Open one deal with the contents close it again move on to the next Barcelona Wycombe Bradford Birmingham Roma

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Open one, deal with the contents, close it again, move on to the next Barcelona, Wycombe, Bradford, Birmingham, Roma. Few clubs have ever been presented with such a variety of footballing conundrums.Through it all, Houllier has maintained a stoic calm. He will admit only to a speeding pulse during the last 10 minutes of the second leg against Barcelona when all pretence at tactical elaboration had been sacrificed to the simple expedient of keeping the ball as far away from the home goal as possible, and to one outright dust-up which, emanating from such an essentially courteous man, must have hit the Liverpool dressing room with the force of a thunderbolt. "I won't tell you which game it was, but the substitutes came on and they made my team worse," Houllier recalled. "They were going through the motions, they didn't bring what I was expecting.

I can tell you, I'm never angry but that was the one day I nearly hit a player. I had to be calmed down by Phil Thompson, which was something funny."The incident tells you much about Houllier's preoccupation with the notion of football as a 14-man game. The players at Manchester United know which is their First XI. "It does not feel like a rotation system when you're not in it," as Teddy Sheringham said. Ask any Liverpool player to pick the first team and he will be baffled by the question. Selection depends on tactical variations, on individual form, on levels of fatigue, on what team might be picked a week later, on the direction of the wind for all they know, which is why a series of Liverpool players, from Michael Owen to Christian Ziege and Danny Murphy, appeared before the media recently without a guarantee that any of them would be playing a part in either of the cup finals.Houllier could not have asked for stronger support for his philosophy or justification for his recent expenditure than the demands of a 61-game season.

Even the most enthusiastic of Liverpool players, those who would instinctively prefer Bill Shankly's "same team as last year" policy, have had to acknowledge that, whatever the personal frustrations, the team would not have survived such a gruelling schedule without a decent break. Yet the idea that warming the bench constitutes a significant contribution to the cause is still anathema to the most committed players. It is, says Houllier, all in the mind."When a substitute comes on, the two teams have lost about 20 per cent of their energy," he explains. "If the sub has the right frame of mind, he can change the game. You play Coventry, you've got Robbie Fowler and Emile Heskey and, OK, they push, they push, they push. You take off Robbie because they leave a lot of spaces and bring on Michael [Owen]."Now, when you've been tormented for an hour by Robbie and Emile and then the little lad comes on with his pace Well, you've got to use that It's a team thing. Michael, a full international, was on the bench for the Worthington Cup final He didn't play for one minute.