Evans/Houllier - The Joint Manager Debacle

[Bjornebye]

Just watching Premier League legends on Netflix. The Carragher one. I still can't believe how arl-arse it was on Evans to bring Houllier in the way it happened. No way it was ever going to work and it was as if the club didn't want to deal with sacking Roy. 

 

Houllier obviously went on and justified his appointment but I can't help feel sorry for Roy Evans. Great Liverpool man, maybe should never have been manager. Ronnie Moran would have been better but I heard he didn't want it. 

 

Trying to think of other managers in the game at the time of Evans appointment who could/would have been a good fit.... 

 

I love them both but still, it was a shitty move by the club. 

[Remmie]

13 minutes ago, Remmie said:

Take all this shite to the ex managers forum and let it die there. 

 

[Bjornebye]

Oh fuck off, no-one even goes on there. 

 

It can be moved there after its been discussed. Ok dickhead? 

 

 

[Remmie]

I actually don't care, I just wanted to be an arse

[Bjornebye]

2 minutes ago, Remmie said:

I actually don't care, I just wanted to be an arse

I got that. 

[VladimirIlyich]

Like Remmie said.

[Captain Turdseye]

1 hour ago, Bjornebye said:

Trying to think of other managers in the game at the time of Evans appointment who could/would have been a good fit....

 

 

 

Also Bobby Robson and Kevin Keegan were decent managers at the time. 

[dave u]

This is from the interview I did with Roy a few months back....

 

Ok let’s address that. Looking back, the joint manager thing just seems really weird. How did they pitch it to you at the time? 
 
I think Liverpool tried to do it for the right reasons. Initially we’d talked about John Toshack, but John didn’t want to come in that capacity. Kenny got a mention too, but France had just won the World Cup and Gerard had connections to the city having been a teacher here many years before. The game was going very continental and Liverpool were trying to move with the times, so I think they did it for the right reasons. 
 
I let myself down in this process though and I think in many ways that’s where my career ended. We agreed to meet with Gerard, I came back off holiday and flew to France. I think they had met him a few days before, which was maybe a bit out of order with me not being there, but that’s football, that’s life. So we met, and when you’re a Liverpool fan, as well as the manager, sometimes your heart rules your head. 
 
We agreed on things we could do to work together, and then it came to talking about titles. One of my directors, possibly Rick Parry, I can’t remember, came up with joint managers. That’s when I should have been stronger and said “there’s no such thing as joint managers, it’s an impossibility, two people can’t be making the decisions”. I should have been stronger, I should have stood up for what I’d done over four and a half years, we’d finished 3rd, 4th, 4th, 3rd whatever, done ok. 
 
I should have said call him a Director of Football or whatever you like, but you can’t have two guys as joint managers. Immediately it started, as obviously Gerard wanted to change some things that I didn’t want to change. The first one was going on pre-season, playing the game and then “right boys, we’re going to have a drink, we’ve got new lads we’ve just bought so let’s go out”. Gerard said they couldn’t go out, but as it happened we all went out anyway. 
 
Then you leave somebody out of the team and they’ll be like “but Gerard said…” and it just becomes very difficult. I should have been stronger at that point, but when you’re a Liverpool fan and think ‘is this for the benefit of the club?’… sometimes in life you have to look after yourself first and I wasn’t great at doing it at that time and that cost me my job. 
 
Gerard said he knew it would happen and it was inevitable that we wouldn’t be able to work together. That’s not me having a go at Gerard, that’s what football is like. It would have difficult with anybody, even my best mate. Gerard isn’t my best mate but we’ve got great respect for eachother. I see him now and we have good conversations and he always gives me a hug - no kisses though! - but at the end of the day it wasn’t Gerard Houllier’s fault it was mine for not being stronger at the outset.  
 
How did it even work though, picking the team and that? There was one incident in particular when Karlheinz Riedle was left out at West Ham and we lost 2-1. He came off the bench and scored but there was a lot of discussion about why he didn't start.
 
It’s hard because every manager has his own ideas. Gerard would maybe want to leave a player out because there was a bigger game on Wednesday, but I don’t particularly like the rotation system. While I was at Liverpool it was about competition for places, and if you got in that team you wanted to make sure it was hard to get you out. Nobody wanted to be out of the team and nobody liked rotation because they wanted to keep their place. Throughout my time at the club Liverpool always tried to pick their best team.  
 
 

 
So when it came to an end, who decided and was there a particular incident that prompted it? 
 
I decided. It wasn’t one thing, it was just that coming to work was becoming difficult and there was always an edge there, with one of us doing one thing and the other doing something else. I didn’t think it was for the benefit of the club so I walked away. Had I have stayed who knows what would have happened but I didn’t think it was working. 
 
We got beat by Tottenham I think, I went home and thought ‘this is getting ridiculous’. It wasn’t fair on the players, they didn’t know where they stood either, so I decided to walk. I rang the chairman and Peter Robinson and told them “this is not going to work, I’m going to walk”. They tried to talk me out of it in different ways. Tom Saunders came to talk to me and lots of other different people, but there was just nowhere to go with that partnership. It wasn’t going to work. 
 
