Winning ugly cannot become a habit

IT’S the time of year for facing truths and making resolutions so we might as well start by admitting that we are becoming a tad concerned about the failure of the Liverpool title bandwagon to derail so far.

Their demolition of Newcastle caused a few strangulated Red gulps at the weekend, especially when set against our laboured yuletide showings. Thank goodness, then, for Southport hotheads and the Merseyside constabulary, who cheered us all up no end as we woke on Monday morning. I particularly enjoyed the fact that news of his arrest broke as we were (barely) digesting back pages full of Stevie G’s Glory and his promise to “keep his feet on the ground”.

“This is the best team i have ever been in,” he added, leaving doubt as to whether he meant Liverpool’s footballers or Huyton’s tag team.

Perhaps it would be too much to hope that this will have the kind of undermining effect on form that United’s own Christmas shenanigans did last year, when the contretemps appeared to act as a caesura between our pre-new year rampaging and a definite post-January falling away.

Still, one lives in hope. And it’ll be lots of fun watching the scouse squirming as it eventually works itself out. To be fair, I suspect SG will emerge largely untainted as, to his credit, he has a record in Southport of good behaviour and solicitous cleaning-up after mates’ past excesses; one of our lads from the town recalls getting personal apologies from both Steve and his uncle after some heated exchange with an SG hanger-on.

In any event, we can hardly speak from the moral high ground at the moment when it comes to matters of ill-discipline.

As I suggested was becoming the case last week, we appear to be in a proper ragged mode at the moment, with further unsavoury incidents occurring against both Stoke and Boro. Ronaldo in particular appears to have gone into a frightful bate ever since he lifted the Ballon D’or and he showed utter idiocy in replicating the kick-flick that frankly should have seen him red carded at Spurs.

He isn’t doing much in front of goal either, though clearly he isn’t alone in that amongst the misfiring Reds. Incidentally, to those who have been solely blaming Berbatov for our strange impotence recently, I present Exhibit A — the dreadful lack of creation at stoke despite Berb’s absence, a dearth only relieved when he came on to inspire the winner.

And, of course, Exhibit B — his delightful match winner on Monday, Cantonesque in style and timing.

The Boss can also point proudly to another good shout — the one that ensured Johnny Evans is still trusted to help Vidic in Rio’s absence.

Overall, seven consecutive clean sheets certainly tells a story; not an exciting one, perhaps, but a good one nonetheless. And one that reminds us how our defence basically won us the two titles last year when the old spirit and verve deserted our forwards throughout most of the spring.

So it is in a hard faced, slightly bad tempered, ‘winning ugly’ vein that we approach Sunday’s tie against our old cup foes Southampton, infamous assassins in ‘76 and ‘92, with the players talking a good game about making amends for Portsmouth.

I don’t know how deep that commitment runs, but it’s a long trek to St Mary’s: a bit of swashbuckling cup verve would be most welcome.

Winning ugly may have to suffice to bridge short-term shortfalls but we don’t want to be getting into a habit of it, do we?

* Richard Kurt’s classic ‘Red Army Years’ is only available via [e-mail]