"Blow me, ****face. Go to hell. I’m sick of you."
As an epitaph to the calamitous Hicks-Gillett regime at
Liverpool, the ten-word e-mail sent by Tom Hicks Jr at 4am on
Saturday, in response to a polite message from a concerned
supporter, ticked just about every box. Brash, arrogant, offensive,
crass, uncouth, contemptuous and hopelessly naive, it was the
defining moment of almost three years of blundering, back-biting
and broken promises at Anfield.
Hicks Jr, the son of Tom Hicks, the co-owner, eventually
apologised to the supporter in question for "losing my temper and
using bad language with you", calling it "a kneejerk reaction". A
jerk’s reaction would probably be a better way of putting it and a
more considered, appropriate response now would be to resign from
his position on the club’s board.
But still, at least it was an apology; Liverpool’s supporters
have been waiting a long time for one of those.
Hicks Jr, calling it "a kneejerk reaction"
apologised to the supporter in question for "losing my temper
and using bad language with you"
Hicks and George Gillett Jr made all the right noises
when they swaggered into Liverpool in February 2007, red-and-white
scarves draped around their shoulders, oozing folksy charm and
pledging, among other things, to start building work on a new
stadium within 60 days (oops), not to take the club into debt (it
now stands at around £245 million), to be accessible ("go to hell")
and "to add to the lustre of the club, not detract from it" ("blow
me, ****face").
For a company director to insult a customer in such a way (and,
yes, it irks to use such terminology) is a disgrace and yet somehow
it is not the foul-mouthed language that irks most about Hicks Jr’s
e-mail. Far worse is the contempt that runs through every word:
contempt for the concerns expressed by a supporter who, without
further comment, sent him a link to an article in the Liverpool
Echo in which concerns were expressed about Rafael Benítez’s
alarming struggle to find money to invest in a depleted,
demoralised squad that is in severe danger of missing out on
Champions League qualification.
The supporters’ concerns for Liverpool’s future, short and long
term, are legitimate. Benítez appeared to acknowledge for the first
time over the weekend that he may be forced to sell players such as
Fernando Torres if they fail to qualify for next season’s Champions
League — previously, in an interview with The Times in
November, he had said he would resign rather than tolerate such a
scenario — and for Hicks Jr to sneer at such concerns, whether he
uses foul-mouthed insults or wit worthy of Oscar Wilde, is not
acceptable.
For the sake of balance, it is worth pointing out here that
Hicks, Gillett and their families have been subjected to some
rather less civil e-mails and, according to Gillett, telephone
calls since their ill-conceived dalliance with Liverpool took the
first of many turns for the worse.
On a visit to Merseyside two years ago Hicks Jr decided, flanked
by minders, to go for a post-match drink in The Sandon pub "because
I have wanted to go for quite some time to see the birthplace of
the club and I also wanted the opportunity to have a direct talk
with some of the supporters". Suffice to say it was a brief
conversation.
Liverpool’s supporters did everything to make Hicks and Gillett
feel welcome in the spring of 2007. Unless it has been burnt,
whether out of embarrassment or anger, there is a fan somewhere
with a banner that, echoing the words of the MasterCard advert,
ends with the phrase "for everything else, there’s George and
Tom".
It was not until the season after — the unedifying and very
public spats with Benítez, the talks with Jürgen Klinsmann, the
decision to take the club heavily into debt, the continuing fiasco
over the stadium — that warmth turned to hostility of the type that
the Glazer family faced on their early visits to Manchester
United.
Outsiders mistake the antiAmerican sentiment on Merseyside as a
misplaced sense of empathy with Benítez. They look at the purchases
of Torres, Javier Mascherano, Robbie Keane, Glen Johnson and others
and suggest that Benítez, having been backed to the hilt, has only
himself to blame for Liverpool’s failure to win a first league
title since 1990. That is a different argument and a spurious one;
whatever Benítez’s perceived faults — and his judgment in the
transfer market last summer, albeit faced with a constrained
budget, was highly questionable — he is far from being Liverpool’s
weakest link.
Hicks and Gillett have made some good appointments in the
commercial and financial sphere, helping to drive up the club’s
revenue, but none of that counts for a bean when Liverpool were
forced to pay £36.5 million in interest last season (and, at best,
a similar figure this campaign). Ivan Gazidis, the Arsenal chief
executive, said in an interview with The Times last week
that "not all debt is bad", pointing out how the club’s interest
bills are more than covered by the revenue generated by the move to
the Emirates Stadium. Liverpool’s debt, by contrast, is very bad,
existing for no other reason than to prop up a regime that, in
every other sense, ran out of credit long ago.
Gillett took the unusual step of telephoning me the last time I
criticised him and Hicks, telling me I had "got it all wrong" and
that "debt per dollar, we are in a far better position than our
rivals". His response was certainly more polite and more reasoned
than that from Hicks Jr in the early hours of Saturday, but my deep
reservations were not overcome. It is not a case of saying that
Gillett or Hicks or their sons are bad people. It is simply the
case that, between them, they have repeatedly shown themselves to
lack the qualities needed to be worthy owners of Liverpool Football
Club.
In February 2007 — the day he said that "the shovel needs to be
in the ground within 60 days" with regards to the construction of a
new stadium, where two years, 11 months and four days on, no shovel
has yet been seen — Gillett said that "this isn’t about making
money. This is about winning and passion and tradition".
Yet passion has been directed in all the wrong areas, traditions
have been ignored, the aforementioned lustre has been tarnished and
the widespread belief persists that they would be as willing as
ever to sell up if they could be guaranteed a huge enough profit to
show for all their hard work and dedication to the Liverpool
cause.
That will be the final insult, when they depart — whether it is
in six weeks, six months or six years — with a profit to their
name. Hicks Jr’s e-mail in the early hours of Saturday was merely
the latest, but, with those ten words, he plumbed new depths. Next
time he is passing The Sandon, he would be advised to keep
walking.
