March 14th was a
very good day for Burnley. Ian Wright scored his first Clarets goal to secure a
hard-fought point at Gillingham, a side which, like ourselves, will be playing in division
one sometime in the next couple of years. But that was not all. We were already on a high
when we arrived at the Priestfield for the evening’s entertainment. We had been ever
since we’d spied the back page of the local paper in a pub. Below the photograph of
guess-which-Burnley-player was a short and to the point piece headlined ‘Souness
joins Blackburn’. Yes! The day before, we’d been concerned that they might
somehow get off the hook. We needn’t have worried. It turned out that Souness was
just screwing a few extra contract concessions out of them before making the mark on the
dotted line. He emerged triumphant with a three and a half year contract. Yes, that’s
right, three and a half glorious years. Three years plus one half to complete the work
already so brilliantly undertaken by those stalwart Burnley heroes Ray Halfwit, Woy
Hodgson and, saving the best till last, Brian Kidd.
Another key concession Sourness extracted was the promise of an awesome
£500,000 bonus if Blackburn were steered to promotion this season. It is not our place to
quibble, but isn’t every manager appointed on the assumption that his job, the very
thing he gets paid for, is to bring the club success? Isn’t this his duty? I must
have been absent at the time when this became an optional extra, something to be rewarded
with a separate prize over and above actual wages. And the wages of Sourness are already
said to be higher than all but of a handful of those of the managers in the land from
whence Blackburn fell and will never return. Successful managers with proven track records
are on less. But in any case, for once, Walker need not worry. In this instance, the old
adage about a fool and his money will not have to once again be demonstrated. Because
Blackburn have about as much chance of making the play-offs as of Cliff Richard appearing
in a drugs and sex expose in the News of the World. Jack, your money’s safe.
Don’t worry. You’re going nowhere.
Not that it won’t prove costly. Sourness’ management style
– if we may be permitted to use the term so loosely – is by now firmly
established, and is utterly predictable. Every player who is at a club he takes over is on
their way out. This proves easier than watching them, assessing them or working with them
in training. They will go cheaply. In their place will come a slew of old, expensive and
thoroughly mediocre players. Chances are that they will be the same ancient, tired and
worn names who have previously appeared in the travelling Sourness circus. Dean Saunders
will be waiting for that call. Barry Venison must be seriously thinking of coming out of
retirement. And what’s Paul Stewart up to these days anyway? The same players who
failed at Liverpool, Benfica and Torino will now be dragged off the subs bench at huge
expense and on considerable salaries so that they can fail to produce the goods one final
time. This is the inevitable fate of Sourness’ Blackburn.
We may even hope to enjoy one of his occasional special treats. Remember
the time he signed George Weah’s ‘cousin’ at Southampton? Said fellow
turned out to be about as closely related to Weah as Colin Hendry, and as skilful too.
Sourness had, of course, signed him without actually seeing him play. Not that he could
have seen him play, because this fake joker could play no better than you or I. He was
brought on as a sub in one game and taken off within minutes, never to be heard of again.
But he did play in a premier league game, and that was something they could never take
away from him. He would always have his place in the record books as having played for
Southampton. One has to ask, can it really be this easy to get Sourness to spend someone
else’s money? And did Sourness never even watch this fellow train? But then, he
always was culpable. Look at some of the players he thought could play for Liverpool.
Could it possibly be the case that we’re being too hard on the man?
After all, he did achieve success at Rangers, even if that’s some years since and
he’s never repeated the trick since. And I suppose he deserves some credit for
spotting what later became obvious. Scottish football was so bad that success really was
just a matter of signing cheques and bringing in competent English players. He made some
good signings, it is true – we could not say otherwise of anyone who bought our very
own Trevor Steven – but there was a lot of dross in there too. Of course, the dross
of England’s top two divisions was head and shoulders above anyone else in a
desperately poor league. Rangers swept all before them. Everyone else got wise to the
method, and Sourness was smart to get out when he did. All other clubs followed suit, and
Rangers have again been forced to up the ante and sign players of international quality to
maintain their dominance.
He would find in tougher leagues that it just wasn’t that easy to
replicate. Signing old and merely competent players was not good enough at Liverpool. Some
frightful no-hopers passed through Anfield’s door. He seemed to believe he could make
a mediocre player a world-beater just by paying more money than he was worth. He further
endeared himself to the supporters rightly unforgiving of the misreporting of Hillsborough
by selling his heart-op story to the hated Sun. It was a tawdry affair for one already
known to be wealthy, and helped seal his fate there. He did nothing to halt
Liverpool’s total loss of direction, but made it worse and more lasting. More than
anyone, Sourness can be regarded as the man who made Liverpool what they are today: a side
that no longer wins things.
The rest was dross at best. Nothing at Southampton and ludicrously short
and fractious spells in Turkey, Portugal and Italy. For each of these forays abroad the
pattern would be the same: Sourness riding into a troubled club, instigating a mass cull,
bringing in English plodders on high wages, then alienating the fans, falling out with the
establishment, bringing background tensions to the fore then being dismissed with a
generous payoff, leaving his load of English plodders out of the team, still on the
payroll and stuck in another country, and the club in a worse position than when he found
it.
As Clarets, we can of course only hope that he replicates this pattern at
Deadwood Park. When one combines the predictability of a Sourness stint with the familiar
workings of Blackburn failure, what else could possibly come to pass? Blackburn’s
policy with a new manager was brilliantly summarised in a recent
internet Guardian piece thus: sack the manager, bring in Tony Parkes as a caretaker,
recruit a ‘high profile’ manager, give him around £30,000,000 to play with, let
him bring in his own lads at high prices, high wages, thereby leaving the last
manager’s lot of high price, high wage players to either hang around in the reserves
or leave at a loss, achieve nothing, sack the manager with a hefty pay-off, bring in Tony
Parkes as caretaker… Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. So it goes on. So it will always go on.
All that happens is that crowds get smaller and the notion of ‘bouncing back’
into the big time grows ever more preposterous. Weren’t they supposed to be bouncing
back this year? And what was that crowd the other night, 16,000? They seem to have lost
half their support. My prediction for next season: they will lose half again. And if you
have to identify a candidate to perpetuate this cycle of spend, spend, spend, fail, could
you think of a better name that Graeme Sourness? After all, at least two alleged
‘future England managers’ have been crushed by the inevitable weight of the
Deadwood Park juggernaut of failure. What can an old has been with a crappy moustache
possibly hope to do about it?
