EPL ~ DALGLISH: CUP SEMI MAY DISTRACT CITY

zocoss SG

Monday, 11 April 2011

Liverpool v Man City 4:00am (Tue Morning)

Mio 102 / 110

Point to prove: Kenny Dalglish remains convinced Liverpool's performance this season has been admirable

'Actual data means more than individual perception and belief' - John W Henry

Kenny Dalglish believes people need to look beyond the bare statistics if they are to gain the true measure of Liverpool’s season. The trouble is his owners don’t agree. Or at least they never have done before.

The Anfield manager sneered that anyone who dared question how a club could be seventh in the table after shelling out £113.5 million on players needed an IQ test.

‘People should take an intelligence check,’ he said. ‘Judging our performance by league position alone is disrespectful. There’s a bigger picture.

'In 30 years' time it will be recorded that Liverpool won the Carling Cup — and maybe the FA Cup — in 2012. If that happens the league position will be overlooked.'

That is an interesting argument. I’m not sure I can recall last year’s League Cup winners, never mind go back 30 years, but then I haven’t had my intelligence checked lately.

Let’s see, who did win the League Cup in 1982? Was it Luton Town? (No, that was 1988); Oxford United? (1986); Norwich City? (1985). Ah, here it is.

Liverpool won the League Cup 30 years ago in the days when the pot was something they used to prop open the door of their trophy cabinet while they filled it with title silverware and European Cups.

But like me, you’d probably forgotten that.

There is no doubt a cup double would add a sheen to this disappointing Premier League campaign, but the concept that Liverpool should be judged on more than their league placing is odd coming from Dalglish of all people.

He is exactly the sort of old school, been-there, got-the-league-medals-to-prove-it type of manager who has wearily trotted out the line that ‘the table doesn’t lie’ in countless spiky press conferences.

Do you think Dalglish would have complained it was ‘disrespectful’ to judge Liverpool on their league position when they were finishing in first place? Of course not.

Even so, he challenged the media directly at Melwood the other day, saying: ‘If anyone thinks that the return we’ve had is a true reflection of the way we’ve played then speak up now.’ According to the Liverpool Echo, ‘the silence was deafening’.

I wonder if there will be a similar silence in the boardroom at the end of the season if the Liverpool boss tries to offer up a similar plea in mitigation?

Keeping you interested? John W Henry knows his investment deserves more than a League Cup...

The Scot has a problem, you see. While he might view his Liverpool world through rosy-red-tinted spectacles and demand a subjective, broader analysis of his performance, his bosses are known for advocating something different.

Cup runs are fine; chatter that the academy is about to bear fruit is encouraging and maybe the match-day catering has improved too, who knows? But I doubt John W Henry will feel he requires an ‘intelligence check’ if he prefers to measure success by the essential numbers.

The principal owner of Liverpool and head of the Fenway Sports Group made his considerable fortune that way. He stopped listening to ‘gut instincts’ in the stock market.

He stripped away any sentiment and ignored the received wisdom of the old guard to apply rigorous statistical analysis to all his decisions. It paid off.

In Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball, which charts the story of the Oakland A’s general manager Bill Beane as he builds a record-breaking outfit on a low budget, JW Henry is described as a ‘new kind of rich person’.

It says: ‘He had an instinctive feel for the way statistical analysis could turn up inefficiencies in human affairs.’
I’ll bet he curses himself every day for not studying the Andy Carroll numbers a little more closely for potential ‘inefficiencies’.

Henry also saw parallels between stock market ‘beliefs’ and sporting dogma. He said: ‘People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.’

So I’m not sure Dalglish can shrug off the data so easily or claim the League placing is not a fair measure. The bizarre assertion that he wouldn’t swap a cup run for a top-four finish and a seat among European football’s elite is hardly going to endear him to the statisticians, either.

At this point, let me expand Henry’s quote at the top of the article where he set out his principles and approach to the business of sport in a letter to an ESPN reporter.

‘Many people think they are smarter than others in baseball and that the game on the field is simply what they think it is through their set of images/beliefs. Actual data means more than individual perception/belief. The same is true in baseball.’

Now go back and replace baseball with football and you’ll see Dalglish and Henry are bound to be singing from different songsheets, which might explain some of the manager’s more eccentric public pronouncements of late.

But set aside what Henry would regard as Dalglish’s ‘perception/ beliefs’ and look at some of that ‘actual data’ he will be presented with:

So overall, it is fair to say the numbers sitting on Henry’s desk are fairly grim.

There seems no appetite to replace Dalglish right now and Henry and Co are too smart to make rash public pronouncements. But the Scot will be under extraordinary pressure from here on in.

This was a season when Chelsea were weak and Arsenal faltered and yet Liverpool never looked capable of taking advantage.

Now there are reports that Dalglish is lobbying for another £50m to buy seven players in the summer. That might not be such a straightforward deal in the circumstances.

I spoke to the American sport legend Beane this week (played by Brad Pitt in the Moneyball film). He told me he still talks to Henry, but hasn’t discussed Liverpool directly with him. However, as he made clear previously, he is certain throwing money at a sporting problem doesn’t always work.

‘What you don’t do is what the New York Yankees do,’ said Beane. ‘If we do what the Yankees do, we lose every time because they’re doing it with three times more money than we are.’

You will not be surprised to hear Henry once tried to lure Beane to run the Boston Red Sox end of his sporting empire. But you might be surprised to hear Beane is in contact with Liverpool’s director of football Damien Comolli and the two are friends.

Henry has no appetite for chasing Manchester City, United or Chelsea in terms of cash spend, more so now Liverpool have missed out on Champions League revenue for the third year in succession. He described the need for a ‘sound financial landscape’ as ‘critical’.

... like the World Series, for example, which his Boston Red Sox won in 2007

To make things more uncomfortable for Dalglish, Liverpool sit just three points ahead of Swansea City, who are essentially the Premier League’s living embodiment of the Moneyball philosophy — where rejuvenated rejects and bargain discoveries operate in a low-wage environment and yet punch way above their weight.

Brendan Rodgers assembled his side for about the same price as one of Carroll’s legs.

If Liverpool beat Wigan on Saturday they will still be seventh. If they don’t there will be an outcry, but Dalglish will survive. Next season he will have to finish in the top four, or he’ll be out, because the table doesn’t lie now and it won’t next season either.