By LFC Vancouver member Keith Perkins, 08 April 07.

Last season, we had a series of mixed fortunes with two of our three hopes for a trophy shattered over a few weeks in strangely similar circumstances. First, we lost 1-0 away to Manchester United in January with a late goal from a set piece, headed in from the middle of the box. That was effectively the end of any title hopes, or even the chance to claim second place. If Cissé, among others, had not been guilty of missing some glorious chances, then the outcome might have been so different. In February, Benfica knocked us back in the Champions League second round first leg, also with a late headed goal resulting from a set piece. If only we could have held on for a few more minutes, we would have had a better chance to recover for the second leg at home. Sometimes an entire season can turn on one or two small incidents. Then we look at the FA Cup run from last season. What happened there was reminiscent of the previous season’s Champions League story. How can you explain the Luton match where we went ahead 1-0, went behind 3-1, and then came back to win 5-3? There must have been some strange magic at work there.

Looking at this season now, it appears as if we’ve been through it all before in the previous two seasons under Rafa. We started off slowly, with poor away form, went out of the FA Cup at the first hurdle, pushed our way through the early rounds of the League Cup using mostly reserves and youngsters, and performed above anyone’s expectations in the Champions League. Is this déjà vu? It was around this time last season when we were being heavily criticised for our poor performances and our lack of goals, especially from our strikers. To silence those critics we then went on to win 5-1 against Fulham, 7-0 against Birmingham 3-1 against Newcastle United, and 3-1 against Everton. Is that enough goals for you? We went on to win our remaining eleven games before closing the season with an FA Cup Final victory.

Just a few weeks back in this season, we found ourselves in similar circumstances - at least according to the critics. We’re not scoring enough goals, our strikers are ineffective, and we are not good enough away from home, and so on and so on. The best way to answer that was to do our talking on the pitch, with wins of 2-1 away to Barcelona, 4-0 against Sheffield United, as well as 4-1 against Arsenal a week last Saturday, 3-0 away to PSV in last week’s Champions League quarter-final first leg, and now followed up with a 2-1 win away from home at Reading. Suddenly, from being written off for the season, we are now in a good position to consolidate our position in the League and to go all the way to glory in Europe, just as we did from this point on in 2005.

Our biggest disappointments recently came with a pair of consecutive 1-0 losses at home, first to Manchester United in the Premier League, and a few days later to Barcelona in the Champions League. That’s eerily similar to last season’s disappointments against Manchester United in the Premier League and Benfica in the Champions League. As it happens, the loss to Barca was not a problem as we had already done enough to go through. The loss to Manchester United was much worse, as it was three points that we should have had, but instead going to our rivals and effectively handing them the title (that may not turn out to be so, but it felt like it at the time). In both matches, we dominated play and should have had the contest won from early on. Bellamy’s goal against Manchester United being disallowed for offside was just one incident that comes to mind, and how many times did we hit the woodwork against Barcelona in the first half? Any one of those moments could have been enough to give us a win instead of a loss. Sometimes an entire season can turn on one or two small incidents.

We’ve done exceptionally well in the Champions League this season, well above most expert predictions. We should easily handle PSV at Anfield this week, and we’ll soon see who we’ll be facing in the semi-finals (as I write this, I’d say Valencia – or is that just wishful thinking?). It won’t be easy for us to go all the way to victory in Athens, but it’s also definitely not beyond us either.

As for the Premier League, well that’s another story. I don’t know about anyone else, but all I’m hoping for now is a top four finish and let us concentrate on more important matters. We have six more League games to go, with all of them against clubs outside of the top third of the table. One of the more difficult of those could be our last match, at home to Charlton, if we are pushing to hold third place and they are fighting to avoid relegation. That’s eerily similar to last season’s final match when we were playing Portsmouth in what could have been the same scenario. Other than that, it should be an opportunity to rest a few tired legs and give some playing time to some of the squad players. That in itself could be an advantage both for the Champions League run this season, and as preparation for next season in the Premier League.

Every season has its ups and downs, and this one has certainly been no exception. There’s nothing that we can do to change what’s already happened; but, what we can do is to look back to the past and see how it may help us in looking forward to the future. Liverpool FC have never given in to temptation to try to go for instant glory. Rather, we look at becoming successful and maintaining that success over a period of many years. We’ve seen through these past three seasons that we have a manager in Rafa Benitez who is an undisputed master tactician. He has out-coached some of the world’s best clubs and their managers - first with Valencia and now with us. He has slowly but surely built a squad of players that have started to show what they are capable of when they play to his system. That system is not so easy to follow but it’s devastatingly effective when it works, as we’ve seen recently. The number of players remaining from the Houllier era is gradually going down as new players that more closely match Rafa’s system have been brought in. It’s taken a while for some of them to develop and adapt to both Rafa’s system and the Premier League, but recent games have seen some real improvements from a few of those players; let’s hope that the improvement continues. Rafa has also brought in an abundance of young talented players who are learning his methods in the youth team and in the reserves. We should start to see some of those players coming through the ranks, possibly sooner rather than later.

