Major change needed if glory days are to return to Anfield

THERE’S no place like a home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.

And sure enough we’re back in a black and white world where everything is as it should be.

Coincidentally, there were a few Friends of Dorothy at the New York Dolls gig I attended instead of the Reading game.

They were outnumbered by rotund, late-40s Reds. We’d come to worship our schoolboy heroes whilst checking texts from Anfield.

The air turned blue when we all received the same “it’s 4-3 now!” message.

Even if the Big Apple’s finest hadn’t been in town I probably wouldn’t have gone. This is the Cardiff Cup remember, and if I wanted to watch reserve games I’d schlep over to Wrexham with the other deluded saps.

I missed some exceptional finishing though, a rarity in itself, and it raised the question of Rafa’s ambiguous attitude towards those players who “just” put the ball in the net.

Facts have to be faced. For 40 minutes last Wednesday (and 30 minutes on Saturday) there was little intimation of what was to come.

In the game I did see I’m not sure what everyone else was watching. We were good sure, but goals are integral to success.

If we nearly threw it away against Reading that was down to complacent substitutions and a keeper who gets rattled too easily. This is tricky. Dropping your custodian is admitting defeat, they rarely respond to a kick up the arse like outfield players do.

Press malice towards Liverpool is now scraping through the barrel bottom and heading for the earth’s core.

The latest “outburst” from a director too cowardly to put his name to it merely illustrates the real advantage of new investment: sweeping away the cobwebbed politburo that has done nothing for this club in years. We need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century and then we’ll only be 100 years behind everyone else. It’s a start at least.

This sort of treachery wasn’t even evident at Anfield during the soporific Houllier endgame.

And of course there’s the whole Gerrard mess. Again. Anyone with Internet access knows the stories now. In Liverpool there’s a storytelling tradition where you have to top the previous raconteur, usually by embellishment.

By the time these Hans Christians (usually cab drivers) are finished and the press get involved there’ll be scenes of depravity the Ancient Romans would have balked at.

This malicious claptrap doesn’t have to appear in the papers to do damage — the grapevine’s taken care of that.

Gerrard is taking two hits at once and it will only subside when the hacks get their own way and prise yet another Hero from our grasp. The fact they got this Madrid nonsense from a source with strong United connections tells you everything. It’s nasty.

Forget about rotation and position. He knows how many outstanding results we had with the same system last season, and he was up for it against Villa.

While it was a pleasing enough weekend the result from Bolton and subsequent viewing of the highlights were chilling.

Mourinho and Ferguson excel there because they love a scrap, while Wenger and Benitez invariably leave Bolton with their admittedly elegant tails between their legs.