Nobody Knows the Pain As Well As We Do

Imagine being lost in the Kalahari Desert, all you have to get home is your Range Rover and a faulty GPS. So you drive and drive and just as you think you’re getting somewhere your faulty GPS does one over on you!

You went the wrong way.

Then – finally –  your GPS gets you within touching distance and you push your Range Rover to its’ limit to get there and boom, it just can’t carry on any longer. Your Range Rover took you to the brink of civilisation  but your GPS just took it too far.

Your Range Rover has broken down at the final hurdle, it drove you up the mountains in terrain so hostile, and here you are almost there; you’re hungry, its been weeks since you have eaten you are thin, dehydrated and now you have to limp towards your last salvation. You may not make it but you push on, you want to survive so badly you and, for some reason, your body is strong enough to carry on and your will to survive is still some how strong.

This has been Liverpool, and much like that faulty GPS, our defence has let us down once too often. Just once we needed that defence to be sound and it wasn’t. We paid the ultimate price.

How Sunday could’ve been so different. We nearly made it, but as that body that carries on without water so does LFC and its fans carry on. We are starved of that elusive Premier League trophy for so long but we carry on. The Range Rover that has been our forward line this year has taken us to the very top of the mountain but we just couldn’t stay there.

To the Liverpool fan this was a knife to the very heart of Liverpool. “We going to win the league!” we all sang with pride. The champagne was on ice weeks ago. The trophy cabinet given a fresh coat of varnish in anticipation.

But we blew it and the way in which we blew it is a hard pill to swallow. No man on earth deserves such torture, no team deserves such torment!

Towards the end of this season our forward line, that beautiful 3 litre V6 engine we called SAS were tired. They took us so far but the just ran dry. And the tired looking Luis Suarez was clearly spent, he could not go any further than the last 90 minutes of the season. He gave us his all, he left his heart and soul out on the pitch for everyone to see. His blood, sweat, tears – all out on the pitch for millions to see and more.

The defeat at Palace took the last out of him and the team. That night was hard to accept, hard to swallow, hard to fathom and it took his everything to just get off the field.

Daniel Sturridge was absolutely brilliant for Liverpool this season. It’s hard to think this man was only fit for 2 thirds of the season. He too gave it all and between them they played the entire season and became giants for us. We end it in 2nd place feeling disappointed. But let’s think about this for a second – we are disappointed with second place!

This disappointment bring a memory back to me, something I read a few years ago, a statement form Bob Paisley who, when asked about his years with a successful LFC, he said “Mind you, I’ve been here during the bad times too – one year we came second.”

So I thinking about this, I started feeling better about the “disappointment” of second place.

Yes we had it in the bag, but this is a learning curve. Our players needed this disappointment. Now our players are hungrier than ever; they tasted success, had it ripped away, and I don’t think they will allow this to ever happen again.

So City are the new Premier League champios, and I can promise you there wont be the unprecedented one million fans lining the streets as did in the aftermath of 2005 in Istanbul. No one really cares who won now that Liverpool hasn’t won it. The sixty thousand fans in Manchester will certainly have a good time in celebration but the whole world wanted LFC to win it, even the neutrals.

Liverpool’s fans are in pain, but in celebrating the return of Wednesday nights at Anfield, we have more to be thankful for this season. Our players have more to play for, the fans have more to hope for. I’m a disappointed fan, but now more than ever, I have a renewed hope for glory, a renewed hope for success and a renewed hope for Gerrard finally winning that Premier League medal.