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Anfield captain justifies Kenny Dalgish’s stance after Bolton debacle and insists the Reds are still challenging for all three of their pre-season targets

Steven Gerrard has the offer of an ambassador’s role from Liverpool but they are not spoiling him yet. The 31-year-old, along with the rest of Kenny Dalglish’s squad, was subject to another calm, composed but cutting critique before training at Melwood on Monday as the manager showed that two nights’ sleep had not lessened his disgust at their performance against Bolton. Backed into a corner and challenged to respond; it seems it was forever thus for Liverpool’s talismanic captain.

Manchester City’s arrival at Anfield for tonight’s Carling Cup semi-final second leg marks the start of a four-day period in which Liverpool could vanquish both Manchester clubs from domestic cup competition and book a first appearance at Wembley for 16 years. Or retreat into renewed self-doubt as City and United move further into the distance while hysteria attaches itself to Dalglish’s rebuilding work. There is no middle to squeeze at Liverpool.

Gerrard, of course, has seen it all before and having converted the penalty that separated the semi-finalists in the first leg, he will be the man Liverpool turn to for the way through once again. The difference in this potentially defining week, however, is that the most strident criticism of Liverpool came from their own manager, a man immersed in the traditions and expectations that he declared his team betrayed at the Reebok on Saturday night.

“It was definitely justified,” Gerrard admits. “When you put in a performance like we did as a group you expect criticism, especially from your manager. Kenny spoke in the dressing room after the game and on Monday before training. He wasn’t angry, he just said it as it was. He didn’t lose his rag or his control. He told individuals and us as a group that it wasn’t acceptable. As captain of the team that is down to me and he went through all of us.”

Gerrard does not dispute Dalglish’s claim that the City second leg contributed to the complacent showing at Bolton. “We didn’t need telling really. I knew at half-time and I knew after the game that that hadn’t been good enough. Maybe the lads had one eye on this and one eye on that. At the beginning of the season the big objective for this club was top four so if you look at it that way, Bolton is bigger than Manchester City.” He rejects outright, however, the idea that the 3-1 defeat represents an opportune wake-up call ahead of City and Saturday’s inflamed FA Cup fourth-round with Manchester United.

“There is no good time to perform like that when you play for this club,” he insists, the disdain clear in his voice. “You have to win every game. The people new to the club will appreciate and understand that a bit more after a performance like that. You can’t do it here. The fans won’t accept it, they don’t deserve it. It’s not allowed. Otherwise you get criticised by your manager, like we have all experienced. I have been here a long time and experienced days like that and the important thing is to move on from it fast. If we perform like that against Manchester City, there will be no Wembley trip.”

Dalglish insisted players would be moved on if the attitude at Bolton prevailed. His problem is that five of the team that started against Owen Coyle’s then bottom-placed team were his signings and Craig Bellamy, the veteran signed on a free, was the only one to impress. The £75m spent on Andy Carroll, Jordan Henderson and Stewart Downing remains a weight upon the manager and, with the occasional exception from Henderson, poor value for Fenway Sports Group, the club’s owner.

Gerrard says only: “Those players know themselves. They know how they are playing. They know what form they are in. What I can say is that those players are working so hard to put in good performances. They are not giving up, they are not throwing the towel in, they are working day in, day out. The effort is there. Maybe they just need a little bit of luck, something to turn their way and they can go on a fine run. We all know those three players you have mentioned are good players.”

An outlay of over £100m in the past 12 months by Dalglish and Fenway, with £50m recouped from the sale of Fernando Torres alone, has not transformed Liverpool from a team hovering above the relegation zone when Roy Hodgson was sacked last January into convincing contenders for Champions League qualification. But they are where most expected them to be; competing for a top-four finish, playing far better football – Bolton being the most obvious exception – than in recent seasons and a home draw away from a first visit to Wembley since the 1996 FA Cup final. The murmurs of discontent about Dalglish, and not for his handling of the Luis Suárez controversy, have not escaped Gerrard.

“Our targets were to get into the top four and go on two long runs in the cup and it’s still possible. Why change? Why are we crying out for change?” he asks. “We’re six points off fourth and there are 16 games left. You’re not telling me that this team and the players we’ve got here are not capable of making that up? The sides who we are competing with aren’t on all-out consistent runs. Man United got beat 3-0 by Newcastle the other week, Chelsea drew with Norwich and Arsenal have lost their last three. Why isn’t it possible? Why are people crying out for change?

“Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all great here. We’ve got a fight on for fourth but we had a fight on at the start of the season, when we were telling people our aims for the season. Of course you go into every season wondering if you can get into the title race but at the moment we’re not in it and our realistic aim at the start was top four and two good long runs in the cup. At the end of this week we could be going to Wembley, we could be in the fifth round of the FA Cup and six points off fourth. The flip side of that is different but big weeks happen at big football clubs and this is a big week.”

And what would it mean to the Huyton-born midfielder to lead Liverpool out at Wembley? “Nothing,” he states. “But to lift the cup at Wembley would mean an awful lot. To get to Wembley is the target, to win it is the dream.”

Steven GerrardLiverpoolManchester CityAndy Hunter
guardian.co.uk

I see that the Hillsborough family support group has called on The Sun to reveal the sources for its notorious story about the 1989 football disaster in which 96 people died.

The paper ran a splash, headlined THE TRUTH, which blamed Liverpool fans for causing the tragedy.

It alleged that some fans had urinated on police and on victims, had stolen from victims and beaten up a policeman who was trying to give the kiss of life.

The story, just four days after the deaths, began: “Drunken Liverpool fans viciously attacked rescue workers… it was revealed last night.”

But revealed by who? The Sun attributed the claims to South Yorkshire police officers.

One thing was clear at the time. The Sun’s reporter did not make up the allegations because other papers (including the Daily Mirror and Daily Star) carried similar claims.

What caused the outrage on Merseyside, leading to the swift imposition of a boycott that continues to this day, was the way The Sun presented the story.

Its “truth” headline indicated that the paper believed the claims. That was its offence.

Indeed, within a day, the usually feeble Sun ombudsman, Ken Donlan, ruled that the headline was wrong. The editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, admitted on radio he had made “a rather serious error.”

Rupert Murdoch also felt it politic to make a public statement in which he said the coverage was “uncaring and deeply offensive to relatives of the victims.”

Within The Sun’s office there was outrage too. It emerged that the reporter responsible for writing the story, having seen the front page layout in advance, had pleaded with MacKenzie not to use the “truth” headline.

The other papers that published similar allegations were a little more circumspect. The Mirror (”Fury as police claim victims were robbed”) and Star (”Dead fans robbed by drunk thugs”) distanced themselves by referring to the allegations as allegations.

Even Liverpool’s own title, the Daily Post, carried an article headlined “I blame the yobs”, which accused gatecrashing fans of being responsible for what happened.

“Scouse killed Scouse for no better reason than 22 men were kicking a ball,” it said.

These lies – for that is what they were, as the subsequent Taylor inquiry made abundantly clear – were also reported on radio and TV (see this ITN report, for example, and especially this one).

That latter clip begins with a shot of a South Yorkshire police federation spokesman walking away from the camera. In the voice-over the reporter states that he had accused the Liverpool fans of hooliganism.

My understanding from The Sun’s reporter, who has spoken to me several times about the story down the years, is that the source (or sources) of the allegations were located within the South Yorkshire force.

The allegations made by the police were certainly contained in agency copy filed to every newspaper. I cannot be sure, but I don’t think The Sun had a different source.

Again, the problem was caused by the headline and the uncritical way it reported the claims, assuming that they were true.

I am sympathetic to the Hillsborough families (and who could not be?), but I don’t think The Sun can reveal much at all.

It is possible that the release of internal police documents will point a finger towards an individual, though I somehow doubt it. As Andy Burnham MP reveals in today’s Mirror, the cover-up began early on with attempts to suppress at least one policemen’s sincere distress.

As for The Sun’s source, I would be amazed that anyone really knows. The paper’s reporter now lives abroad in retirement, but I think he relied on agency copy.

The editor, MacKenzie, is now a Daily Mail columnist, but I doubt that he ever knew of any specific source.

The ITN clip is crucial because it shows just where the families should concentrate their fire. The South Yorkshire force had a motive – to distract attention from its own failings, as highlighted by Taylor – and the opportunity to brief journalists off the record.

All the newspapers, news agencies, TV and radio outlets, relied entirely on the police for the reporting of scandalous and inaccurate allegations.

The Sun’s sin was to believe them. That’s why the boycott has held so firmly over 22 years.

The SunHillsborough disasterKelvin MacKenzieDaily MirrorDaily StarDaily MailITNLiverpoolLiverpoolPoliceAndy BurnhamRoy Greensladeguardian.co.uk

Today’s gossip fears for the family line

The Mill is nothing if not a traditionalist. Rumour runs deep in its blood. Cut the Mill and it bleeds rumour, not to mention also crying for ages until it sneezes snot everywhere and threatening to, like, sue you and then pretending it can’t walk properly or even sit down even though you only cut it very slightly on its upper arm and purely for demonstrative purposes. Innuendo is in the Mill’s genes. Manipulative gossip festers beneath its toenails like an unexpected soft white substance that can be gently scraped out with a sharpened matchstick and then furtively deposited on the rear lip of the bathroom radiator in your girlfriend’s parents’ house in a surprisingly enjoyable moment of covert vandalism.

