James Lawton: Houllier's escape into fantasy world in danger of becoming way of life

One way of coping with the madness of football management is to keep reality at bay. If you care enough about each result or, more significantly, performance, a really bad one can can ravage your equilibrium. So when one comes, you do the opposite of embracing it. You pretend it didn't happen.

Bill Shankly was the master of the art. When Ajax put five goals past big Ron Yeats and the "flying pig," goalkeeper Tommy Lawrence, Shankly snarled that the Dutch masters were a disgrace. "The most defensive team we've ever played," he declared.

There was an echo of that last weekend when Shankly's successor, Gérard Houllier, suggested that a few missed chances by his team were the reasons Chelsea inflicted a devastating defeat at Anfield.

The difference - and it is a huge one - is that for Shankly the occasional fantasy was a temporary escape hatch. For Houllier there is the danger that it is becoming a way of football life.

How long the Liverpool boardroom will indulge it has certainly become one of the big issues of the infant season. Everyone knows the value of Houllier, his essential decency as a man and excellent values as a leader of young men. The Anfield directors are famously, and honourably, grateful for Houllier's superb groundwork in changing the culture of the club and driving away the image of excessively self-regarding Spice Boys.

He also produced the superb bonus of trophy-winning, three in one season. But now, if you want to know the meaning of pressure in football, and understand how the stakes have been raised so dramatically by Roman Abramovich, the Tsar of Stamford Bridge, you only have to catch the expression of Houllier when he attempts to talk away the meaning of defeat.

Of course, you may say it is absurd that after just one round of the new Premiership campaign, Houllier's career is so plainly on the line, but if we agree that competitive pressures have been cranked up so enormously through the summer, we can hardly be surprised that there is a huge onus on the Frenchman to prove that he can indeed guide his team beyond the desperate frustrations of last season.

Houllier has had a budget, a massive one, and time - and his obligation, as never before, is to show that he has the philosophy, as well as the disciplinary values, that goes into producing a championship-winning team. Against Chelsea, Liverpool's play received little or no lift from the arrival of Harry Kewell. Houllier, it seemed, had bought another star to put behind a cloud. It is one thing, as so many have preached to Abramovich, to gather a collection of talented players. It is quite another to give them the means to play - and develop as a team.

Tomorrow at Villa Park, Houllier will be just a few yards along the touchline from his friend David O'Leary. A couple of years ago they were lords of the game. Now, O'Leary, quite as much as Houllier, is obliged to spring back from defeat on the opening day. Both men have been roughly acquainted with an immutable fact. Never before has there been such hard, quick pressure on the leading managers.

Glenn Hoddle is fighting for his managerial life at White Hart Lane. Normally an impressively honest football witness - Hoddle's unforgiving comments about those of his players who fail to produce proper professional discipline has often been an example to every manager in the game - his own difficulties were reflected by his intemperate remarks about a referee after the opening-day defeat by Birmingham City.

Almost everywhere you look there is a manager under pressure and nowhere is it more true than at Highbury, where Arsène Wenger's refusal to come to terms with disciplinary problems appears to be coming to a ludicrous head. How else can you describe Wenger's implicit support of his England centre-half Sol Campbell's absurd claims that he is being persecuted by referees?

Wenger's worry is not for his job, but his dream that he was on the point of mastering, and perhaps even humiliating, his bitter rival, Sir Alex Ferguson. Now his failure to strengthen his squad significantly, his grim acceptance that the vital business of building a new ground has sapped his ability to bring in fresh blood, has left clear strain where there should be the unbroken exhilaration of working with his brilliant creations - Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira and Robert Pires. Even here there was a cruel stab at his confidence - the heavy suggestion that Henry and Vieira were on Abramovich's shopping list.

All of this leaves us with one or two certainties. One is that self-serving double talk will be the working tool of most Premiership managers, and that one of the few exceptions will be Claudio Ranieri, who is perhaps under most temptation to say one thing and think another with the shadow of Abramovich and Sven Goran Eriksson, for all the denials, stretching so long. Ranieri's charmingly eccentric English is one aid to honesty. Another is the eloquence of his body language. When the plutocrats of Chelsea disappoint him, Ranieri will say it by stretching his arms to the heavens.

Another certainty is that one of today's managers will not use the device of Manchester City's Malcolm Allison, when his talented team suffered a bad defeat at Derby County. He persuaded his victorious rival, Brian Clough, to join with him in denouncing the quality of the team who occupied top place in the league. It meant that the morning headlines had little to do with City's abject performance.

One reason it wouldn't work today is that the victims of the scorn were Manchester United. Ferguson, bolstered by the arrival of the luminous young Cristiano Ronaldo, is for the moment out on his own. There is simply no escape from the reality of his strength.