My writing generally comes from the heart, and what's in my heart right now is...
I came for the football. I was a young boy, seven years of age and falling in love with the game after watching Diego Maradona, Careca and Michael Laudrup, amongst others, doing their thing at Mexico ‘86. And with every other kid in my class, my school, my street supporting a club, I suppose I figured that I should too. Liverpool happened to be that club.
The first team I really remember comprised Barnes, Beardsley, Aldridge, McMahon, Hansen, Gillespie, Houghton, and so on. You know the one. It was the team that annihilated Nottingham Forest 5-0 at Anfield one evening in a game that the legendary Tom Finney was moved to describe as “the finest exhibition I’ve seen the whole time I’ve played and watched the game” [for some context, there are two quotes attributed to Bill Shankly that sum up his feelings about Finney: “Tom Finney would have been great in any team, in any match and in any age…even if he had been wearing an overcoat” and (asked how one contemporary player compared to Finney) “Aye, he’s as good as Tommy – but then Tommy’s nearly 60 now”]. This was the same team that equalled the record for most games unbeaten from the start of a season, and which did so not merely through defensive strength but attacking majesty, scoring 87 goals across 40 games. The same team that warranted the entire 1987/88 Match of the Day ‘Goal of the Season’ competition for themselves. I still have that footage saved somewhere and I still can’t pick a top three, it’s utterly impossible – McMahon chasing a lost cause out to the touchline against Arsenal, a move that ended with a typical Aldridge finish from inside the six-yard box, or clipping the ball into the top corner against Manchester United with the outside of his boot; there was Nicol’s run down the wing and sublime chip at St. James’ Park against Newcastle; what about Barnes escaping from the corner against Forest, taking out about four players in one flowing, majestic run before squaring for Beardsley; there was Beardsley’s lofted pass from the halfway line earlier in the same game that sent Aldridge away for the opener; there was the magnificent volley from the little Geordie magician in front of the Kop in the Merseyside derby; oh, and of course that Barnes goal against QPR.
What a team, and what an introduction to the game for this young lad. This was like arriving into a restaurant for the first time and being served fillet steak, Cuban cigars and 100 year-old Scotch by a bevy of lingerie models, payment optional. I came for the football, and I got my fill of just about the best kind I could have ever hoped for. But that’s a long time ago now. These days I’m a man, 33 years old, and a lot has changed. I looked at the game back then with a kind of innocent, wide-eyed wonder that has evaporated almost entirely in the intervening years. It was naivety, in truth. Football, even the kind played by the likes of John Barnes and Peter Beardsley, seemed awfully similar to what I was doing with my friends in the street (and, in fact, I’m pretty sure that the green in front of my house had a better surface than Plough Lane ever did, dogshit and all). As I got older, however, I learned that football wasn’t just a game but a ‘sport,’ and with that came a certain amount of knowledge. Then that sport began to change in front of my eyes, and as time went by, there was less and less to like about it. If you had handed me a pen and paper back in 1987 and asked me to write out a list of what I loved and hated about football, the former would have outnumbered the latter by at least ten-to-one. These days, I wouldn’t even waste my time or yours. These days, when even the things I love about it seem to drive me towards hating them too, we’d probably both be fit to self-harm by the time I was done writing. Now, a lot of that might simply be down to the wisdom that comes with age, and maybe it was always like that to some extent. Yet so much has changed that it feels like I’m in an entirely different place now from where I started some 26 years ago, even though I never moved a muscle. I started off sitting in the living-room of a cosy little three-bed terraced house which, after years of refurbishments, extensions and alterations, has now become a towering ten-storey apartment block massed around me, and you know what? I fucking hate it, and I don’t even know why I’m still sat here.
Well, that’s a lie, actually. I do know why I’m still sat here, but sometimes I need to remind myself because it’s not something you can stick on your mantle, sit back and admire every day. It’s not something you can wear, or something you can reach out and touch, something you can take a snap of and then upload to your Facebook page; it’s not tangible, in other words, and so sometimes you forget. It’s even easier to do so now that football has become some kind of Vegas Strip where the senses are continuously being bombarded, where it’s so hard even to adjust your eyes to the glare of the bright lights and, once you have, all you see is a hundred colourful signs flashing hypnotically and directing you here, there and everywhere to empty your pockets. Luckily, it’s something that the moneymen and marketing experts of this world haven’t quite figured out how to slap a price tag on just yet, although we can be sure they have their best people working on it. It’s certainly been used to shift replica shirts and other assorted merchandise, hospitality packages, match tickets and God knows what else in the past, but it’s something that has yet to be packaged and put on a shelf in the conventional sense. And although it has taken heavy fire over the years and suffered quite a bit of damage along the way, it remains the one element of modern football that provides a connection to another time, that unites us with our dads and granddads, our uncles and granduncles, perhaps to those people who were present back in December 1959 when Glenbuck’s most famous son arrived at Anfield and changed everything forever, allowing someone like my younger self to discover and fall in love with this great club 28 years later even though I had never even set foot in the city of Liverpool.
