I had no idea what I was going to write about. I've been so busy lately that I had more or less forgotten that I volunteered to write a match preview. Then I remembered reading an introduction to a chapter on postmodernism whilst taking a course in Cultural Studies. In it, the author was really unsure how to start and was unable to find a decent entry point, so he called a friend to talk about his problem. His friend of course said:
this is what you should talk about, that you're not sure what to write. What's more postmodern than the hesitating author riddled with postcolonial guilt, the academic questioning their own authority.
Well, the turnover for advice would take too long for the friends that I have that are fellow reds. So in order to stop meta-levels I started to watch the Maribor game. Maribor by the way, probably the saddest town I ever visited. Given it was on a Sunday for only a few hours, but it was pretty much what Morrissey had in mind for that song where it's silent and gray. The first twenty minutes was loud and colourful however, just like we've known that it can be, like we've known that
we can be, even though it's been easy to hesitate. That feeling that there's a team any game now that we will just maul over. 7-0. In the Champions League.
Salah looking like the unstoppable force, Can the immovable object. Milner, goddammit, he played with both more enthusiasm and determination than ever, and that says quite a lot knowing what kind of a player he is, and that he's been sitting on the bench for all of the season so far. Coutinho was dancing. Firmino was at the right place at the right time, all the time. Alexander-Arnold just turned 19 and continues to score amazing goals in the Champions League, as a right back. Oxlade-Chamberlain scored his first goal for the club and Karius got a confidence boosting clean sheet.
The counter pressing was so good that Klopp felt like cheering on that more than the goals. "The only problem recently was how to explain why we didn't win. That has been the most difficult thing about our recent games. When you don't score it is a challenge to stay confident but we will try to use this result now. The next game is Tottenham so it's pretty likely it will not be a similar result. We have five days to recover and prepare and we are looking forward to it."
As sweet as it was, recording the biggest away win by an English team in the history of the European Cup, Maribor is no Tottenham. In fact, Maribor is no Ljubljana either, both in terms of the beauty of the cities, and for the fact that the latter is at the top of the Slovenian league. But it's certainly no Tottenham.
I wanted to shoehorn in everyone's favourite provocateur Slavoj Zizek here, a Ljubljana native, but he hasn't really talked about football. Cultural critics who have though, are Noam Chomsky and Theodor Adorno. Adorno says that "football wastes qualities which could prove valuable in a political situation" and "the act of repetition schools obedience". In the same vein, Chomsky says that the purpose of football "is to get them away, get them away from things that matter. For that it's important to reduce their capacity to think. It's striking to see the amount of intelligence used by ordinary people on sport (...) people have the most exotic information". The people should instead be doing something worthwhile. Football is a representation of society’s cultural decay and so on and so on. For any Marxist ideologue, football is religion, the opium of the people.
Football is escapism. That's why it's so sad when you lose.
Luckily for us we're going into the weekend with a 7-0 away win in the Champions League, and we play Tottenham at Wembley where they've only been able to win in one out of four this season.
Referee: Andre Marriner
Assistants: Simon Beck, Scott Ledger
Fourth official: Mike Jones
