Into the red - John Williams

After a decade in football wilderness and weighed down by the legacy of unmatched domestic and European successes in the 1970s and 1980s, Liverpool Football Club, under new French coach Gerard Houllier, and influential and forward looking Chief Executive, Rick Parry, face up to the huge challenge of building a new team and a successful modern club at Anfield fit for the 21st century. But change is never easy and a rough ride lies ahead. At once controversial and bloody-minded Houllier's policies are proving contentious: changing the dressing room culture which has been central to the club's earlier successes; his policy of player rotation, to name but two, so how does this new coaching guru, with a strong personal attachment to both the city and the club, see the future of the game and Liverpool's place in it? And do the fans of the club, its lifeblood, share Houllier's vision of a borderless international football squad and a more pragmatic, a less flamboyant, approach to playing the modern game?;This book charts the place of football in the city of Liverpool and the recent relative decline of Liverpool FC along with some of the reasons for the club's dramatic fall from grace. But it also reports on the extraordinary "revival" season for Liverpool FC in 2000/1 as the club battled, uniquely, in Europe and at home for honours across four different fronts. It includes comment from some of the key protagonists at Anfield as Liverpool FC, under Parry and the enigmatic Houllier, begins to build, on and off the pitch, an exciting new footballing era for the club, dragging Liverpool FC into the new millennium and, ultimately, becoming even bigger and better than the great football epochs of the team's history under legends such as Shankly, Paisley and Fagan.