The Mill’s father was a piece of suggestive graffiti daubed on a railway arch wall. The Mill’s father’s father’s father was a ticker machine spewing early Victorian news wire gossip across the sawdust and porter strewn floor of a Cheapside tavern. Great-great-great-great grandfather Mill was a town crier’s bell-end. There are salacious Egyptian hieroglyphs in the family and even talk of a particularly ill-founded cave painting.

Still, the Mill is nothing if not a modernist. The Bosman ruling. Other rulings. The ruling that means you can snatch talented children from a Slovenian tower block forecourt five-a-side pitch. All of these have been the Mill’s daily bread in recent times. But still, there are mornings when, perusing its newspaper sheath, the Mill does feel a stab of longing for a return to the days when nobody was allowed to really do anything so there was no point making up stuff about highly promising Maltese defensive utility men because football gossip extended no further than a the vague possibility two years from now Liverpool might pay £30,000 for a very thin Scottish centre-half.

Mornings such as this, for example, when the front page of the Times features a large picture of Tony Blair doing a Prince-William-rapping-style gesture and saying “I’m your man” and trying to become president of Europe because you get a bulletproof car and stay in hotel suites that have a sweeping vista over the dusky Bruges cityscape.

But thankfully the Mill is nothing if not professional and rarely strays from a steely sense of purpose. So, in the Sun today, Liverpool are keen on buying 21-year-old Valencia left-winger Juan Mata, who will look quite good in the Carling Cup, score a goal against Bolton, then for some reason never really play much and quietly disappear back to Spain before popping up three years later looking awesome in the Europa League for Atlético Madrid or Fiorentina. “We want Valencia to recognise his true quality and it’s not just a matter of money,” laughed his father Juan Sr, making a sarcastic “puking” gesture and holding up a hand-written sign with the words “it is all about the money”.

Also Pepe Reina is about to be “locked into a fresh contract”, ideally one with an invigorating smell of cinnamon and freshly baked bread and not just a vaguely sickening chemical odour intended to convey a temporary sense of freshness which fades very quickly into a lingering stench of fags and something that might be old leather upholstery and might be vomit. Reina will get £90,000 a week.

Elsewhere, David Villa has fired his agent. Manchester United are “on red alert”. And Anthony Edgar, who sounds like an influential early 20th century literary critic who, although outwardly stern and fiercely respectable, ended up secretly marrying his infant cousin, has had to go back to West Ham after the Football League refused to extend his loan deal at Bournemouth.

In the Mirror, Phil Brown is “on the brink” because Adrian Pearson, who used to be Hull chairman and then went to Derby is now about to become Hull chairman again. There’s a big picture of Phil Brown looking, as ever, like your really embarrassing midlife crisis divorced dad who now has a 21-year-old dental hygienist girlfriend and never really remembers your birthday but occasionally shows up and performs an awful cringemaking stunt like theatrically breaking down in tears in a motorway service station, or serenading you over the PA at your school sports day, before bursting into tears again and whizzing off in his rubbish souped-up Rover and not showing up again for another six months.

Mike Ashley wants to rename St James’ Park the Wispa Gold Arena or the GoCompare.com Stadium in return for money. Brazil midfielder Sandro is keen on going to Spurs. “Tottenham’s interest is extremely flattering,” he says, although he might just be being polite. Watford want to extend their loan deals for Henri Lansbury who, let’s face it, isn’t really going to make it, and Tom Cleverly of Man Utd who the Mill has never seen play but who has a good name.

Two men called Levi Kushnir and Balram Chainrai, who the Mill hasn’t made up and are apparently real, want to buy Portsmouth. So that all sounds fine then.

In the Mail, Sven-Goran Eriksson has “moved to quash rumours” Hans Backe will be his puppet. “I am not going to be hands on,” he said in a Margaret Thatcher voice, waggling Hans Backe’s head amusingly from side to side. And Jeff Powell says Alex Ferguson is “a raging ball of anger”, and also the best manager ever.

In the Times, Tony Blair wants to be, you know, president of something. Something big.

And according to Tuttomercatoweb, Milan want to swap Klaas-Jan Huntelaar, who was quite fashionable a few years ago on the internet, for Fiorentina’s Adrian Mutu.

LiverpoolValenciaBarney Ronayguardian.co.uk