Book description
After a decade in football wilderness, weighed down by the legacy of
unmatched domestic and European successes in the 1970s and '80s,
Liverpool Football Club - under new French coach Gérard Houllier 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 twenty-first century.
But change is never easy and a rough ride lies ahead. Hard-headed
and controversial, Houllier and his policies are proving contentious:
changing the dressing-room culture which has been central to the
club's earlier successes and his policy of player rotation, to name
just 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, less flamboyant approach to
playing the modern game?
Into the Red charts the place of football in the city of
Liverpool, along with some of the reasons for the club's dramatic fall
from grace. It also reports on the extraordinary 'revival' season for
Liverpool FC in 2000-01 as the club battled, uniquely, in Europe and
at home for honours across four different fronts, and on season
2001-02, a dramatic one for Houllier in particular. It includes
comment from some of the key protagonists at Anfield as Liverpool FC
begins to build, on and off the pitch, an exciting new footballing era
for the club, dragging it into the new millennium and ultimately
challenging the great football epochs of the team's history under
legends such as Shankly, Paisley and Fagan.
John Williams has written widely on football and football culture.
Previous publications include
Hooligans Abroad
,
The Roots of Football Hooliganism
,
Game Without Frontiers
and
Is It All Over: Can Football Survive The Premier League?
He also regularly contributes to football magazine
When Saturday Comes
. He is the director of the Sir Norman Chester Centre for Football
Research and is a lecturer at the University of Leicester.
