I came at this book a bit backwards. I had started Simon Hughes’ series of retrospectives with Ring of Fire and loved it – the players’ willingness to weigh things up with the benefit of hindsight made for a bittersweet look back of what went right and want went wrong for Liverpool in the noughties.
I then went back and read Red Machine but found it a bit dull. Liverpool were simply too good during the 80s to really open up much difference of opinion. Sections with someone like Kevin Sheedy gave a slightly different view of the time but these were detours from the mainstream of Liverpool’s decade.
With the nineties a terrible decade for Liverpool, I was looking forward to this book, expecting it to be a lot closer to Ring of Fire, however it made le realise quite how much Simon Hughes’ series relies on the interviewees.
Jan Molby is a decent start but truthfully feels more of an eighties throwback despite staying at Liverpool until 1996. Once you get into the 90s proper, you end up with a host of players who don’t really seem to have the maturity to look back at their careers with a level head like in Ring of Fire, despite having had longer to do so. There’s more bitterness and delusion than anyone accepting responsibility for their lack of success. This is inadvertently revealing as to why Liverpool failed in this period, yet also makes for frustrating reading.
When the likes of David Thompson and Jason McAteer try to blame everything on Gérard Houllier – nothing to do with the fact he didn’t rate them of course – as if the team hadn’t been failing for years prior, it’s difficult to do anything other than roll your eyes. Few of the players seem to want to admit anything was really wrong at the club, so no wonder they won so little. They won’t even shoulder blame for those suits.
Erik Meijer’s is another good section, but again feels more like a detour away from the mainstream of Liverpool’s decade.
It’s the interviews with the managers, particularly Graeme Souness, that save the book though. Souness talks with honesty and humility about what he got wrong but also explains his reasoning at the time, while Roy Evans places the decade in the wider context of Liverpool’s history, as well as addressing some of the background issues and some insight into signings.
Souness’ section was that perfect blend of bittersweet feeling and insight that I enjoyed about Ring of Fire, yet much of the rest of the book was a bit disappointing – not unlike Liverpool during the 90s.
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