This summer could well be the make-or-break for the immediate future of the club. The new owners are saying all the right things concerning how they see the club developing over the long term, especially with respect to supporting Rafa’s plans. Tom Hicks is the most vocal over the need to spend wisely, but they have also said that the money will be available for the “right” player(s) if Rafa believes that we will be a better side as a result. Construction of the new (much larger) stadium should be well under way soon, and we can be sure that Messrs. Hicks and Gillett will be looking for new revenue generating opportunities from all over the world in order to build the finances that allow us to compete for the best players. Everything appears to be falling into place, but we should never forget that sometimes an entire season can turn on just a few small incidents. Now, if we can just have a few more of those fluke moments go in our favour then we’ll be all set.

We have a proud history, with a long list of honours gained over the years. For as long as I can remember we have always been able to celebrate our past success while we looked forward to an even brighter future. I for one certainly won’t mind if it really is déjà vu all over again.

What do you think? Give Keith your comments at keith [at] lfcvancouver.com.

By LFC Vancouver member Keith Perkins, 08 April 07.

If my primary school headmaster had seen Chris Lawler’s performances for Liverpool in the sixties and early seventies, he would have died of apoplexy at the sight of a defender running forward during a match and having the audacity to score goals. I can just see my old headmaster now, with his insistence that the only proper formation was 2-3-5, and that the two full-backs should never cross the half-way line. What he would never have understood was that Chris Lawler – as one of four defenders – was a pioneer of the overlapping system of play, that allowed full-backs to push forward ahead of midfield players, effectively defending by attacking. It was a remarkably successful tactic for both Lawler and for Liverpool, as he racked up an amazing goal-scoring record of 61 goals in 546 games. That’s a respectable scoring rate of one goal for every eight or nine games, which is still a record for any Liverpool defender, and is especially remarkable when we realise that none of those goals came from penalties. In the 1969-70 season, he was the club’s second highest scorer with ten, and in all European competitions during his Liverpool career he scored eleven times.

Chris was a local lad who came through the ranks of Liverpool’s youth teams. He signed professional forms on his 17th birthday (October 20th) in 1960, but had to wait until March of 1963 before he made his debut against West Bromwich Albion at Anfield. In that entire season, he made only six appearances, initially pairing up in the middle with Captain Ron Yeats. He then made another six appearances the following season, including a three game spell late in the season in place of Yeats, during Liverpool’s run-in to the 1964 championship.

At the start of the 1964-65 season, Ronnie Moran retired and Gerry Byrne switched from right-back to left-back, leaving the right-back’s position vacant; until Lawler took the spot for himself. By the end of that season, he had played in 32 consecutive First Division games, and then played in the FA Cup Final win against Leeds United. At the end of the following season, he had gained a League Champions medal, and a runners-up medal in the Cup Winners Cup which was Liverpool’s first ever European final.

His style of play was plain and simple. There were no tricks or flamboyant moves that would attract attention, just a calm methodical approach to the game that made it look so simple. He was once described as “sauntering through games with all the apparent urgency of a man out walking his dog.” But, if anyone thought that he was not completely focussed on the job at hand, they soon found out just how dangerous he could be. He had an uncanny knack of calmly taking the ball from a defensive position, playing it forward to start an attack, and then somehow disappearing from view only to reappear in the oppositions’ penalty area and then knocking the ball into the net. That ability of making blind-side runs forward earned him one of his nicknames as “The Ghost.” If his style of play on the pitch was quiet and unassuming, it was a fair reflection of his quiet and modest personality off the pitch, which led to him also becoming known by the nickname “The Silent Knight”.

Many of the goals that Chris Lawler scored were memorable for their importance as they were often the key to Liverpool’s success. The first European Cup Winners Cup match against Juventus was a 1-0 loss in Turin, but was overturned by goals from Lawler and Strong in the second leg at Anfield. That was followed by a pair of goals against Standard Liege. Then, at the quarter final stage against Honved with a 0-0 draw from the first leg in Hungary, Lawler scored one of the two goals at Anfield in the second leg that put Liverpool through to the semi-final against Celtic. Liverpool were back in the European Cup as League Champions from the 1965-66 season, when they were comprehensively beaten by Ajax after a 5-1 loss in the first leg in Amsterdam. It was Lawler who scored the consolation goal in the very last minute of the match, but the deficit was too much to overcome in the second leg and Liverpool were subsequently knocked out.

