I was supposed to be a Chelsea supporter. My father was one, and that was because his father had died.
Bear with me. This is a Dickensian story. My grandparents, trying to better themselves, had bought a little house on the London/Essex border. Digging in the garden during a storm my grandfather contracted pneumonia and died. My grandmother lost the house, my father, aged six, was incarcerated in the local orphans’ asylum and my grandmother went into service for a family called the Dugdales. At their house in Chelsea, she cooked, cleaned and made the debutante dress of daughter Rose. I like to think that Rose’s left-wing notoriety – she later became an IRA activist – owed something to my grandmother’s story.
It was visiting his mother during school holidays that made my father a Chelsea supporter and decades later he duly attempted to indoctrinate his kids. He took me to my first match: Chelsea v Liverpool. It was the late 60s or early 70s. The atmosphere around Stamford Bridge was one of threat. I was surprised by the silence. Outside the ground, the only sound from the Chelsea supporters was made by their trudging feet. Inside, they sat glumly while the Liverpool supporters who had infiltrated the stand were vocal, amusing, passionate. We got talking. I was sold, even without the performance on the pitch. This was the era of Smith, Yeats and Hughes, of the majestic Roger Hunt. As I remember it, Hunt scored one of Liverpool’s goals – a screamer from a distance. Tambling pulled one back for the opposition but it never seemed likely they’d get another. The red machine was awe-inspiring.
Back home, I announced I had found my team. My family had loads of Scouse friends, printers who had moved down south and later manned the barricades against Murdoch. I told them I supported Liverpool, expecting a welcome to the ranks. To a man, they were blues. I mean, f*cking hell - you expect your parents to be embarrassing but not to that extent.
My father was concerned. He knew one of the Cobham trainers and they made a last ditch effort to convert me. I, not my brother, was sent to meet Charlie Cooke. There’s a picture somewhere – him smiling benignly next to this sulky, skinny lad. ‘I support Liverpool,’ I told him. ‘Great team,’ said Charlie.
From all this, you’ll understand why, for this OOT, the matches against Chelsea are the ones that get the adrenalin pumping, the stomach somersaulting. The family bragging rights, the banter, not to mention the high-stakes regularity of recent cup battles - from ‘Luis Garcia, he drinks Sangria’ to Riise’s missing right foot - I’ve crowed or sulked throughout like that kid in the stands. My father was a difficult man to get to know, so football was a connection, and when two years ago he was diagnosed with dementia, it was our single connection as his brain died and he disappeared, replaced by a self-centred, delusional, accusatory doppelganger.
March this year: ‘John Terry’s playing for Liverpool this weekend, Dad.’ A weak smile. He still knew this was banter. ‘Never.’ And then he told me he’d given up watching football because the television had confused the shirts. There was nothing left to talk about. He died not long after, bruised hands plucking at a canula, the eternal skull on a stained hospital pillow.
We know the background to this weekend’s fixture. We know Mourinho is in his cyclical melt-down stage, his gloom and sense of persecution apparently worsened by his own father’s illness, for which I feel sympathy - though I hope I did not behave like such a c*ck to others when my father was dying. We know that Klopp is attempting to transition these Liverpool players from reaction to dynamism, not just on the pitch, not just in the defensive play, but mentally, too. We have no character. We have no Smith or Yeats or Hughes. That for me, is his biggest problem and one he alluded to after the Southampton game, the mental passivity that now seems to be baked in. But there are grounds for optimism. I gathered from the excellent RAWK poster BassTunedToRed that the Shots on Target Ratio is a crucial one. Exploring the stats with him further (this was before last weekend’s fixtures) he tells me:
‘Chelsea's shots on target ratio has plummeted from 63% last season to 43%. In other words, they've gone from having a top three shot profile to that of a team likely to finish around fifteenth (in theory; surely they'll improve?)
‘Liverpool, meanwhile, clock in at 59% in 2015/16, which suggests their underlying performance hasn't been too shabby at all (as teams finishing fourth average 60%), so if Klopp can sharpen the team up a little at both ends then good results should follow soon enough.’
There’s plenty of food for thought for RAWK to discuss and I joined RAWK primarily to learn tactics and methods. But essentially football remains for me a fierce visceral loyalty. Which is why there’s no room for sentimentality, nor even maturity, this weekend. As Tomo! wrote in the Mourinho thread:
‘Hope he gets the sack after playing us and his cock falls off in the shower.’
