1. Blimey, it never gets tiring feeling how big our club is around the world.
I work in education, and that often means traveling out of my bustling metropolis and into remote corridors. Truth be told, I was fearful that I wouldn’t be able to watch this game. I was scheduled to fly out to one of my company’s satellite schools in a remote part of the country, and it just so happened that my plane was late by a whole six hours. I was perhaps the only passenger who pumped his fist when this was announced, but I wasn’t the only one riveted by the action as it unfolded.
There’s more than a degree of surrealism attached to watching fifty people sliding off their cheap plastic airport seats like a Dali painting while mesmerized by the Kop’s most emotional rendition of YNWA for a while.
There were more than a few young ones in that airport waiting lounge, and for large swathes of the game not one sound they made. They were transfixed. Football is a beautiful game, and Liverpool, and Steven Gerrard especially, would have won a few more fans.
2. How would Chelsea have approached this game?
One shouldn’t underestimate the ability of Jose Mourinho to bore. And win. They are the anti-Harlem Globetrotters, and it boggles the mind as to how often Mourinho gambles on – and gets away with – merely depending on one or two creative outlets throughout a game backed by a defense that almost guarantees no lapses in concentration. Eden Hazard sparkled at Stamford Bridge in the reverse fixture, and Demba Ba is doing his interpretation of a passable frontman, but what if either of them fail to fire at Anfield? What then?
For Chelsea, Anfield will be something like the PSG game, except Liverpool don’t have the double edged sword of a two-legged awkward 3-1 lead to contend with. Plus the harrowing first half of the second half against City will have ensured that Gerrard and his men now know that merely hanging on for dear life has it’s own merits in top level football, where tides seem to turn seemingly uncontrollably and without notice.
City was the first “big team” win where Liverpool didn’t just blow their opposition away. This needed desperation, and tales of reception are seldom straightforward.
City will have known that from 2012.
3. Can we have a few more ‘rejects’ please?
I have a great idea for Being: Liverpool: Part Two.
And it starts with a montage of all our resident bad boys: Suarez biting into Ivanovic’s arm- and subsequently scoring the equalizer; Sterling outside court; Sturridge in a Chelsea shirt not passing – for good measure one could also add some spicy headlines from The Sun alluding to his bad attitude, how he’s ‘not living up to expectations’ etc, and then a picture of Phillipe Coutinho sat forlornly on the Inter bench – a symbolic portrait of another Brazilian youngster who moved over too early…
And then fast forward to today. Suarez and Sturridge hitting the net – time after time. Chips, lobs, curlers, slap shots, headers, free kicks: the lot. And then Sterling, pirouetting through midfields like a greyhound who chases his tail and then zooms again, all with a purpose designed to evade. And then Coutinho, who, in spite of fluffing one long ranger after another, in this game, and across the season, found the time to score a seemingly unlikely winner, scavenging off Kompany. If it was Suarez who’d done it, that goal would’ve been celebrated twofold at least.
And for the last scene, there should be an open top bus ride. But I won’t tempt fate. I’ll leave it up to the footballing gods.
What Will It All Mean Jordan?
After the game, Mamadou Sakho posted on twitter a rather bittersweet shot of the lads in the dressing room. Stevie was there, as was Dan Sturridge, Raheem Sterling and in the corner a very down looking Jordan Henderson who couldn’t quite make sense of it all.
He had played his role down to a T. He offered Stevie the protection to do his quarterback thing. He gave Coutinho that license to push further into the City defense, and then, overcompensating for a bad first touch, he lunged in.
I don’t know where that tackle leaves us, and time will tell. Will Lucas and Joe Allen be able to withstand a Nemanja Matic barrage? And what about Palace? We all know what Tony Pulis expects from his midfielders.
Which begs the larger question: do you dive in to save a title-defining game, even if it means putting the title at risk?
He’s a good man. You have to feel for him.