There were many domestic games where Lawler’s goals were crucial, including one that Everton supporters would rather forget. That was in the derby match at Anfield in November of 1970. Shankly’s new squad looked decidedly shaky with new signing John Toshack looking unconvincing as a striker. As the second half began with the score 0-0, Everton suddenly stormed into a 2-0 lead. That would normally be enough but on this day it wasn’t. Heighway pulled one back in the sixty ninth minute, and Toshack showed his value as he equalised in the seventy sixth minute. Then, as if a script had been written for this game, Lawler pushed forward as the match was nearing its end and knocked in the winner with six minutes left. He broke Evertonian hearts once again two years later when Liverpool thumped them with one from Lawler and one from Emlyn Hughes, after two earlier own-goals, to make it a 4-0 rout.

If anything is more amazing than his scoring prowess it’s his fitness and durability, with him missing only three of 336 League matches over seven seasons. He was always a first choice on Bill Shankly’s team sheet, even when Shankly decided to break up his squad for the 1970-71 season and bring in some new younger players like Heighway, Hall, Lloyd, Clemence, and Evans. Lawler was one of only four senior players from the side to survive the cull and continue with the new squad (the other three were Callaghan, Smith, and Hughes). With this new squad, Lawler picked up a runners-up medal for the 1971 FA Cup Final loss to Arsenal, and then went on to collect more winners medals for League Champions and UEFA Cup winners in 1973, and an FA Cup winners medal in 1974. During that 1972-73 League and UEFA Cup winning season, Chris played in all 66 competitive games that the club were involved in on four fronts.

Not surprisingly he represented England at schoolboy, youth, under 23, and senior levels. What is surprising is that he only received four caps at full international level, including his dream debut in 1971 where he scored a spectacular goal against Malta at Wembley in a 5-0 win.

When Bill Shankly retired in the summer of 1974 it was effectively the end of Chris Lawler’s Liverpool career. Bob Paisley brought in Phil Neal as his replacement, and only selected Lawler for a few games. His final appearance for Liverpool came in September of 1975 against Hibernian in the UEFA cup, after which he moved to Portsmouth the following month (who were under the management of fellow Liverpool retiree Ian St. John). After a couple of seasons on the south coast he moved on to Stockport County, Miami Toros in America, and Bangor City of the Irish League.

One of the most famous stories about Chris Lawler and his quiet nature comes from an incident where Shankly was playing in a five-a-side match and a goal by Shanks was being disputed. Chris was asked to settle the dispute and in his typical short and to-the-point manner simply said, “No goal, boss.” Shankly was livid and started yelling, saying to him, “Bloody hell Chris! Ye don’t open yer mouth for ten years and now when yer do it’s a bloody lie!” That and many other stories were told as Chris Lawler became high in demand as an after-dinner speaker. His association with Liverpool continued through the eighties when he was scouting for players and coached the reserve team. In more recent years he has been in semi-retirement coaching young players in the Skelmersdale area.

There’s always going to be debate as to who was Liverpool’s best ever right back. For me, as well as for many Reds, it’s an easy choice. Other players may have earned more medals and gone on to greater glory, but Chris Lawler will always have a special place in our memories as a player who pushed forward so effectively to score more goals than any other defender in the club’s history. In last year’s survey of over 100,000 Liverpool supporters, Chris was chosen as number 51 in the “100 Players Who Shook the Kop.” A fitting tribute to a great man and a legendary player.

Video Clip:
51 - Chris Lawler

What do you think? Give Keith your comments at keith [at] lfcvancouver.com.

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YNWA/JFT 96,
Andy Neumann

Standings as of 13 April 07.

Rank	Member	Points
1	Ste	38
1	Kevin	38
3	Lance	35
4	Dennis	33
5	Mark Aston	30
6	Andy	26
7	Keith	22
8	Glenn Whyte	10
9	Chris Cole	6
10	Quentin	5
11	Glenn Whitt.	3

To enter the members contest see the rules below.

RULES:

• Only open to paid LFC Vancouver Members.
• You list the names of the players you think will start the next LFC match.
• You must submit your list to lfcvancouver [at] gmail.com at least 12 hours before kick-off.
• This contest will include every match that LFC plays this season. Starting with Blackburn.
• The member(s) that correctly guess the starting XI will be awarded 5 points.
• At the end of the season the player with the most points will win the prize.
• What is the prize? It is a surprise!
• The standings will be included in each week’s newsletter.

Scoring System:

• 11 Correct picks = 5 points.
• 10 Correct picks = 3 points.
• 9 Correct picks = 1 point.
• 0-8 Correct picks = 0 points.

YNWA/JFT 96,

Andy Neumann