Graeme Souness, who underwent a triple heart bypass in April 1992, immediately following Liverpool’s draw with Portsmouth in the semi-finals of the FA Cup, said much hinged on Houllier’s character.”My cardiologist, who is a Liverpool season-ticket holder, told me there are two types of people I was a type A. He said that if I was told to retire from football, go home, put my slippers on and watch Coronation Street, I would be so frustrated that I would be actually under more stress than if I went back to work. I can’t speak for G?rd, but he looks a pretty intense chap.”Although winning five pieces of silverware in less than six months had lessened the immediate pressure on Houllier and won him the affection of the Kop, there were still running sores at the training ground at Melwood, not least the festering dispute between Robbie Fowler and the club’s assistant manager, Phil Thompson. This is before mentioning the plethora of former Anfield greats who use the local radio stations and the press to give Houllier advice about restoring the lost and perhaps irretrievable glory days when Liverpool bestrode English football. Houllier, who was a teacher on Merseyside during the Shankly years, did not thank them for it and was irritated by references to the past.Once, when talking to the Leeds manager, David O’Leary, to whom he is very close and who visited his family in hospital, Houllier expressed his frustrations vividly. “He said to me as we walked out on to the pitch beforehand: ‘Dave, it’s so hard to deal with the players now ­ the union, their power, the money they earn’. Life has changed, respect has gone and it’s hard to manage players,” O’Leary recalled after Saturday’s 1-1 draw.”A lot throw their dummies out at times, over little things It’s hard to keep players A lot of the successful managers of the past ruled by fear That fear factor has gone now Newspapers have changed, the players have become so strong Football is a very two-faced game I am lucky I have quality friends.

I can survive without football and I don’t want to die on the training field.”By contrast, Bobby Robson, who, with Sir Alex Ferguson, represents the last of what O’Leary called “the old-style managers” said he could not think of a better way to go. This, however, is precisely the scenario that terrifies the 68-year-old’s family.However, in August 1995, Robson, then in charge of Porto, was diagnosed as having cancer of the nose and face and told he should not work again. He returned in November, spurred on by the lure of the Champions’ League, where the loss of Houllier’s tactical acumen will be most keenly felt by Liverpool, especially in the forbidding arena of Kiev’s Olympic stadium.Thompson takes control against Dynamo Kiev tomorrow and will be “in charge for the foreseeable future”. Liverpool do not lack for coaching expertise with Sammy Lee, who is on Sven Goran Eriksson’s England staff, and Jacques Crevoisier, who worked with Houllier in the French youth system before joining Uefa, European football’s governing body, likely to take a more high-profile role.Ironically, Houllier’s immediate predecessor and one-time co-manager, Roy Evans, thought Dalglish might be the man to come to Liverpool’s aid.

“Kenny Dalglish is not doing anything, although whether he would go back I don’t know. I haven’t seen anyone go into football on the management side who comes out better than they went in. They age quickly.” Dalglish, who does not look his 50 years, might be the exception.”At first you think the pressure is unbelievable but then you learn to cope,” observed the Arsenal manager Ars? Wenger, another of Houllier’s close friends. “That is why it is like an addiction.” Plotting Liverpool’s downfall in Kiev will be Valeri Lobanovski, approaching his 70s and beset by ill health, who is resisting moves to end his seven-year dual role of managing the champions of Ukraine as well as the national side For some, the craving never stops.. On Saturday I took my six-year-old son to his first football match, Ipswich Town v Everton. There were no goals, which he found slightly bewildering, because the drab low-scoring matches he plays in at school – in which creativity is stifled by the tendency of everybody to run hell for leather after the ball, including both goalkeepers and reportedly, on one blissful occasion last week, even the dinner lady – tend to finish 14-13 The more free-scoring games finish 23-all.

On Saturday I took my six-year-old son to his first football match, Ipswich Town v Everton. There were no goals, which he found slightly bewildering, because the drab low-scoring matches he plays in at school – in which creativity is stifled by the tendency of everybody to run hell for leather after the ball, including both goalkeepers and reportedly, on one blissful occasion last week, even the dinner lady – tend to finish 14-13. The more free-scoring games finish 23-all.
This, incidentally, reminds me of the last time I took a taxi across Liverpool. The cab driver was raving about his son, aged 10, who that day had scored eight in a match against a Stoke team – “three with his left foot, three with his right foot, and two with his ‘ead” – despite copping – increasingly ferocious abuse from the Stoke defenders, who, as he danced past them, roared or more likely squeaked at him: “Your mum’s got big tits”.Anyway, in taking Joseph to his first Premiership match, I confess that I was trying to compensate for disappointments in my own childhood. For years I begged my father to take me to watch Everton, but he always refused on the grounds that large crowds contained too many dangers for small children.More pertinently, I think, attending a Saturday afternoon footie match would have kept him away from horse racing on the box. Everton versus the ITV Seven was not even a contest.So it was not until I was 15 and considered old, large and and ugly enough to go with my mates – by which time my dad had departed for the celestial Tattersalls enclosure and could no longer raise an objection – that I actually went to Goodison Park. I made up for lost time, too, not missing a home match, nor many away matches, for the next four years.

But, all the same, it is an enduring source of regret that I first stood on the Gwladys Street terraces in the age of Geoff Nulty and George Telfer, rather than Alan Ball and Joe Royle.So when my friend Neil Farrar – whose company ASD Europe Ltd, a sportswear manufacturer with a reputation for excellence, reliability and integrity, not to mention charismatic executives with chiselled good looks, has a box at Portman Road – kindly invited me to be his guest for the Everton game, I cheekily asked whether Joseph could come too.I cannot, of course, claim that these are halcyon days for Everton. Whereas I grew up inhaling the spirit of the club motto, “nil satis nisi optimum”, loosely translated as “only the best will do”, Joseph now understands it as “nil-nil satis”, loosely translated as “we’ll settle for a goalless draw”.But, even so, I still nurture hopes that Duncan Ferguson might one day loom as large in Joseph’s pantheon of heroes as Bob Latchford does in mine.Obviously it’s early doors, but he already seems prepared to commit himself to a lifetime of supporting Everton. Moreover, he was not unduly gutted by the lack of goals on Saturday. He loved watching the crowd, he loved being at liberty to help himself from a fridge full of Coca-Cola, and he loved the fact that there was a tipsy middle-aged woman in the adjacent box who some time after the game, as the Ipswich players signed autographs on the pitch, kept yelling: “Mr Wilnis, I’ve had your pants on my head!”Accordingly, it was a happy, skipping six-year-old with whom I made my way home on Saturday.