THE most expensive player in the history of English football cannot hit a cow’s backside with a banjo.
The second most expensive player in the history of English football is a little boy lost.
The reigning Footballer of the Year, with a freshly-signed contract, is gone at all levels, with a creaking body and a scrambled mind.
The ‘greatest defender on Earth’ and captain of the champions, with his own freshly-signed contract, is gone at all levels, with a creaking body and a scrambled mind.
The Manager of the Year appears to have no answers, giving the impression that it’s mostly all down to bad luck.
The largest summer transfer spree football has ever seen, carried out by a widely-lauded recruitment team, now resembles a custard-gun attack at a clown show.
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The champions of England are in the bottom half of the Premier League.
This week, they had two home bankers against Nottingham Forest and PSV Eindhoven and lost them by an aggregate of 7-1.
And isn’t it bloody brilliant? Not because we are talking about Liverpool — although, admittedly, that is funny — but because it shows us what an extraordinary competition the Premier League is.
It is flashy and arrogant. It has more money than sense. It provokes untold anger and is riddled with imperfections.
But where else in the world could we witness this kind of wondrous shambles?
Because Liverpool’s is the most extra- ordinary meltdown English football has seen since . . . last season.
Liverpool have lost nine of their last 12 matches in all competitions. And at a similar stage of last term, champions Manchester City also lost nine matches out of 12.
As evidence of the competition’s supreme strength in depth, those stats take some beating.
Alexander Isak, whose £130million transfer fee broke the record set by Florian Wirtz a few weeks earlier, is yet to score a Premier League goal for Liverpool.
The Isak saga, which dominated the second half of the summer transfer window, looks even more grubby and lamentable in hindsight than it did at the time.
Isak refused to play for the club with the wealthiest owners in world football so that he could move to a club wealthy enough to pay him even more.
It was truly remarkable that Newcastle’s Geordie Arabia project should have been the ‘victims’ of that tawdry saga, with the high-minded ‘spirit of Shankly’ boys from Merseyside as the filthy-rich predators.
But, even at that time, it was questionable whether Liverpool actually needed Isak, having already signed Hugo Ekitike in a deal worth £79m.
Now, with Isak struggling for fitness, sharpness or any vague resemblance of being an elite footballer, it looks like a monumental folly.
There are usually elements of patience and sympathy with a player who is struggling to adapt to a new club, but Isak sacrificed all that with his behaviour during that miserable exit from Tyneside.
Wirtz, a 22-year-old in a new league, deserves a fairer hearing. And while no player chooses his own transfer fee — yadda, yadda, yadda — a deal fee of £116m cannot be ignored for a player whose impact has been virtually non-existent.
Like his fellow recruit from Bayer Leverkusen, Jeremie Frimpong, Wirtz does not fit into Liverpool’s existing, title-winning template.
They are a No 10 and a wing-back and Arne Slot, just like Jurgen Klopp before him, tended to play with neither.
Milos Kerkez was widely regarded as the best left-back in the Premier League at Bournemouth last season and was rewarded with a place in the PFA Team of the Season. Yet the Hungarian has been hopeless at Liverpool.
Slot won the title with Klopp’s team. Now that he has had to coach and integrate new players — very good and very expensive new players — the Dutchman is looking way out of his depth.
History suggests it is not ridiculous to think that Slot’s job is under threat so soon after winning the title. Jose Mourinho at Chelsea and Claudio Ranieri at Leicester were both axed during disastrous title defences.
And it’s not just the new players, of course. The Mo Salah and Virgil van Dijk contract sagas were a lengthy, tiresome sub-plot to last season’s empathic title win. Yet agreeing those new deals now looks even less advisable than recruiting a raft of under-performing new boys.
Footballer of the Year Salah, at 33, and his 34-year-old captain Van Dijk have disappeared over the hill and dived off a cliff.
No Liverpool supporter ever really wants to hear the name Sir Alex Ferguson. So, while we’re at it, let’s mention the name Sir Alex Ferguson.
The former godfather of Manchester United could be utterly ruthless in moving on even his best players. He would have allowed Salah to leave this summer. Possibly Van Dijk, too.
The centre-back’s display against PSV was an absolute disasterclass and there had been plenty of signs this season that such a performance had been coming.
And all of this adds up to the spectacle of Liverpool floundering desperately, just as City did in the middle of last season.
City’s meltdown sparked a major squad overhaul. Liverpool’s meltdown has occurred after a major squad overhaul.
Which makes it far more difficult to rectify.
It will be tremendous fun to watch the champions trying to dig their way out.
An omnishambles of this magnitude could only happen in our mad, bad and bloody marvellous league.
And for that we should be truly grateful.
YANKEES’ COCK-UP
THERE have been many examples of remote owners of English clubs showing a spectacular lack of understanding of this nation’s football culture.
Yet the idea that Sheffield United’s American supremos should contact Sheffield Wednesday’s administrators, apparently with the motivation of merging the two rival clubs, absolutely takes the chocolate Hobnob.
When schemes such as a merger of the Sheffield sides — or the breakaway European Super League — take place, they are rightly met with visceral opposition.
And we are gladly reminded that English football’s wealth and power has been built on a vibrant, tribal, passionate and irreverent working-class culture.
As Sheffield’s own Jarvis Cocker wrote of the English working class in Pulp’s Common People: “Like a dog lying in a corner, they will bite you but never warn you. Look out, they’ll tear your insides out.”
A CHANT TOO FAR
AFTER Chelsea defeated Barcelona 3-0 on Tuesday night, I popped into a pub near Stamford Bridge.
There I saw a group of young Blues fans filming themselves singing, ‘Stop the boats, stop the boats, Nigel Farage’.
Which seemed a strange way to celebrate a brilliant result achieved by their club’s group of brilliant young immigrants.
Yet it did create a perfect circle involving Roman Abramovich, the man who would have got them all interested in Chelsea in the first place, and Abramovich’s mate Vladimir Putin and Putin’s useful British idiot, Nigel of Toad Hall.
THE SUN SETS ON WONDERFUL ‘GAME’
THIS is my final column for The Sun after a combined 20 years over two spells with this great newspaper.
Writing for you — some of this nation’s most passionate fans of football and other sports — has been a great honour.
Whether you have agreed or disagreed, I hope you have enjoyed reading. Above all, I hope you found that I’ve tried not to treat writing about sport too seriously, too often.
Sport should be a wonderful escape from serious grown-up life. It is the most important unimportant thing.
And sportswriting is a game about games. It has been a pleasure to play it for so long.
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