Houllier losing the plot?

No heroes managing Liverpool, Man Utd and Arsenal

By Brian Glanville, World Soccer

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WATCHING Poland's Jerzei Dudek fail to hold shot after shot last Saturday at Loftus Road, playing for Liverpool against Fulham, I couldn't help thinking of Chris Kirkland and what a waste it was.

At a time when England are crying out for a competent keeper, here is the 21-year-old, 6-foot-three inch Kirkland languishing in Liverpool's reserves. He and Dudek last year were bought almost at the same time -- conspicuous consumption indeed.

Gerard Houllier, after his team's 3-2 defeat, had to admit that Dudek, like the rest, had had a bad day.

Houllier's lavish transfer policy has had mixed results. El Hadji Diouf, alas, cannot face Frank Leboeuf every week, as he so rampantly did for Senegal against France in Seoul in the World Cup opener. He cannot at the moment command a place. And it is all too plain that there is no adequate substitute to stand in at center back for Stephane Henchoz, alongside Finland's Sami Hyppia.

Nor is it easy to fathom Houllier's policy towards Steven Gerrard. Having publicly rebuked him after the fiasco in Basel, he started with him on the bench against Fulham. But surely this is the main man when it comes to giving Michael Owen the passes he wants to dash on to. Mysterious.

IT hasn't taken Nicolas Anelka long to get up to his old tricks. At the press conference that followed Manchester City's win at West Bromwich, manager Kevin Keegan was eulogizing him.

Anelka himself was insisting he was a changed young man, lamenting the fact that Fernando Morientes and Raul wouldn't give him the time of day at Real Madrid, confessing he had been wrong to go back to Paris Saint Germain. The word was that his ghastly agent-brothers had been banished from Maine Road. A new era had begun...

Until suddenly Anelka was complaining that City hadn't let him go to play in a charity match in Paris. Soon after that, when Jacques Santini announced the French squad for the friendly against Yugoslavia in Paris, Anelka wasn't in it. Till late in the day, Santini found himself short of strikers and asked Anelka to come to Paris. Anelka angrily refused.

The French provocatively asked the FA to suspend him from club football. To which the FA replied that legally the call had come for Anelka too late to make suspension feasible. Leopards and Anelkas don't change their spots, but I do have some sympathy with him over the Franco-Santini affair.

ALEX FERGUSON is no hero of mine. Ludicrously, he still won't attend post-match press conferences, yet he always talks to ITN's bland questioners after a Saturday game. But it irks me that United are still being blamed for withdrawing from the FA Cup to take part in that fiasco of a so-called Club World Championship in Brazil.

United never did want to go, but pressure was put on them by the FA and the government -- reportedly in the person of the ineffable ex-sports minister (yet, Tony we know you resigned and weren't sacked) Tony Banks. The fear being that were United not to go, vital votes would be lost when it came to deciding which country would stage the World Cup. They were lost anyway; Germany won.

But there do seem to be rays of hope that Blatter's ghastly regime at FIFA may be topped, now that Swiss investigators are really getting their teeth into the arcane financial dealings of ISL, the company so dear to Blatter and FIFA.

Meanwhile how little we hear now from those obliging journalists who defended the Adam Crozier regime on the grounds he was making the FA so much money.

Financial skeletons are falling out of the cupboard day by day while the hyper-expensive move to Soho Square (the big clubs now want Wembley) looks increasingly grotesque.

Still, don't blame Adam. Blame the birdbrains who appointed him.

"WE HAVE PUT IN A FANTASTIC PERFORMANCE," said Mark Hughes, after Wales, to my own great satisfaction, had won 2-0 in Baku against Azerbaijan.

No you hadn't Mark, and I'm sorry to see you succumb to managerspeak. Wales, however depleted, had beaten a team most of whose players (and several were absent) hadn't played a competitive match for weeks, thanks to a standoff between clubs and the local federation. Such eulogies should be reserved for wins like those against Finland and Italy.

MEANWHILE, at Southampton Arsene (Three Wise Monkeys) Wenger was at it again, seeing no evil in the palpable foul by the alarmingly shaky Pascal Cygan on James Beattie, which led to the latter's well-worked free kick goal. On that evidence, Arsenal cannot get Martin Keown back soon enough. Cygan is in the process of being found out.

Brian Glanville is Britain's most celebrated football writer. He also writes a monthly column in World Soccer magazine.

His latest book, a fully updated edition of THE STORY OF THE WORLD CUP is available in all good bookshops. Readers of worldsoccer.com can buy this highly-acclaimed history of the World Cup and enjoy a 10% discount by clicking here.