Red2TheCore
By Jagdev Singh Sidhu
IT all comes down to this. A season of relative success or utter failure will be summed up after the final whistle in the FA Cup Final between Liverpool and Chelsea today.
Win and Kenny Dalglish can proclaim – only just though – Liverpool's season a success. The FA Cup and the League Cup will be a nice haul for any team and the manager will have won himself some breathing space to oversee changes to equip Liverpool for next season's main prize – qualification for the Champions League.
The shambolic league form will be excused. Sure, FSG, the club's owners, will point to the league position with a lot of disdain, wonder what went wrong and lament the lost opportunity of missing out of this year's main prize – which is qualifying for the CL – but they will be incredibly brave to axe Dalglish if he wins two domestic trophies.
Missing out on the Champions League though will cost the American owners tens of millions of pounds in lost revenue and to compound the misery, Liverpool's poor league standing will also see a drop in prize money accorded to teams based on the final positions in the League.
Missing out on that revenue will not have helped buffer the club's financials which saw them lose almost £50mil last year, much of that due to the club writing off building plans for the new stadium drawn up by the previous owners.
For the new owners, though, who want to run Liverpool as a business, some of that lost money from a higher league position will have gone into strengthening the squad which now has to undergo a makeover without the luxury of additional money that could make a difference between landing a top or average quality new player.
And Liverpool has only themselves to blame. Losing against Fulham midweek was not the send-off the fans would have wanted ahead of the FA Cup final against Chelsea. That also means that the points haul at home will be atrocious. The average points scored by Dalglish's Liverpool at Anfield has been lower than when Roy Hodgson was manager and that speaks volume over how the team have underperformed this season.
Despite the poor showing by the players chosen, the chance to rest the heavyweights such as Luis Suarez and Steven Gerrard ahead of the final must have been too great to resist. They were brilliant against Norwich, in which Suarez scored a magnificent hattrick.
Those two will be counted on to lead Liverpool's last and only chance of success and for Dalglish, who has chopped and changed the team with great frequency this season, decisions have to be made as who will play.
The lethargic performance midweek will make it easier for him to pick his squad but then it will be interesting to see if Dalglish goes with a lone striker or pair Suarez with Andy Carroll upfront against a Chelsea team, barring their own loss against Newcastle, are actually in a top form.
Whatever the case, it will be a fantastic match.
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