[Ulysses Everett McGill]

Liverpool fans fuming over Tom Hicks display of poor timing


April 18, 2008 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/article3768361.ece

Oliver Kay

It was the mugshot that did it. As the long-awaited interview with Tom Hicks drew to a close, he was pictured drinking from a Liverpool mug that looked as if it had come straight out of the box. What he was forgetting, though, was that the bona fide Liverpool supporters are not mugs and that this latest attempt at spin, like so many others, would not wash.

Some of those Liverpool supporters may go farther and call Hicks’s interview with Sky Sports News “a disaster”. That was the phrase that he used to describe Rick Parry’s tenure as chief executive at Anfield and, given that all or some of the interview in Dallas was recorded on the nineteenth anniversary of the Hillsborough tragedy, as a result of which 96 Liverpool supporters died, accusations of insensitivity were inevitable.

Yes, he had sought to avoid such accusations by delaying transmission until yesterday morning, but using the d-word was a crass error from a man who seems unable to open his mouth without offending those he aims to win over.

“There were huge numbers of supporters grieving for loved ones,” Neil Atkinson, of the Spirit of Shankly group, said. “It was a time to be respectful and understand what this football club is all about. But Mr Hicks seems to have no respect for anyone. He didn’t say anything on the day of the service, but straight afterwards he is up and running again.


“Tom Hicks has got no respect for football or this club. The man cannot be trusted at all. He said there would be no debt on the club, but that is not what has happened. The situation with Rick Parry is really an irrelevance. He is good for one thing only and that is his vote at board meetings to keep Hicks at bay.”

Parry knows that he cannot survive at Anfield if Hicks succeeds in buying out George Gillett Jr, his co-owner. Hicks denounced Parry’s record as chief executive — ridiculing the club’s attempts to exploit their brand worldwide, a failing to which David Moores, the former chairman, reluctantly admitted when he sold the club 14 months ago — but, as with just about everything at Liverpool at present, the root of it is personal.

Hicks feels that Parry was guilty of impertinence when he said recently that it was time to “stop washing the club’s dirty linen in public” and from that moment there was no way back — at least not under Hicks’s sole ownership, if such a thing ever materialises.

Hicks tried to paint a picture yesterday of a Liverpool that would thrive under his ownership and he is right to suggest that he has a better relationship with Rafael Benítez, the manager, than Parry or, indeed, Gillett can claim.

Again the Texan distanced himself from the attempt to line up Jürgen Klinsmann, the former Germany coach, as a replacement for Benítez in November, saying that Gillett was the instigator of their two meetings and, more damagingly, that Parry “had already been talking to Jürgen for three hours alone before George and I got there”.

The intention was to expose Parry as an anti-Benítez force and thus an enemy of Liverpool supporters, but even as he hangs others out to dry, Hicks comes no closer to winning the trust of the club’s fans.

He has decided that the embarrassing Klinsmann saga serves as a useful stick with which to beat his enemies (Parry and Gillett), but with every mention of the German, he undermines Benítez.

He calls it honesty, but if that is truly what it is, he is honest to a fault. And a majority of Liverpool supporters are not convinced that honesty is the motivation.

Honesty, though, is in short supply at Anfield at present, with even Benítez succumbing to the spin, counter-spin and agenda-driven, self-serving comments that are the order of the day at a club that was once a byword for stability and unity. The Liverpool supporters, though, see through it all. They are no mugs.