Being: Liverpool is a slick operation from Fox Sports but there are not enough examples of the manager and squad at work

There are many unanswered questions from the first episode of Being: Liverpool, the fly-on-the-wall documentary with the unnecessary colon. Why are old men sat up close as Jamie Carragher and others dissolve into hysterics while having to attend a ‘relaxation and meditation’ class? Why does Brendan Rodgers have a self-portrait on his wall at home? But, most pertinently, why?

As a free advert for The Storrsdale pub in Mossley Hill, it’s right up there. As an insight into the work, organisation, sacrifice and demands required at a major English football club, it has its moments. There is something strangely absorbing about watching the Leivas, Lucas and his wife Ariana, treating fellow South Americans Luis Suárez, Sebastián Coates and their families to a game of monopoly, or seeing Rodgers’s unease as he reveals his 16-year-old daughter Mischa is in a relationship with the son of his assistant at Swansea and now Liverpool, Colin Pascoe. “We don’t think about it much,” the Liverpool manager says. “It just happened for some reason.” Theo Pascoe, the son, has modelled for Hollister.

Fox Sports enjoyed several months of enviable access at Liverpool, detailing the end of Kenny Dalglish’s reign to the early days of Rodgers, and have produced a slick documentary on the evidence of episode one. It showcases the best of the city’s architecture and doesn’t shy away from its worst, some of which, in the abandoned streets around Anfield, Liverpool’s decades-long delay over a new stadium is responsible for. Perhaps it was expecting too much for a similar warts-and-all treatment of the club. Hard Knocks, the HBO series into an NFL team, this is not.

From a purely football perspective, there is plenty of emotive Liverpool imagery but not enough examples of Rodgers and his players at work. The manager’s training ground instructions to the young right-back Jon Flanagan – “Stay behind the ball. You’re not the one bombing on for fun, Cafu” – are a rare example. Hopefully this will come as the series advances into the season.

But then, as becomes clear, this is not really about the inner-workings of a football club and everything to do with promoting Liverpool in a glossy, Hello magazine style to a global (particularly American) audience. And so we get a good nose around the extravagant homes of Rodgers and Steven Gerrard, the Liverpool captain being described by the narrator Clive Owen as the winner of “two FA Cup titles” – what about the rest? – introductions to their families and Gerrard discussing the “due diligence” process of securing a first date with his future wife.

Plenty of toe-curling results from Being: Liverpool and, football being football, the documentary makes Rodgers, the chairman, Tom Werner, and principal owner, John W Henry, hostage to fortune at a time when they could all do without it.

We get this from Rodgers on Andy Carroll, subsequently loaned to West Ham United for a £1m fee with no guaranteed transfer at the end of the season; “It’s going to take something incredible for him to leave the football club. I think people have looked at it and think maybe he can’t play in this style in which I would want to play, but I think that’s a little bit unfair.”

Explaining the sacking of Dalglish, Henry claims: “When we first talked with Kenny about coming in, he understood and we understood that at some point there was going to be a time where he was going to step aside when we found the right person for the long term. And he said to me in the first conversation we had that he would be ready for that.” As Henry says, “in the first conversation we had”, that is, when Dalglish was asked to replace Roy Hodgson on a caretaker basis and not when he was subsequently awarded a three-year contract as permanent manager.

Television’s need for the catchy sound-bite puts Rodgers in dangerous David Brent territory on occasion. The episode’s title “The Silver Shovel” is taken from the manager’s description of his upbringing in Carnlough. “Player plus environment equals behaviour” is another line from a manager who, away from the cameras, has consistently spoken in clear, refreshingly realistic terms about the task confronting himself and Liverpool. He needed a few extra million to sign Clint Dempsey to help that cause, not this.

For the Hello-reading Liverpool fan, this will be a treat. For those struggling with Henry’s “vision” for Liverpool, who question why the club have promoted the documentary on the eve of the release of the Hillsborough papers (Fox’s scheduling demands), it is another reason to go to The Storrsdale.

Being: Liverpool begins on Fox on 16 September and will be shown in Britain on Channel 5 from 21 September.

A news article on 2012-09-11 15:55:00 from: The Guardian

Read the full article here.

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