets forward a lot more when paired with the little Argentine. When it's Alonso and Gerrard, then of course the Spaniard will naturally sit deeper. But as we saw at the weekend, Alonso has the freedom to get forward and have attempts at goal when Mascherano is in the side. So it's another 'negative' label on this Liverpool side that doesn't fit. Granted, Alonso won't get ahead of the ball like Frank Lampard, because that's not his game, but equally, he is far from a holding midfielder in this system. He has scored as many goals this season as Claude Makelele managed in almost 400 games for Real Madrid and Chelsea, and both were from open play. I also think it was a touch unfair of Alan Hansen to suggest, even in the guise of observation rather than criticism, that the manager is the most cautious in Liverpool's history. I've been impressed with Hansen's analysis of Liverpool this season, but the focus on caution, to my mind, is wrong. You don&'t get to the top of the table with overly cautious football. As a whole, I honestly don't see Rafa as a cautious coach; I still see him as all about the balance. In a game like Blackburn away, it's easy to think that the Reds can just go there and blitz the opposition, but the home side were always going to come out fighting. I see it as fairly sensible to tactic to start out solid, and gamble more as the game progresses, using the team's extra quality as space opens up. It can go wrong, but so too can overcommitting men early on and paying the price before you've even got a foothold in the game; there's no guarantee either approach will work. So caution could easily be another word for being sensible, only with damaging negative connotations. It's easier to be constantly positive if you are by far the best team in the land; a position Liverpool had got themselves into by the mid-70s, after a decade of improvement under Bill Shankly, and it was a supremacy that lasted another 15 years. You have that in-built confidence as winners. Yes, you become more of a scalp, but your belief as a team should be immense. You've got the medals to prove you can win league titles. What Liverpool now face is far harder. The team still has that expectation that they should be winning things, borne of decades of league titles, but without the platform of years of recent success. Paisley, Fagan, Dalglish and Souness inherited teams full of league winners; Benitez didn't. I think that consistently beautiful football becomes easier when you have that success in the bank, but for now, Liverpool just need to win the league by any means possible. I'd like no.19 to be attained with 100 points and 150 goals, but at this stage in the club's reawakening, but we cannot be too precious about it. The same applies to simply challenging for the title. We can worry about the aesthetics another time, but beggars can't be choosers, and for almost two decades we've been begging just for a shot at the title. Let's also not forget that Liverpool's attacking play has ranged from very good to superb against a number of teams this season, including Chelsea, Manchester United, Everton, Wigan, Manchester City, West Brom, Bolton and, perversely, in the defeat at Spurs. Many of those matches were without the club's best attacking player, Fernando Torres. But it's encouraging that in the number of games when the team hasn't played well, results of one kind or another have been achieved; no bad performance has resulted in a complete lack of points. And that is why the Reds are justifiably top. I honestly don't see the point of Hansen implying that Benitez isn't as positive as Graeme Souness and Roy Evans; surely positivity lies in the outcome, not the means? What's 'positive' about the sloppy defending that let down the mid-90s side, or, in Souness' case, losing far too many games? Evans won 48 per cent of his league matches (excluding his time with Houllier), and Souness won just 41 per cent. By contrast, Benitez has won 56 per cent of his league matches, while his all-competitions record stands at 57 per cent – the same as Bob Paisley's, and better than Bill Shankly's. Does that suggest caution? Liverpool played some beautiful football under Evans, and as a season ticket holder throughout his time in charge, it gave me a lot of pleasure. But what Liverpool lacked was the right balance between defence and attack. Caution in modern football is seen as almost like cheating, or not playing the game in the true spirit. Which is rubbish. Liverpool's European empire was built on hugely cautious displays away from home, with so many backpasses you'd lose count. And rightly so, as it worked. So I'm not arguing that Liverpool are currently an extremely positive attacking side to rival the Brazil of 1970, as that's not the case. What we are seeing is neither caution nor a gung-ho, devil-may-care attitude; it's a successful balance. For me, the manager is 'tactical', not 'cautious'.