Hope springs eternal on Kop

I’VE mentioned him in this column before, my friend the Long-Suffering Liverpool Supporter.

We'll call him LS for short. As a lad he'd grown sated and smug on the style of teams featuring household names like St John, Hunt, Toshack and Keegan. As a young adult, he'd swooned before the apparently unstoppable success of sides starring the likes of Hansen, Dalglish, Barnes, Rush and Aldridge.

But then, as he advanced into middle-age, and the management glory days of Shankly, Paisley and Dalglish gave way to the management gory days of Souness, Evans and Houllier, so also began the long years of personal distress, made all the more painful by the relatively recent memories of how great it once had been.