It was interesting to observe the differing interpretations of Liverpool FC in a week when the club experienced a re-birth. The decline of the Merseyside giants must have been of deep concern to those in the FA engine room, particularly given the predictions that the arrest would prove terminal. The club, went the argument, was married to arcane traditions and the city was simply not hip or cosmopolitan enough to attract the exotic stars from abroad. This is Anfield: so what?
After Wednesday night's childishly fantastic UEFA Cup win, it was clear that the commentators were correct about one thing: Liverpool is definitely not cool. It's players will never have Chelsea chic, or the ineffable glamour that wearing a Man United shirt affords or even the big city slickness that mid-table Spurs can always rely on.
Come to play for Liverpool and you are a Scouser, a Scally, a Corkhill.
Once, on FA Cup final day of 1995, the Liverpool team actually believed that it had achieved genuine coolness and the manifestation of that - those offwhite, Del Boy suits - remains the most embarrassing episode in the club's history.
Liverpool's apparent reclamation of old glories has been greeted with polemical viewpoints from the TV pundits. While Kop legends Alan Hansen and Mark Lawrenson were giddy with glee on BBC 1, the domestic pairing of Giles and Dunphy were not best pleased on Network 2.
Eamo', in fact, could hardly contain his outrage and in recent times seems to acknowledge every Liverpool victory as a personal insult. Still smarting from Arsenal's failure to beat the Scousers by the 4-1 margin they probably should have in the previous Saturday's FA Cup final, he raged like Lear on the heath against the Merseyside's first European triumph since 1984.
"I can deny them. It should be about the skill to win. Look at this Liverpool side - it's a mess. He's a bad coach. I say he is a bad coach. He took Owen off, he put Gerrard at right-back when he should have been running the game at midfield and he left Danny Murphy on for 110 minutes . . ."
More restrained, but equally nonplussed by the hooking of three Cups in one season was John Giles, who warned that Houllier had not built a team for the future. Dunphy contended that the run of 60-odd cup games was down to some sort of luck. For many weeks, he had predicted an abrupt end to the streak.
After Liverpool made it to the UEFA Cup semi-final, he happily assured us that Barcelona would eat them alive. It wasn't born out of any bias from Dunphy's part, simply that he believes that the current Liverpool style - boring pragmatism - is a betrayal of the Shankly/Paisley/Dalglish tradition and that they are imposters, not worthy of the praise.
There is little doubt that anyone with the interests of English football at heart - including the cross-channel soccer media - will welcome the return of a resurgent Liverpool without dissecting the blueprint for success too deeply. But it is worth looking at what a strong Liverpool side represents in the neon world of Premiership soccer.
BBC's documentary When Liverpool Ruled the World, broadcast as an appetiser to the final against Alaves was a fairly straightforward review of the club's continental adventures of the 1970s and '80s. What one was left with was not so much an admiration for the great victories so much as for the warmth of the city. The unforgettable quote about Dalglish's dialect - "He's never injured and even when he tells you he is, you can't understand him". The 1977 crowd banner: "We've eaten the Swiss rolls, had the Frogs legs and now we're Munching Gladback".
Best of all was the "perm" craze which spread from Phil Thompson and Phil Neal on to Lawrenson and into the terraces until practically every Scouser in the city had a big frizzy perm. That in turn led to the scene in Boys from the Blackstuff where Yosser Hughes, with regulation 'tache and perm meets a sulking Graham Souness and says, solemnly, "you look like me. And Magnum".
Liverpool's first European Cup final, in Rome, was remembered for the startling number of fridges and other household appliances sold by fans determined to make the trip. Twenty-five thousand turned up. Always swimming against the economic tide, Scousers had football and wit to sustain them.
That is why of all the current generation, Robbie Fowler will always be god on the Kop. After his goal on Wednesday night, George Hamilton observed that for Liverpool fans, it was the one they'd cherish most.
Fowler is one of them - far from hip, full of flaws but burning with talent and a sense of identity, of what it is to be a Liverpudlian. That infamous mimic of his alleged cocaine habit, when he bent over to snort the end line after scoring - that was part of it.
Mischievous, yes, but witty too. Even his inflammatory gesture to the preppy Graham Le Saux, insulting and wrong though it was, still earned many a private chuckle. Fowler isn't PC, he's a Scouser, an Anfield hero with butty legs and a stupid breathing apparatus on his schnozz. He will never make the front cover of Esquire but he will always sell extra copies of the Echo.
Maybe the sceptics are right. Maybe this season was just a cosmic interruption of Liverpool's slide to irrelevance. What seems clear, though, is that the football club can never become unimportant to the city. It is the city and vice versa.
People who spend time in Liverpool testify that it is a brilliantly warm place, maybe the way Dublin used to be before all the Tiger crap was peddled. But it is also, in places, astonishingly destitute.
So it is pointless talking of the future. The future is the 90 minutes, the "you'll never walk alone" anthem, the sense that even for an evening, the rest of the flashy soccer world is looking at their little red-bricked enclave with awe. In that sense even if Eamon Dunphy is right in the long term, he is still wrong.
