Most of football isn’t romantic. It takes no prisoners. For most fans (and I imagine) players, football is akin to waking up at seven in the morning, putting on a suit and scrolling through your playlist as you wait for the tube. It has its own rhythm, a sense of consistency, a sense of machinery about it. And more often than not, there are no heroes in our great game. There are achievers, accumulators of numbers, plodders, those who you know won’t last the day and those you can tell will move on to bigger and better things.
What football doesn’t offer much, though we would like to think so, are stories of redemption.
For most at Cardiff this Saturday, the narrative revolved around Vincent Tan and his hijacking of a proud club’s history. They wanted their blue back, the Cardiff faithful, and one couldn’t blame them for not giving up the ghost. After all, they live in a twilight zone where their former home colour is now on their away shirt. It’s like the Cardiff bandwagon rolls into away grounds like an ex-drummer at a party, chewing his tobacco and staring at something nonexistent on the floor just to avoid the gaze of them awkward other guests.
Identity is breathtaking in how painful it can be. Martin Skrtel would have run on to the pitch feeling quite bittersweet about this season. If he reads his own reviews in the papers, he would have found that some were calling himself the only somewhat consistent performer at the caramel core of a central defence that doesn’t represent the sharpness and industry of the men in front of him. Central defenders are proud creatures, and the concession of countless scrappy space-cadet goals would’ve left a bitter taste in the mouth – especially that display at Hull.He needed to forge a new identity.
With the score at 2-1, he and long-time running-mate Daniel Agger would have felt that familiar churn in the stomach. And then it happened, a beautiful phase of football, when, by virtue of a gambling left foot equalizer and a header that reminded you of an immovable concrete pole, he equalized, then gave Liverpool a lead the team were not to relinquish.
Saturday was the day when Martin Skrtel apologized for his lack of usual decisiveness, and carved out a new identity for the rest of the season. For Daniel Sturridge the road to redemption has been long and spanned many a city up and down the country. Coventry, Manchester, London and now Merseyside. His identity was that of a freakish talent that would never really make it. The one that got away before it even got there.
But he got there on Saturday, and busted a gut to get to Luis Suarez’ neat little slider across the box. For me what changed his identity was not so much the hunger or the athleticism – these were the freakish talents that we knew about – but the celebratory run towards Suarez, both arms pointed in the Uruguayan’s direction, as if to imply that the goal was a culmination of their joint efforts.
That lung busting run I was referring to? That is only a matter of course, something that is a means to an end. Between Skrtel and Sturridge (and Henderson at other times, and Sterling for that matter) it has been a season all about reflecting on their identities in the larger scheme of things. And with the exception of the English striker, at different times they have found themselves in the periphery of the first eleven.
There may even be hope for Joe Allen, you know. Welsh Xavi he may not be, but he is focusing once again on the things he once did exceeding well: quick changes of feet that lead to a keeping of possession and switching of play. But it may be too soon to claim an extreme makeover for Allen, but I’d like to use this as a segue to write a few words about something else that has undergone a change of identity this season, something greater than all the characters I’ve named thus far: the Liverpool fan.
We fear no one anymore. We look forward to the big games. Touch wood, of course, but be honest, you do fancy Anfield wins against Chelsea and City don’t you? When the team goes a goal down you do expect a swift response. Games that were once draws are wins now. And those wins? They’re no longer exercises in tactical micro managing alone, but an extension of how we felt about football when we were kids. You passed and moved and scored and conceded. You kicked off again, and the team that scored the most goals won.
Pass and move, pass and move… Now that’s an identity that’s romantic.
