No idea if this is any good. Sorry if it's self-indulgent. It all came out in a catharsis today. Originally published @
https://crankyenglishman.com/drinks-with-my-father/ (my site)
I began my life three months early on the 11th February 1990. Liverpool Football Club were about to win the title for what would be the last time in a while, a hated Tory Government clung onto power like a dying man clings on to oxygen (some things are eternal), and my father fell off a trailer drunkenly celebrating my birth and ended up in Wigan hospital. Which would’ve been useful if I wasn’t at Sharoe Green.
I wasn’t meant to make it for a variety of reasons – my impatient birth, incredibly tiny size, and complications left me hanging on a little bit – but thankfully, I did. Unfortunately, I was also lumbered with this pesky thing called cerebral palsy that would follow me around for the rest of my life. It never stopped me doing much, mind you – whether in a frame, on sticks, or on air, I would stand in our pub carpark (The Halsall Arms, in Halsall – it’s not there any more. Some say it never was) imitating Robbie Fowler, my childhood hero, time and time and time again. Sadly, kid me got to love watching the Reds, but never got to see them win trophies. That just wasn’t a thing for the Spice Boys. Failures in finals? Losing to Coventry every year? That was more our thing.
Thankfully, once I got a little older, we found ways to win – wins at the Millennium Stadium and Dortmund, among others, stick in my memory to this day. Then, of course, there was something I never thought I’d see, us winning the European Cup. Istanbul. Rafa. What a man. To this day I’d defend him – he was the first manager who actually felt like he would give me something to shout back at the glory-hunting United supporting knobheads at my school, by now in a tiny village called Euxton, in Lancashire. Suffice it to say, then, that I’ve supported Liverpool my entire life, good, bad, and Hodgson.
It wasn’t just a long-distance relationship, either – I got to go, sometimes. I’ll never forget the first time I went. My dad first took me to Anfield when I was 8 years old, and the crowd sang You’ll Never Walk Alone, and we both had our scarves in the air. I turned to look at him as we sang, and I saw him cry. It was the first time I’d seen him cry.
As a kid, I had no idea why he was so emotional. The following years would teach me why. For one thing, I don’t know if he ever expected to have football with me. Like I said, I wasn’t far from not making it to football age, let alone thinking that I would ever be mobile enough to navigate the steps and seats at Anfield. But it was more than that, Football leads you through emotions, good and bad, high and low, just like life. You remember the moments you spend watching it – being attacked by him in our living room in 2005, after the greatest comeback we’d ever seen, to win our first MAJOR trophy of my lifetime. All the big European wins. All the trophies. The devastation of 2014, and a million things inbetween.
I get it now. I really do. I spent my entire life being taught by this club that anything was possible, that you could follow your dreams, that you could be up against it and no matter what, you still had a chance. That was me. I was lucky enough to get myself fit and well enough to be independent – to pursue a comedy career, to travel to places I always dreamed of, and to even touch the top of a mountain I never thought I’d reach. Living alone. Imagine that, for a disabled kid who’s forever been called ‘cripple’ or ‘spaz’ or whatever. I was about to try doing something that I honestly never thought was possible. Better yet, I knew exactly where I wanted to be.
You’d think it would be Liverpool, wouldn’t you? Alas, no – my friends, my life, my narrative, my ambitions, they all took me to the opposite place – Manchester. I’m still there now, although I’m not sure I could honestly tell you what drew me here, and the reasons to stay dwindle by the day. But we’ll come back to that. I moved here in 2018, and by now, Liverpool had just come off a heartbreaking loss in the Champions League final, to a Lorius Karius inspired Real Madrid. No matter, though, as we were led by a different man now – Jurgen Klopp.
I think it’s impossible to state just how much Jurgen Klopp ‘gets’ Liverpool Football Club. You sit there and you see it in front of you, and the only thing that ever strikes you is how the man looked born to be there. Born to manage Liverpool. Born to be one of us, because he just understood how things worked. What Liverpool fans want, demand, and believe in. From the second he came in, it felt like he should’ve been there all his life, and in a strange way, that mirrored my own life, too. I was happy, healthy, and living alone and thriving. Disabled people don’t always have the happiest of lives. I was never the cheeriest person, I didn’t have the teenage, university years of memories that some people do – it took me a long time to find my independence. I felt like I didn’t really live my life until my mid-20s. That coincided with this run under Jurgen, and as such, I can honestly say that the 18 months between my initial move to Manchester in September 2018, to the inevitable COVID lockdown in March 2020, were probably the best of my life.
I was young, free, having fun, and I had kindred spirits in two of my still best friends in Patrick and Hugh, and had more fun watching football than ever. That run may have been the wildest of them all – first, the ridiculousness of the 2019 Champions League – in the midst, managing to go mental with people I never knew in Germany as Origi outduelled Messi – I’ll tell that story more fully one day, but it was the best night of them all. We somehow just missed out on the league by a point, but the season ended on the night of the final, and no matter what came of life, no matter where we had to go to see the game, I had my arms round my dad, singing You’ll Never Walk Alone, again. For those moments, Divock Origi will live forever, just as Alan Kennedy or David Fairclough or someone of that ilk did to my dad.
That crushing machine in 2020 should’ve ensured more lovely memories, but sadly, bigger things intervened when it came to the league. COVID and an incompetent government ensured I couldn’t have my arms around him or sing YNWA. I watched it on my own, in my flat, bored, lonely, and sad, but thankfully, the reds made sure that it was still our moment. Fair play to him, no matter the distance, he always messaged, texting as soon as the whistle went and saying ‘I was beginning to think I’d never see us win it again’. I know what he meant. He was 32, not too far from my age then, when we last won the league. I doubt he ever thought it would happen for both of us. But… it did. On top of the world, looking down on creation. So this is a happy story, right?
