Sideline Cut: It has been a rare week for Liverpool fans, a group no longer accustomed to witnessing the audacious or the down-right lucky when it comes to the Reds, writes Keith Duggan.

But from Neil Mellor's once-in-a-lifetime strike against Arsenal to the League Cup theft at White Hart Lane, it was a bright beginning to the Christmas season and provided a fleeting reminder of what Liverpool used to be.

The longer Liverpool struggle to stave off a slide into permanent mediocrity - the illusion they belong in the same realm as MUFC, Arsenal and Chelsea is beginning to dissolve - the more poignant the club becomes. Just as the heritage of Leeds United was terribly compromised by flying too close to the sun Liverpool is a club caught in stasis, wistful and respectful towards its glorious past while hell-bent on reclaiming a voice at the high table of English football.

The revelation by club chairman David Moores that his worry for the financial and sporting future of Liverpool has caused him countless sleepless nights is believable.

The interesting thing about Liverpool is it remains a family-based club respectful of its local roots and of the fans' voice throughout a period when its adversaries have travelled at the speed of light towards becoming streamlined and untouchable business interests. The board of Liverpool FC has behaved with some semblance of loyalty and decency in the departure of two largely unsuccessful (by Anfield standards) managers, Roy Evans and Gerard Houllier.

It has dithered and agonised over the leaving of Anfield for the new 60,000 capacity stadium a few hundred yards up the road at Stanley Park. It has resisted a succession of attempted acquisitions of the club, most notably by businessman Steve Morgan. He has promised, if permitted to buy controlling shares, to pump £100 million into the club by the new year. Such money, for a club straddled to a new stadium with spiralling estimated costs and a debt of £22 million, is difficult - and possibly foolhardy - to turn down in the cut-throat world of Premiership football.

Moores' acceptance that he might, reluctantly, have to consider making way for the money brokers eager to transform Liverpool into the Chelsea of the Northeast, gives the impression of a broken man.

More than most sporting clubs, Liverpool are acutely conscious of their own history and paralysed, to some extent, by the influence of Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley. There is a theory in sport that the ascension of a single man into a mythical, irreplaceable figure is a dangerous thing. And even when Liverpool was winning the European Cup under Joe Fagan and the domestic double under Kenny Dalglish, there was an impression the club, and those who loved it, were reliving an earlier epoch rather than experiencing something fresh and exciting.

Sometimes the decline of Liverpool seems to me to be bound up in the personality of Robbie Fowler. Ten years ago, Fowler, with the ruddy features and chubby legs and impeccable balance was in the midst of a season that would yield him 31 goals. He put a hat-trick past Arsenal in just four minutes. If Wayne Rooney did that today, he would be elected Prime Minister.

Even in the crass early years of the Premiership, Fowler had the cut of the old-fashioned about him and if some of his more outrageous gestures were in poor taste, he was funny and real and, at his best, brilliant. But he lost his way in a period of general aimlessness at Liverpool and it is kind of sad to think of him languishing up the road at Manchester City when he might, in a parallel world, have evolved into the key figure of Liverpool's renaissance.

There is an irony in the recent suggestions that Liverpool enter a ground-sharing agreement with their city rivals Everton given that way back in 1898 John Houlding formed the Anfield club after splitting from his former Goodison colleagues in disagreement. The new club instantly looked north for Scottish players, a trait that did not go down well locally at first but was part of the club's tradition by the time Shankly came along to make the club an omnipotent force.

The inevitable departure from Anfield has led to widespread debate locally, in fanzines and the Echo newspaper and even among academics in the city. Demolishing Anfield is for some an act of wilful destruction, tantamount to killing off the club itself.

If a Liverpool fan can no longer enter the Spion Kop the same way as his or her grandfather did, is it the same club anymore, league titles or not? Against that, if the club stays loyal to the ground - with its famous declamation "This Is Anfield" above the players' tunnel - and falls towards irredeemable mid-league anonymity, is it the same club anymore?

The romantic ideals of the Liverpool boot-room, the war-time sensibility and ambition of Shankly, the notion of a local family owning a local sports club as though it were a woollen mill; none of this counts for anything when set against the vast riches of an arriviste like Roman Abramovich.

When a small group of Anfield traditionalists began a campaign to keep the club at the old ground, they were actually given a hearing by Moores and Liverpool board.

It is fun to imagine what sort or reception a group of ordinary insurrectionists might be given if they demanded a meeting with the board at Stamford Bridge. A 10-year ticket to the mining town that spawned Abramovich would be as likely as a meeting over tea and buns.

It is arguable that for the sake of competition and variety alone, English football needs a resurgent Liverpool, even if that means the nostalgia of the Paisley era is drowned out in a flood of foreign cash and new commercialism. Because Anfield - and indeed Goodison - remains fervently a working class area, there is a stronger possibility that the feel of the club will remain true and recognisable to those for whom following Liverpool was about an expression of self and locality.

But you can understand the fear and the reluctance in what sounded like a resignation speech from Moores and you can empathise with the abhorrence of the working classes of Liverpool to admit money and not local skill or wit or imagination is the only way forward.

It is a dilemma. Maybe it is better to struggle on, losing touch with the glittering empires of new football and to enjoy an odd moment of magnificence as against Arsenal last weekend. It is either that or embrace what is tantamount to a car-boot sale of the beliefs and tradition and perhaps the very soul of a sporting club that was carefully bettered over an entire century.

No doubt about it but money could buy Liverpool silverware once again. However the terrifying fear for Liverpool fans, particularly those living in the shadow of the Kop, is not so much they might not feel quite the same about the new success but they might not feel anything at all.