Nerve 22 - Who Are You?

Who Are You?

In the great days I was a waiter in Butlins, Clacton, Liverpool were European Champions, League Champions, and so dominant that other waiters - Villa, Birmingham, Wolves, Baggies, and Coventry fans - paid me the ultimate compliment of banning me from football debates. Liverpool were so good and admired that they were beyond tribal rivalries. What this reflected glory added up to in props to my emerging self confidence I will never know, but the repeated insults among the banter all the 'brummies' were giving each other were really felt. Now that Liverpool are 'shite', that world of mediocrity and falling expectations has come to me.

Luckily, now I don't get upset or am unable to eat my tea when Liverpool lose; call it growing up, age, or realising there is a bigger world out there, but it's still a (gentle) jab in the guts when they do get beat. Like the people we see around us Liverpool FC have taken a few knocks, some self inflicted, and have struggled to come back. In a cruel world whose values the Premier League promote, the man who loses his job can quickly lose his wife, his kids, and himself. How about that for a Top Four?

Liverpool are in decline. They may scramble back into the big money elite next season or the season after but things are stacked against them. They don't have the players, they are in danger of losing any world class ones they do have, they don't have the money, or the 60,000 ground to generate the cash to compete. If they do build a bigger ground they will increase ticket prices to pay bigger wages on top of bigger transfer fees. While all the time having deliberately run down a suburb of the city loved long before the 'Anfield' Shankly created.

At last, someone in the national press has highlighted the squalor that Liverpool Football Club has played a part in creating around the ground. The idea that they could have been a regeneration leader in supporting the community in Anfield never entered their heads. Instead they shamelessly allowed good people in good houses to rot around them to achieve their own selfish ends. Which, 20, 30 years later they still haven't got?

They are a big business living off the myth of being part of a community. There is more to community than football fans hamstrung by their loyalty to a club/company cynically exploiting this. Being a Liverpool supporter, my mate Jimmy tells me, is about emotion not reason. Football fans are not going to wake up and football clubs like Liverpool are not going to nudge them.

Fortunately, like Shankly, my old man was a mad Liverpool supporter, and a socialist. Like Shanks, he didn't know much about politics or Marx, he just instinctively felt it. That shared feeling of doing right by and for each other, we are told, has gone. But that sense of belonging never goes, it is always there, it's what makes life worth living. When I fall I want to be in a world where someone helps me up. This is not the world of the Premier League, as Liverpool to their cost, are finding out. Eat your tea, lads. It's over, you just don't know it.

Printer friendly page

Comments are closed on this article