Part of what I’m describing is obvious, and it’s something that every football supporter, regardless of affiliation, has shared for as long as they’ve been supporting their team. It’s imagination, a spark that sets the mundane afire; it’s inspiration, even as we struggle to pay our bills, raise our families and be a rock to the people we love, the seemingly routine but utterly essential shit we do every day of our lives. Back then, there was work and home for five or six days of the week, maybe even seven, then the release of football on a Saturday; these days we have different things to occupy us, other priorities, altered work patterns, and football can pop up on any day of the week at virtually any time of the day. The essentials, though, remain the same. It’s what has me salivating at the prospect of tomorrow’s game, at the prospect of couple of pints and watching my team hopefully make it back-to-back wins to start the season. How will they line up? Same as last week? How will we limit Benteke’s influence? Will Henderson start, or maybe Allen? What about Aspas? Will Mignolet still be as nervous under high balls as he started last week, or will those two saves from Walters and the one from Jones settle him down? And so on. It’s the kind of stuff supporters have been doing for years, and when you take away the bells and whistles, it’s still far and away the most exciting thing about football.
There is, however, something more fundamental and infinitely more important at play here for me that goes beyond mere football. Honestly, if it was still just about the football for me, I would have walked away a long time ago. The modern game is not who I am, but the club I started supporting 26 years ago, amazingly, still is. I’ve wondered about that plenty of times, believe me, but something has always drawn me close even as I contemplated pulling away. At the club’s lowest ebb, when RBS was knocking on the door, when Hicks in particular was trying feverishly to refinance his loans, when our best manager for a generation, one of us, had been allowed to walk alone out the door and be replaced by a man who was advertised as someone who would ‘steady the ship’ but instead seemed happy to merely maintain its course towards the rocks, it was the concerted, gutsy campaigns of the supporters that ended up saving the club. And when the new owners came in and remained aloof, essentially running the club from hundreds of miles away and dragging one of the biggest legends this club has ever seen halfway across the world to sack him, there was still the realisation of what the man represented and continues to represent, they could never take that away. And all the while, there was the Justice Campaign which finally bore fruit last year and threatens to bear even more in the near-future, the work of a group of courageous mothers and fathers (ably supported by the fans) who were put through Hell by the establishment and whose tireless work, 23 years after the fact, got an unequivocal apology out of a Conservative Prime Minister in front of the entire world. Even during six and a half years where the club had been sold into foreign hands and almost ceased to exist at one stage, there was still Rafael Benítez, Kenny Dalglish and Steven Gerrard; there was still Anne Williams and Margaret Aspinall; we still had inspiration coming out our ears. And there was still us.
We lose sight of the fact that this remains no mere club, that it represents something far more than just football. It’s so easy to forget when we’re sent scurrying in a million different directions by the loud, brash distractions of modern football, but football and football clubs can be sold, ideals and principles cannot. It’s why I’m happy to embrace the past, to celebrate the people who went before and the things they did and said, even at the risk of being labelled ‘sentimental’ by those who simply don’t get it. People either talk up the relevance of history or talk it down, depending on what point they want to make. I cherish it, not because Liverpool won more trophies in the past, but because history tells you who you are. One of the reasons we were all so lucky to be born or drawn to this particular club is that it already had a sense of itself that resonated with us. It’s a reflection of its city, and also of that man who arrived in 1959. We saw it when Rafa cried at the Hillsborough service, when Kenny greeted the players coming off the Anfield pitch after the League Cup semi-final against Manchester City with tears in his eyes; we saw it when Steven Gerrard refused Chelsea (twice) and when Simon Mignolet’s penalty save was greeted by a deafening, sustained roar last Saturday that seemed to just keep going and going. We see it time and time again. And I see it in our manager. It’s easy to laugh at the language he uses sometimes, but when he said things like “I grew up, not with a silver spoon, but with a silver shovel” and “we have a standard at Liverpool and I will fight for my life to retain it”, I thought “alright, Brendan, you’ll do for me, lad.”
Belief is a fragile and valuable thing, but somehow, after all these years, I’ve still got it. I believe in Brendan Rodgers and I believe in his team. I believe in hard work, respect, honesty, courage and, most of all, community. Some question whether we're getting any of that from the boardroom; I don't know, but I believe we'll get it from this manager and this team, regardless of trophies. And I believe in us. That’s why I’m still here; I came for the football, but I stayed for Liverpool F.C.
