Picture this if you will. It is just after five o'clock on any Saturday afternoon when Premiership football is being played; the venue is irrelevant. The press room door swings open and in marches the managerial representative of Liverpool.

In reverential silence we listen to one man, one opinion, one perspective. Or, rather, we did.

If football is indeed a sport driven and sustained by the common currency of rumour, is it really any wonder that Liverpool's bold experiment in shared managerial stewardship should have become the focal point for so much intrigue and speculation?

Those supporters whose patience has been eroded by several seasons of mediocrity will argue that as British football's most successful club seeks a first league title in nine years, Anfield is playing host to one too many cooks and that the fare on offer is of the Dickensian, rather unenticing variety.

Three weeks ago, after a particularly inept performance against Charlton Athletic, the team coached, encouraged and selected by Gerard Houllier and Roy Evans were jeered as they crawled apologetically back towards the dressing-room.

Worse was to follow. Having delivered a damning verdict on the players, Joe Public raced home and picked up the nearest telephone to denounce the backroom staff. The common thread running through phone-in broadcasts on Radio Merseyside and Radio City was: why had one suddenly become two?

It was the curious timing of Houllier's reappearance on Merseyside (he taught there briefly in 1969) which prompted so many knowing smiles in the watering holes.

Liverpool had disappointed last season, badly so, but Evans had been promised at least one more crack at the big prizes. But with the World Cup promoting the idea that all things French were suddenly quite wonderful, Houllier decided to leave his country's football association and move back into club management after a break of some 10 years.

His reputation preceded him and a queue of chequebook-waving chairmen lay in wait. Houllier was invited to fill vacancies at Celtic and Sheffield Wednesday and was mulling over his options when Liverpool stepped in for him.

It is likely that the more influential members of the Anfield aristocracy had pencilled in Houllier as Evans's eventual successor and that, by tossing his beret into the ring 12 months earlier than had been anticipated, the Frenchman had induced a measure of panic inside the Liverpool boardroom.

With Houllier anxious to play first violin rather than second fiddle, a compromise had to be found and so was born the notion that two heads could be better than one. It is debatable whether Evans was consulted or even informed. It did not really matter, because even if Evans had screamed the place down Houllier would still have been taken on to the payroll.

On the day of Houllier's public unveiling even Evans's fiercest critics - perhaps even those at Everton, who play Liverpool today - would have taken pity on him. The Scouser and the Frenchman sat together and laughed together. They smiled engagingly as they reasssured each other that everything was going to be all right.

And yet - whisper it - the Bootle bootroom boy made good was sitting beside the man who would inevitably replace him. It was past and future meeting in the present and it was uncomfortable.

As the more cynical departed muttering, "It will never work," the pair diligently set about stoking up the flames of passion inside a love affair of someone else's design. It was, and probably still is, football's most transparent marriage of convenience.

And now, three months after the ceremony, there are joint press conferences, joint declarations of intent and, ludicrously, joint programme notes. The big question is what happens when the two men fall out big time: what happens when joint manager A wants one thing and joint manager B wants another? Who gets the final say?

It is a rhetorical question, of course, because when push comes to shove it will not be a case of survival of the fittest or the most able but the survival of the newest.

Evans has unwittingly been asked to pull together all the strands of the traditional no-win scenario; if Liverpool do well Houllier will get the credit, but if things go wrong Evans will carry the can.

In France a close acquaintance of Houllier said he knew the former coach of Lens, Paris SaintGermain and France had been expecting changes for some weeks at Anfield that could lead to a "bigger role" for himself; he declined to give further details.

"He's always been the thinking man's trainer, even when it wasn't fashionable," said a former player in France. "It's the same kind of approach that has brought Arsene Wenger such success at Arsenal. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the Liverpool bosses had decided they wanted more of that."

Evans is one of the most approachable and decent men ever to grace management in England and, significantly, he continues to enjoy the unequivocal support of David Moores, his chairman and friend.

But after more years in the fast lane than he will care to remember, Evans will not need to be reminded that in his chosen sport sentiment is an emotion extended only to faithful tea ladies and loyal groundsmen. Managers tend to fare less well, particularly when the problem of finding a suitable replacement has already been addressed.