All I feel after last night is gratitude and pride. Not for the first time as a Liverpool supporter.
They say you are what you eat. We football supporters, regardless of our colours, are fed in several different ways. We are fed by the organisations which govern the game: the F.A., UEFA, FIFA, and so on. We are fed by the referees and match officials appointed by these governing bodies. We are fed by the media: newspapers, magazines, books, radio and television shows. This is our basic diet, and it is shared by supporters of every club.
It isn’t always nutritious, that’s for sure. Sometimes it seems downright poisonous. Most of the time, however, it leads to simple malnourishment. We get just enough sustenance to survive and keep coming back for more, but it’s unhealthy and very few among us can ever claim to be truly sustained by it. Most times, the pollution of our food chain is then further compounded by the greed of agents and their players, the widespread cheating of said players and their managers, and the hypocrisy and corruption endemic in the game at both boardroom and managerial level.
Let’s be honest, no supporter wants diving in the game. Whatever club we support, every single one of us would rid football of this cancer across the board if given the choice, and along with it the feigning of injuries, the intimidation of referees and all of the other blights too. These are elements that wouldn’t even occur to us when we first pick up a football and have a kick around with our friends after school. It’s not the game as we know it and love it, so why would any of us want cheating like that to infect football? We wouldn’t. That’s something we all have in common.
The problem comes when a member of the team you support specialises in such acts. Unfortunately, most football supporters tend to look away when that happens. Didier Dropba, for example, is beloved by Chelsea fans. Yet no right-thinking individual who love football could ever possibly condone what this man does on a game-to-game basis. Not one person who truly has any affection for this sport could have looked on in the opening moments of last night’s game as he feigned injury off the pitch and then rolled back on to get the game stopped, and not be disgusted. Yet the supporters of his club exalt him.
Why is that? Are we to assume that Chelsea supporters see diving, cheating, feigning of injury as part of the fabric of the game? And is it only Chelsea supporters? Did Man. United fans not defend Ronaldo through the worst years of his cheating (he’s way behind Dropba on that score nowadays)? Didn’t everyone laugh when Jurgen Klinsmann arrived in England and joked about his years of blatant cheating? Arsenal supporters didn’t really care when Pires would dive, did they? And us, well, we take a dodgy penalty when we get it (Gerrard in Marseille in 2007 immediately springs to mind).
I think the crucial thing with us as a support is that we take such things when they occur, but we do not condone it. I think if we’re being honest, we would prefer Stevie and Nando never to go down when they can stay on their feet. We tend to appreciate honesty, in my experience, and if the attitudes on this site towards cheats like Drogba and Ronaldo are anything to go by, then we despise gamesmanship with a passion.
Yet we very rarely get that with Liverpool, do we? Outside of the occasional lapse by Luis Garcia or Stevie over the years (and, very occasionally, Nando), we have had honest teams going right back to Shankly and beyond. And though the game has changed immeasurably in recent years, and respect for the rules has sadly slipped, we have remained a clean team, routinely near the top of the fair play league and without one serial cheat in our team. Occasionally, one of our players might feel contact and go down. We don’t condone that. But there has never been, and I hope there never will be, any institutionalised acceptance of cheating at our club as there has been at others (our opponents last night a prime example).
So what is it? Why is it accepted by some and not by others?
Because we are what we eat.
Football supporters support. We support our teams, that’s what we do. Chelsea fans have been fed a steady stream of cheats for a long while, certainly since Mourinho took over. They didn’t bat an eyelid when Robben got Reina sent off in 2006, when Gudjohnsen got Xabi booked out of the semi-final second leg in 2005, or at the antics of Didier Drogba since his arrival. They’ve been fed trash, so they’ve become trash.
Arsenal supporters have been fed glorious attacking football for a good few years. Hence they shout “hoof” every time the ball leaves the ground from an opposing player’s boot. Once upon a time, they won league titles playing some of the ugliest football you’ll ever see. They don’t like that type of football anymore because their team don’t play it. If they did, they’d defend it to the hilt. Man. United supporters deride our past victories as meaningless, because they’ve been going through the most successful period in their history. Yet they bleated on about their past for 26 barren years.
Everton supporters are bitter, because they were once (not so long ago) regular contenders for the top trophies. Yet they’ve only won one in the last 21seasons and were almost relegated twice in the nineties. Their diet has been bitter. They’ve become bitter. Newcastle United supporters are desperate. Desperation has been their diet. How else do you explain them welcoming a man with no managerial experience whatsoever as their saviour? It’s desperation.
And so on. But what are we?
We’re dreamers. We’re realists too. We appreciate honesty and hard work. We appreciate good football as well, but the minimum requirement has always been effort. We embrace our past with a passion. We never forget. No other club’s supporters would have carried on fighting for justice for the 96 like ours have, I truly believe that. We are proud. We are fighters. We are creative, good-humoured. We talk the talk, that’s true, because we are rightly proud of our past and don’t impress easily (Chelsea F.C.). Yet we are also humble.
We are all of these things because that’s what we’ve been fed forever. From Shankly and Paisley, onto Dalglish, Evans and Houllier, and now Rafa. Humble men, proud men, honest men. Good hearts, fighters, inspirers. Good-humoured too. Then there’s the players, from Keegan to Gerrard, Torres to Toshack, Barnes, Beardsley, Smith, Souness, and so on. Men. Real men. Fighters, winners. They make you proud. They inspire you. And you can’t help, as a supporter, to have their character rub off on you just a little bit.
That’s why we are who we are. Our diet has been nothing but fillet steak and fine wine our whole lives, win, lose or draw.
Chelsea supporters are to be pitied. They’ll always be trash, because they’ll always be fed trash. They’ll never know what it’s like to be moved to tears by a team who lost the battle and the war, yet whose effort and honesty was truly humbling. They’ll never know what it’s like to feel like a fucking ant as you look at 96 names and feel nothing but empathy and strength, inspired by the struggle of great people for justice, and the courage and dignity they display every single day of their lives. They’ll never know what it’s like to have men – MEN – like this playing for them. Never.
All they’ll ever have is mercenary cheats like Dropba, diving and feigning injury, motioning to the crowd to turn up the volume. They’ll have their badge-kisser Lampard. They’ll have their captain John Terry, a man who’s admitted to cheating on his wife on multiple occasions. They’ll have Ashley Cole. You can’t even call these people men.
Last night was the most beautiful defeat I have ever experienced, and if there is a Heaven, I know there were 96 souls smiling down. A performance befitting the sombre occasion that today brings. We could have asked no more. I will always love this club, and unlike Chelsea, I believe that we will always have humble, hard-working, inspirational men like these to make us dream.
After all, that’s who we are. And last night proved that.
