For my sins, I currently have the extreme misfortune of having to drive 45 minutes to and from work each morning and night in a clapped out old L reg Renault Clio.
It's my old dear's old car, and it's sturdy and safe, but sadly it boasts a little FM/AM radio... the tape deck's busted, and the FM reception's painful on the ear. as a result, I find myself occasionally switching on the five lives and talksports of this world... and from time to time it's a guilty pleasure.
But here's the thing. I've realised that it's bad for me. You can spend your time broadening your mental horizons and maintaining the kind of long-term perspective that puts progress in its proper context, but if you listen to these stations for long enough, it's like supergluing a set of blinkers to your temples, zipping up a Lord Anthony parka over the top of that, and forcing you to sit in a pit of your own effluent (in my case that's not too bad as it smells of freshly baked empire biscuits, but you get my point). And as the joke goes, when the ads finish, the pit monitor turns to you and says "OK mate, back on your head".
Two incidents have given me a long-needed slap in the face over the last 24 hours and made me realise it's time to rip those blinkers off and get back to the view from the clouds, where patterns emerge and long-term progress beckons.
First up, someone posted a glimpse of a group of sadly like-minded souls festering in a pit of their own collective effluent in a thread called "Thoughts on Benitez". Fair play, the poster later emphasised that he was posting an article from another site, and that it didn't represent his own views... but it really introduced me to something i hadn't felt for a long time - nameless dread. the worry that we're being infested by a plague of bloody zombies.
Then I'm sat in my car this morning, only to hear these thoughts echoed time and again by people purporting to be Liverpool fans. Rafa has to go. Rafa is so arrogant that it's going to cost us the league. Liverpool will never get another chance like this to win the league. Blah blah, chuff chuff... people shuffling along the road with their severed entrails glistening the tarmac. Plague of the bloody zombies.
So you reach your work and get out of the car and next thing you know you've done half the distance to reception shuffling sideways and groaning 'Nnnngggaauuuuuuuhhhhh' out the side of your mouth...
WAKE UP!!
Sorry... had a little relapse there.
The thing is, from the clouds, things look reasonably good. We're top of the league. We finished the CL group stages top of our group. We've had Skrtel and Torres out for long periods, we've shouldered sub-par performances both as a collective and from certain players (at times from new additions but also from seasoned pros who we should expect better from)... but still we've somehow found a way to emerge in our current position. All this having been engaged in third or fourth gear for most of the time, and maybe hitting fifth for a few sporadic spells, let alone the sixth we know the squad is potentially capable of when everyone's fit.
But the zombies are gathering outside the Winchester, hungry for chubby Spanish flesh. The camp legendary plastic paddy zombie says Keane's leaving on a jet plane, the rank and file zombies moan that the manager is arrogant, will never win the league, that we'll never get a chance like this again, that the scouting system's fucked up... and meanwhile the militant lunatic zombies tell us rafa's outspent NASA during his tenure and ought to have cured cancer by now.
Meanwhile, inside the boozer, a little compos mentis county, a few sage souls wave and try to catch our attention... ehm... guys - anyone realise our club's in the process of getting an intercontinental transatlantic parisitic bumming?
We need to fend these zombie f_ckers off and remember what's working at the club, despite everything that threatens to ruin it.
P.S. I realise I post some variant on this theme every so often, but you know what? If you don't like it, then tough... cos I'm going to keep reminding people of it whenever I can.
