MEMORIES of a golden era will be evoked tonight when a collection of Anfield’s favourite sons gather to pay homage to the club’s greatest influence.
Members of the 1965 and 1974 FA Cup winning teams, including Roger Hunt, Kevin Keegan and Phil Thompson, will line-up at half-time to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Bill Shankly’s arrival – the moment when Liverpool Football Club became an institution.
It will be hugely poignant to see those men returning home and their presence, perhaps, will provide a lift to supporters still smarting from a calamitous sequence of results that have plunged the Reds’ season into disarray.
More than anything, though, the sight of giants such as St John and Yeats, Lawler and Byrne, Heighway and Milne will, inevitably, lead a certain generation of fans to recall Shankly’s famous maxim that ‘first is first and second is nowhere’.
That Liverpool’s major aim for the year is to win the race for fourth is a painful reminder of how things have changed; yes, qualifying for the Champions League is crucial for revenue and attracting top players but, for a club of Liverpool’s stature, it can never be called success.
Still, needs must and the Reds, quite simply, cannot afford to miss out on that objective, even though the chances of them doing so appear to be dwindling by the week, Sunday’s 2-1 home defeat to Arsenal providing more woe for a disenchanted crowd.
But if spirits have been sagging on the terraces, there is no room for wallowing in self-pity in the dressing room and Dirk Kuyt, scorer of Liverpool’s goal against the Gunners, believes there is a need to go back in time to save the future.
Great Liverpool sides of the past never let painful reverses knock them out of their stride and while the atmosphere around Melwood has been flat for the last 48 hours, Kuyt has promised there will be an emphatic response when Wigan Athletic visit this evening.
With games against Portsmouth and Wolverhampton Wanderers to follow, there is a clear opportunity for Rafa Benitez’s side to make up lost ground and Kuyt believes the players owe it to everyone connected with the club to come good again.
“When you play for Liverpool, you have always got to focus on the next game,” said Kuyt, who has rediscovered his shooting boots in recent weeks. “We want to be in the top four and we need to change things as quickly as possible – that is our target.
“We won’t dwell on Arsenal and we know Christmas could be a good period for us. When we beat Manchester United, we really wanted to take it on from there but unfortunately we have kept dropping points since then.
“All I can say is that the players, the manager and everyone connected with the team is working really hard to change things. I know if we keep going with this attitude that will happen for us.
“We all have confidence that we can finish in the top four but the first focus is to win the next game, which is Wigan. That’s all we can do. People might have heard us say that before but that’s just the way it is.
“You can’t sit down and start thinking ‘how bad are we?’ or ‘aren’t things terrible at the moment?’ – this is almost the same team that did really well last season; we’ve got some people coming back from injuries who are getting fitter.
“It is tough at the moment. It really is. When you are working as hard as we are every day to get the best results, you want to see it happen but that’s life. We are all very lucky people to play for Liverpool and that’s why we want to change things.”
But how does the change come about if the team is working as hard as Kuyt says? Why, suddenly, has the team that never knew when it was beaten surrendered leads in five of its last eight matches?
What alarmed most about the Arsenal defeat was the fact Liverpool went out with barely even a whimper, never mind kicking or screaming, their heads dropping alarmingly after Glen Johnson’s own goal cancelled out Kuyt’s opener.
Kuyt, like so many others, has spent the last couple of days soul searching but is at loss to explain why they caved in – what he does know is there can be no sign of a repeat against a side who have given Liverpool some uncomfortable moments in recent years. “It was unbelievable,” Kuy reflected.
“We controlled the first half and created chances and Arsenal did not cause us many troubles, so it was good performance and maybe you could say we were unlucky not to score more than one.
“We just said at half-time that we wanted to keep it up in the second half and keep playing the way we did but it didn’t happen.
“I don’t know why. It was so strange.
“‘Johnno’ was really unfortunate and then they scored a second before we knew what had happened.
“The lads were so disappointed; we’d played with a lot of effort, confidence and we were ready for the game, that’s why it is so difficult to explain.
“I’m so confused by it all. This is my fourth season here and the first couple of years, we were so close to big trophies. We were almost there last season and we wanted to get (the Premier League) this year but we are far away from that now.”
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