Why Winning The Carling Cup Matters to Liverpool

John Henry and Tom Werner have a mission to promote Liverpool Football Club in their own country, a huge, strange land where "soccer" is mainly a game for children and grown men play netball for massive amounts of cash.
America is a land where narrative has power, founded on a dream. A land of settlers, each coming from other lands, bringing their own culture, their own stories. It's no coincidence that Hollywood is in the USA, the American people love a good story, be it funny, sentimental or, above all, triumphant. They see themselves as the world's leaders, the winners of WWII and the Cold War, the big players on the world money markets, the creators of much of the technology that drives the internet age. If they are going to get interested in a football team, that team needs to win something (with the help of some good-old American know-how, naturally)

Not much is often said about our club chairman, Tom Werner. John Henry usually puts himself up as the face of FSG, the senior investor, principle owner, what have you. Henry is a speculator by trade, a man who plays financial markets and has done excellently from it. That's what he knows. Werner, on the other hand, is a media collossus.

This is the man who made Roseanne and The Cosby Show, That 70's Show and vehicles for stars like Whoopi Goldberg and Cybill Shepherd. There are very few people in TV with the kind of track record of Tom Werner, and with that comes a list of contacts of people in television, a lot of whom will owe their careers to the man. If Tom Werner makes a phonecall, it gets answered.

So if we can beat Cardiff (and let's take nothing for granted here, we've struggled against poorer sides) you can bet images of Steven Gerrard lifting that cup will be making their way onto every sports bulletin on US TV. And that audience doesn't have the cynical attitudes to the Carling Cup of some of the British media, because 95% of them have no idea what the fuck the Carling Cup is.

All they will see is Liverpool, the winners. And here's the narrative, Henry and his boys have come over to the club when it was on its knees, when it hadn't won a trophy for several years, and they have delivered. In the same way that Rafa, Luis Garcia and Alonso made Liverpool the second side for every football supporter in Spain on that night in Istanbul, millions of Americans could start to be drawn towards LFC as a lifestyle. As they say in the movies, this could be beginning of a beautiful friendship.