Do I regret doing it? Not particularly, because it was the right thing to do at that time. But I do regret what went on before when I should have been the master of my own destiny in the initial meeting.  

[ZonkoVille77]

Met Roy a fair few times. He's an absolute gent of a man. Lovely fella. 

 

From meeting him I always got the sense that he was naturally a bit too timid to be a manager. 

 

The club can say it worked bringing Houllier in and that's all they'd have ultimately cared about. 

[Pureblood]

There's nothing wrong with it in principle.  I'm sure Rafa could help Jurgen out with some of the defensive stuff... three goals conceded against Crystal Palace doesn't look too clever.  

[lifetime fan]

Read an article in the Observer with John Scales last weekend, he didn’t come across as having an axe to grind but was pretty dismissive of Evans and the dressing room at the time. 

 

Always wanted Moran to have the managers job, fucking love this photo. 

 

 

[aRdja]

52 minutes ago, TK421 said:

There's nothing wrong with it in principle.  I'm sure Rafa could help Jurgen out with some of the defensive stuff... three goals conceded against Crystal Palace doesn't look too clever.  

I don’t think that would work if I’m honest. Take Gini, Rafa barely played him at CM, and Klopp plays him there almost exclusively. Their styles are just too different for it to work, much as I would LOVE for Rafa to come back in some capacity. 

[Pureblood]

1 minute ago, aRdja said:

I don’t think that would work if I’m honest. Take Gini, Rafa barely played him at CM, and Klopp plays him there almost exclusively. Their styles are just too different for it to work, much as I would LOVE for Rafa to come back in some capacity. 

Nonsense.  I would go even further and get three managers:-

 

Defence - Steve Clarke

Midfield - Rafa

Attack - Jurgen

 

But FSG would never go for it, unfortunately. 

[aRdja]

1 minute ago, TK421 said:

Nonsense.  I would go even further and get three managers:-

 

Defence - Steve Clarke

Midfield - Rafa

Attack - Jurgen

 

But FSG would never go for it, unfortunately. 

I don’t know, if we had to have joint managers, you’d almost go with Rodgers for attack and Klopp for defence, as at least you could see how their styles could be compatible. Rafa would work better with Poch IMO.

[Anny Road]

Much as i respect him i would not wont to work with Rafa. Image he is a miserable selfish twat. Qualities that make him a fine manager in his own regard.

[Strontium]

If anything summed up the ineptitude with which this club has been run through most of the Premier League years, it's appointing the new boss as a joint manager because you're too weak to fire the old boss. Houllier was the right man for what was becoming an increasingly professional sport. As he shows above, Evans came from an era when it was okay for the players to go out on the lash.

[Pureblood]

2 minutes ago, aRdja said:

I don’t know, if we had to have joint managers, you’d almost go with Rodgers for attack and Klopp for defence, as at least you could see how their styles could be compatible. Rafa would work better with Poch IMO.

 

How about:-

 

Goalkeeper Manager - John Achterberg

Defence Manager - Steve Clarke

Midfield Manager - Rafa

Attack Manager - Jurgen

 

???

 

They could be called "The Fab Four from Liverpool".  

[Boss]

The only thing that was arl arse was our golden generation being taught how to be professionals by the likes of Roy Evans and Razor Ruddock. That was arl arse on their careers. Houllier saved Gerrard and Carragher from suffering a similar fate.

[magicrat]

2 hours ago, TK421 said:

 

How about:-

 

Goalkeeper Manager - John Achterberg

Defence Manager - Steve Clarke

Midfield Manager - Rafa

Attack Manager - Jurgen

 

???

 

They could be called "The Fab Four from Liverpool".  

Lallana could be cosmetic products manager

[Bjornebye]

5 minutes ago, magicrat said:

Lallana could be cosmetic products manager

He already does the Avon at Melwood 

[magicrat]

1 minute ago, Bjornebye said:

He already does the Avon at Melwood 

Joking aside he could have had a great career as a hairdresser. Looks the part (no pun intended) and just needs a little pink Fiat 500 soft-top to mince about in.

[Tony Moanero]

2 minutes ago, magicrat said:

Joking aside he could have had a great career as a hairdresser. Looks the part (no pun intended) and just needs a little pink Fiat 500 soft-top to mince about in.

Looks the part? His hair and beard are turd and he looks like the kind of fella who lets his wife/girlfriend dress him.

[magicrat]

2 minutes ago, Tony Moanero said:

Looks the part? His hair and beard are turd!

Fuck me you really have got the haters on the fella. Can't play football and you would still deny him a future in hairdressing !!

[Remmie]

2 minutes ago, Tony Moanero said:

Looks the part? His hair and beard are turd and he looks like the kind of fella who lets his wife/girlfriend dress him.

I think he means that's what hairdressers tend to look like. I'm not sure I've ever seen a male hairdresser with a hair style that looks good. 

[Tony Moanero]

4 minutes ago, Remmie said:

I think he means that's what hairdressers tend to look like. I'm not sure I've ever seen a male hairdresser with a hair style that looks good. 

Fair point.