AS we contemplate the start of another season, with the usual mix of hopeful anticipation and the wish to prepare oneself inwardly for more disappointment – yes I believe in Brendan Rodgers, but it would have been nice to win ONE game on our pre-season tour – it’s time to wonder why we fans keep on doing this to ourselves.
Football supporters and non-football supporters are two wildly different classes of people who will never, ever, understand each other.
These days not a lot if it makes much sense in what non-footie fans strangely insist on calling the “real” world. When a football club really represented the working-class people of working-class towns, standing on the terraces in the filthiest of weather really did represent an expression of solidarity with the people with whom one lived and worked, week after week and year after year. Now we’ve all become so mobile, and now football has discovered money and attracted the interest of the moneyed classes, (the “prawn sandwich brigade”, as Roy Keane dubbed them, and they should know) it hasn’t so much lost its meaning as acquired a different one.
When I started getting interested, around 1970, football was in a transitional period. The rule at my school was that support for Grimsby Town was taken for granted. However, it was understood that, as by any objective standards Grimsby were crap, one was allowed to adopt a top team as well. I suppose that in 1971 I was an unashamed glory-hunter in opting for Liverpool; I never visited the city until I was in my thirties. But at least I’ve stayed true to the other rule I learnt back in Grimsby; that you never change your religion, your political allegiance, or your football team.
And of course in the 70’s and 80’s nothing ever happened to shake a Liverpool fan’s allegiance. It was a smooth ride, from one height to the next, and the awful plunges which were Heysel and Hillsborough hit us hard but essentially cemented us into the LFC edifice. After that it seemed to matter much less than it should that we never won anything much for years after 1990.
In fact at around that time I went to work abroad, and this was before the days of satellite TV. It wasn’t actually possible to follow the Premiership that closely – one depended far too much on newspapers which arrived a week late. Terrible though it is to record, I rather lost touch. And to be brutally honest, the reason I got back on the ball wasn’t terribly creditable either.
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Like far too many people nowadays, I found myself in a broken marriage, an absent father of early-teenage sons. By some amazing inspiration from on high, probably the intervention of St. Bill Shankly, my elder son decided he was a Liverpool fan too. So not only did I find my own Red soul again, I was presented with a golden opportunity to keep a close connection with my beloved boy (and with his brother as well, who’s a Gooner, though his partner is a Red and is working on him.) We spent virtually the entire second half of the Istanbul final on the phone (I was in Hamburg).
So I’m just one more LFC fan whose fidelity to the club is not unmixed with sentimentality – at once our great strength and our besetting sin. And I don’t give a stuff for the derision of those of my friends who ‘Just Don’t Get It’. A lot of them are intellectuals who suspect I’m just trying to establish fake proletarian credentials, and ask me what football results have to do with the price of fish. Well, nothing, of course; nobody dies (tragedies apart) and nothing is really changed by the result of a match. But, if you care enough, and become part of a club’s fanbase and its history (for those clubs who have a history, of course), you’ve added an extra bit of interest and passion to your life which the bloodless intellectuals just can’t claim.
This works both ways, of course; but I don’t envy those people for whom a Saturday afternoon’s results don’t add or subtract anything from the general happiness index. I wouldn’t have gone without those five episodes of walking on air in 1977, 1978, 1981, 1984 and 2005 for anything on earth. On the other hand, I shall never know whether the spectacular row which broke up my second marriage in 2009 would have happened if we hadn’t been dismally beaten 2-0 by relegation-bound Portsmouth earlier that afternoon……
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I know exactly what you mean….I rarely argue with my Missus, but arguements do happen more often within a couple of hours after a poor Liverpool result. She doesn’t seem to understand I need 2-3 hours of silence and relfection of the game, and analyise its consequences, get my head straight, know what to say to the guys at work on monday. But she seems to think I should be a barrell of laughs straight after a defeat?! (Although I have converted her from a Man U fan to LFC, he dad is furious, his little angel went with him to OT for all those years with the whole family, Now i’ve took her to Anfield, although, part of me thinks she only supports LFC because she wants me to be in a good mood for the weekend!!)