The plight of the game north of the border could only be underlined by

The plight of the game north of the border could only be underlined by the fact that Souness makes no great claim for his team at its present stage of development.Indeed, last season’s Worthington Cup win and entry into Europe, on top of survival in the Premiership, represented striking gains for the apparently played-out club he guided back to the big time so recently. Certainly, those achievements were seen as a basis for long-term future progress rather than some instant busting into the ?te of the English game.For all the modesty of their situation, however, Souness’s team looked as if they had come out of an entirely superior drawer. The craft of Tugay Kerimoglu, the running and touch of Damien Duff, the powerful emergence in the second half of the recently injured David Dunn, and the constant threat posed by the old swordsmen Dwight Yorke and Andy Cole pointed to a potency, albeit unfulfilled on the night, way beyond the resources of the celebrated home team.The result was that we were, starting 24 hours earlier at Anfield, able to take a slide rule to the relative strengths of three European leagues: in ascending order, those of Scotland, England and Spain.That La Liga sits firmly on top of this particular pyramid was established beyond a scintilla of doubt by Valencia’s beautifully pitched outplaying of the Premiership leaders, Liverpool. Then, when you measured the gap between the expectations of Liverpool and Blackburn and applied it to the huge gap between the game of the latter and Celtic, the scale of the Scottish predicament was clear enough.Celtic failed the credibility test just as they did in the qualifying round of the Champions’ League when defeated by Basle. They were sufficiently animated by the roar of their crowd to scuffle to a result.

Yet the defeat was one which did little to impinge on the sense that Souness has the sure calculation, after some years of doubt and trauma following serious heart surgery, to operate profitably amid the game’s unrelenting and unforgiving pressures: he is, indeed, the serious football man he has always believed himself to be.His return to the city where he made his managerial reputation, and mocked sectarian madness with his signing of Rangers’ first Catholic player, Maurice Johnston, was certainly an impressive business.If a team speaks for its manager on the field, Blackburn were eloquent enough in all but the hard edge of killer instinct, which always a key element in Souness’s own formidable repertoire as a midfielder of the highest quality. That, Souness would no doubt say, is surely his next order of business, one which should not prove unassailable with the presence of Yorke and Cole and the recovering Matt Jansen.Twenty-fours after Liverpool’s creative failure against Valencia, maybe it was inevitable that there might be some speculation on what would have happened if Souness had not fallen so early in his attempts to reanimate his old club.The popular wisdom is that Souness “rushed his fences” when he returned to Anfield to find what might have been described as a hotbed of complacency. When this is put to him he tends to scowl and say: “Maybe I didn’t rush my fences quickly enough.” Like the man in the opposite corner of the ring at Parkhead, Martin O’Neill, Souness has a passion for the game and an intolerance of indifference which it is always good to see prospering. The same is true of G?rd Houllier, the week’s conspicuous loser in the Autumn Credibility Stakes. But, of course, it was a loss which had to be placed in the strictly relative category.However much you suspect that Souness, had he survived his first drive to return Liverpool to the best of their traditions, might have brought creative dimensions which are currently missing at Anfield, you surely cannot do so without acknowledging the qualities that Houllier has installed and which are still be be fully integrated in the make-up of Souness’s Blackburn.Houllier has created a team of utterly authentic competitive instinct, one which came close to wiping out the vast technical advantage enjoyed by Valencia.

It meant that in their different ways, Houllier, Souness and O’Neill, whose team was no less outclassed than Liverpool’s, had all left impressive imprints on the week’s most scrutinised action.What they could not do was compensate for the decline of competitive standards in their separate theatres of action. One result was that the Battle of Britain could never rise above the status of a local and rather minor dispute.. The Sunderland midfielder Claudio Reyna has been ruled out for six months – which is effectively the remainder of the season – with a cruciate ligament injury. The US national team orthopaedic consultant, Mandel Boum, flew in from the States yesterday to see Reyna and deliver the bad news.The 29-year-old needs an operation, but surgery cannot be carried out until the swelling has settled, so it will be scheduled for between two and three weeks’ time in Los Angeles.The new Sunderland manager Howard Wilkinson said: “We will find out in the next three or four weeks how much we will miss Claudio,” he said. “His problem is somebody else’s opportunity.”Obviously you don’t want to to lose good players, but the fact is we have lost him and we have to move on.