Wrong. Bump. It wasn’t long after we won the league, actually, that things started to go awry. A combination of lockdown, personal life difficulties, and the fact that the team looked utterly shagged out, left me feeling thoroughly miserable for most of the next year. I don’t want to overstate football’s importance to me – it is just a game, as all sports are – but when every single one of your sports teams shits the bed in the same season, and that season sees you locked inside and not seeing your mates (those who hadn’t moved after deciding city life wasn’t for them), and you’re predisposed to misery anyway, it tends to get you down. Even now, in the first embers of 2024, I’m not entirely sure I’ve ever fully recovered from the affects of almost 3 years locked down.
In that time, we lost my Grandad, my dad’s dad, a football lover and wonderful man, who spent most of his time when I was younger indulging my passion for football – somehow finding the paper to tear up, fold, and put into your old football trophies, and sitting there watching me do stupid cup-draws out of them when I was a kid – to then watch me play the ties against myself! ‘Nottingham Forest…will play…’ – to this day, a cup draw makes me smile. In fact, any time to this day someone references CeeFax or I hear the Grandstand tune, I think of Saturdays I used to stay with him sometimes and watching the scores update and come in. I don’t think I’ve ever loved football as much as I did in those early 5-10 years, apart from under Klopp and I’m pretty sure it was down to things like that. Simpler stuff. So anyway, life was going awry, and with it, so were the reds. We all endured 2020/21, not least Klopp himself.
After so long away, I wasn’t watching games with people any more. Most games were just me, in my flat, on my own. I’d go out the odd time, but it was only occasionally. I barely saw my dad, and that was fine – we weren’t interested in infecting each other, and the games were hardly worth it anyway. Then, in 21/22, something really did change. We were good again. Propelled along by Dua Lipa and good thoughts, we almost did the impossible and came away with everything. I had a hell of a time watching us do it, first with my amazing friend Louise for the League Cup final (she practically dragged me out, and it was the first game I’d watched in a pub in about 2 years), but not least in the FA Cup final, where my shouts of ‘WHEY FUCK OFF MOUNT YOU TORY c*nt’ probably still reverberate around The Footage. That was, now we could do it again, with Dad again, arm in arm, pissed, and happy. I was so happy after that final that I actually watched Eurovision for the first time in my life. I enjoyed it, too. Is this what being in a major city of culture does to you?
Sadly, we couldn’t make it stick, and following the loss to Madrid, my life went into a bit of a tailspin. I don’t need to get into it here, but a complicated personal life, crap professional life, and the numbing greyness of everything that life had become left me feeling about as bad as I ever had. The team also took their cue from me, being mostly irredeemably crap for that season. Still, the season ended, and despite some wonderful moments in my personal life, I was still pretty miserable. Come August, and I’m cutting out a lot here as the piece is long enough, but eventually, one Sunday night/Monday morning, I had to pick up the phone and admit the truth. I was depressed. It might be hard for you to understand why that was such a big thing for me, but as an already avowed Northerner, suffice it to say that people of my ilk aren’t really the first to admit to mental health problems. In Northern working-class families, the women show their emotions, the men show their arses (future teatowel). So it was quite hard for me to pick up the phone and record to my Dad that I was so depressed that I rarely, if ever, wanted to see the next day, and I think it was equally hard for him to hear.
He dealt with that by reinstating the best bond we had. Liverpool Football Club. Not a week later, we go down to the pub, starting a new tradition, to watch us play the new stinking face of sportswashing, Newcastle United. I was pretty vulnerable that day, and my mood wasn’t especially helped by the early sending-off and general ineptitude of the referees. Then, like a bolt of lightning, someone reminded me what football was all about.
Him! Possibly the face of Klopp 2.0. But also the face of what football is to me and was to me. Win, lose, draw in my own life, there was always them. The last 5 or 6 years, since I moved to the enemy territory, have been up and down, triumph and disaster, love and heartbreak, but I was saved by one thing. The fun of supporting Liverpool. Full of drama, and unforgettable moments, delivered on a season-by-season basis. There was that song. There were the tears when I remembered Grandad, or linked arms with my Dad to celebrate another trophy. There was reasons to live. There were reasons to believe. There were happy moments, sad moments, and everything in between. Maybe some people don’t ‘get’ football, or understand why it inspires such devotion, but that’s why. It can be a microcosm of life. It can lift your day or ruin it.
But it’s always there for you, and there was always Liverpool Football Club. There was always the games, there were always the drinks, there was always the song. Sitting here in 2024, I’m a better man now than I’ve ever been, with memories that will last forever, and more than most, at the heart of it all, was always Jurgen Klopp. Now he’s leaving, so I don’t know what happens next, for Liverpool Football Club, or for me. I’m sure it will be fine. If life’s taught me anything for the last 2 years, it’s that everything eventually will be at least tolerable. I don’t support Klopp Football Club, after all, but he understood it more than most of us ever will, and it’s hard not to feel like it will never quite feel just as fun, just as sweet, just as freeing, again. Still, we’ve got 4 more months of drinks with my Dad to enjoy. With any luck, we might lift a few more trophies and get to sing that song all over again.
Thank you for everything, Jurgen. You made the world a better place for me and everyone else for a while. YNWA. x
