Ever Look At Us And Think ‘That’s How You Do It?’ Course You Do

Chatting with Liverpool fans suggest football fans can empathise towards a moral game.

The Blackpool Offside has taken the oppurtunity to speak with Noel-Of-Liverpool and give fans a slice of interactive soccer-pie ahead of our clash this weekend. The answers, surprisingly, allowing me a strong sense of sincere smuggish affection toward the reds of the coast.

Blackpool Fans: Not the only ones who see the future as orange

1) Your club is currently a microcosm the battle between capitalist
scummery, and wholesome fan / state ownership. And your team appears
to be getting slowly shafted by it. What is going to happen?

As much as it might go against the roots of the club, and that before the current owners showed up many would have decried it, right about now I think most Liverpool followers would happily accept any number of wealthy sheiks or corrupt Russian mobsters if it only meant an end to the us getting shafted part. When you’ve been deprived of water for long enough the animal part of the brain starts to demand salvation no matter the source and no matter if it might leave others less fortunate and gasping by the wayside. All of a sudden the slick man in the three piece pin-stripe suit who might have devil horns sprouting somewhere back there unless it’s just the light starts to look like a decent option, even if the bottle of water he’s offering was made from the crushed dreams of dying kittens.

Or, in English: October 6th is rapidly approaching, and with it the RBS’ decision on whether to re-finance the debt. If they choose not to, and if the owners cannot find another bank to foot their now toxic bill, the bank taking over and sending the club into administration seems the most likely outcome. And I don’t think you would find a single serious Liverpool follower out there wouldn’t jump at administration and a nine point deduction over the alternative. So, what’s going to happen? Well, either Hicks and Gillett manage to re-finance the debt and we’re stuck with them forever and always, or the RBS takes control of the club and all sorts of potentially bad things happen, but potentially bad things at this point seem far preferable to certain bad things.

2) Your manager, Roy Hodgeson, is one of the greatest people in
football. Are you lucky to have him?

It’s complicated, and I’d like for him to somehow find a way to come good, but at its simplest I’m really not sure we’re all that lucky to have him. I don’t think anybody really expected him to come in and take us top of the table, not with the turmoil behind the scenes, but he was always billed as a steadying hand who would help take us through the rough stretch of the ongoing ownership issues. Unfortunately the players look less energetic than they did last season, the tactics employed are causing many to lose chunks of their hair suddenly and violently, the playing style he’s attempting to instal is about as far as you can get from aesthetically pleasing, and with little control over personnel decisions in Hodgson’s hands we’ve seen a definite downgrade in the playing staff already since he’s arrived.

I certainly can’t speak for everybody, but from my point of view if the league and major cup competitions were always going to be out of reach until new ownership arrived I would have rather stuck with Rafa: at the end of the day he was one of us, and he would have fought to keep as much of the club together for the future as possible. Unfortunately that’s a moot point now, and all we can do is hope that Roy finds a way to turn things around so that his legacy at the club isn’t “He was a nice guy.”

3) At some point, you may well end up sharing a stadium with your
Toffee rivals over the park. How does that prospect make you feel?

Annoyed. Intellectually it’s a concept that might even make a bit of sense, but it goes against the history and identity of the club, and it really shouldn’t be an issue if our lying owners hadn’t been, well, liars.

4) It must be pretty poor being a Liverpool fan when you are forced to
live in the here and now. What keeps you going?

A slight masochistic streak, the ability to look for silver linings such as the culling of more casual Sky Sports and call in show type fans that will inevitably come with a drop in performance, and a fascination with tactics that is getting a fair workout from the current morbid displays. Plus a possibly foolish little corner of my mind that still has some hope that tomorrow will be the day everything clicks into place and the world is full of flowers and sunshine again (well, at least from an LFC standpoint).

5) Do you ever look at Blackpool F.C, and think, ‘that’s how you do it?’

Absolutely. I look at a side just up from the Championship, one that all the experts picked to head straight back down, and I see you come out with an attractive, attacking brand of football and to hell with the consequences. And it’s working. Meanwhile we’re consistently putting on some of the most dire and dull performances I’ve ever seen, and it’s not as though it’s doing us a lot of good. Blackpool’s playing attacking football, so far they’ve been rewarded for it (well, aside from the occasional pantsing by Chelsea), and that’s as it should be.

Category: Blackpool Team News