As Liverpool Football Club celebrated their birthday turning 132, Karl Coppack remembers how his support has changed throughout the years…
ON June 3, 1892, Liverpool Football Club were founded following a rent dispute with Everton.
It’s our birthday. I’m glad it’s your birthday. Happy birthday to you.
Despite slanderous calls to the contrary on various TAW shows, I was not around to see any of that happen. My own relationship with the club came much, much later.
My family are from the Scotland Road area of the city (known simply as ‘Scotty’) and I lived there till I was four. I grew up in Croxteth but from the age of 4-10 I was a resident of Norris Green to the north of the city.
I can’t remember the exact months, but seeing as many people recall dates by matches, I know that we won the European Cup in Rome while I was sat on a Norris Green carpet and retained it a year later on a Crocky one.
Ours was a blue house, albeit with ties of red curiosity. My dad was a blue, though hardly a Goodison regular. He didn’t care that his only son was favouring the red side. The odd jibe against Kevin Keegan was all he managed and his main barbs were reserved for Everton’s first team and manager Billy Bingham, but, in footballing terms, ours was a broad church.
He certainly wanted Liverpool to win that first European Cup, though he didn’t go so far as to celebrate the goals. Maybe he just didn’t want to see his son miserable. That was the school’s job.
I was obsessed with Liverpool by then. Absolutely obsessed and I knew then that, unlike dinosaurs, the Six Million Dollar Man and my Euro ’76 Panini sticker album, this was more than a passing interest. This was forever and the fury of that flame within me would never be diminished.
It has, of course. Never to the extent that I would serve my time better in different directions, but the magic loses its potency as you get older. Inevitable, really.
For a start, Liverpool is no longer a mystery. Bus rides past the ground back then always had me with my nose up against the window, refusing to blink. I just had to take it all in and guess at the magic that happened from within those walls.
The ground itself was shoddy with its peeling paintwork and clumps of weeds growing from between the gaps of the steps leading up to the back of The Kop, but it held such majesty for me. The European Champions were in there somewhere. The greatest club in the world. What’s more, they were just a 15 minute bus ride away. I felt privileged.
It never occurred to me that kids of the same age were doing the same thing at, say, Villa Park, Pittodrie or even Prenton Park, but of course they were. Kids are still doing things like that now, though in a very different context and means. I love that.
Nothing is stronger than the alignment between club and young fan. Nothing comes close. That fire is strongest when first lit. Every moment from then is a lessening sense of attachment. Oh, the support will always be there, but never as zealous.
Over the years I’ve met some of those players and found them to be just normal lads used to a job near my house. No longer were they the Gods of yesteryear.
I saw Bruce Grobbelaar in my mum’s local Chinese last year and barely lifted my head to acknowledge him. Two decades earlier I walked past Didi Hamann and Stephane Henchoz as they left Melwood. One of them was smoking. I looked the other way, appalled. Even though I was older than the pair of them, I felt let down. No one wants to see behind the magician’s cloth.
I don’t even know what the current manager sounds like.
But none of that takes away from my love of the club. They’re still my waking thought and I still need time away from them and the emotional exhaustion once in a while. I love a summer. Liverpool don’t lose in June and July. I can put them away for a bit. I need to.
I sometimes wonder if this obsession is healthy. I’m forever using old games as reference points. My girlfriend recently jokingly asked me if I knew who Liverpool were playing on the day we first met. I smiled weakly by way of answer but kept quiet.
Of course, I do! We beat Ipswich away 2-1. Ian Rush with a late winner.
Like you, I’ve got mates who can provide a forensic hour by hour breakdown of when games were, what the score was and what they were doing at the time. I can do that. I can tell you everything about Ian Rush’s ‘last’ game for Liverpool against Watford in 1987 before he trotted off to Juventus. Then again, I can watch the highlights of a recent game online and wonder if I was there. Age.
It feels like it’s our birthday as much as the clubs.
I often wonder what it must be like to be like this with another club. My Norwich mates have the most intense conversations around their club and celebrate or deride players I’ve never heard of, so I suppose it must be the same for them too. I wonder if their interest has gone from full on zealotry to mere fascination since they were kids.
Anyway, happy birthday to the 132-year old Reds.
Happy birthday to you too.
Pre-order Neil Atkinson’s book ‘Transformer’ and help us get a Sunday Times bestseller…
I see it from the other side first hand as your godson is an avid Leeds United fan, his sister is far more sensible and supports Liverpool and has even been to a couple of games at Anfield. Also this obsession is not new. My grandad used to add corrections to scores or the names of players in the Liverpool history books I used to read as a child. For myself I don’t honestly remember many games when we used to stand on the Kop. But the atmosphere and humor still sparks the odd memory whenever I hear ‘Running up that Hill’ or a meat and potato pie…
For over 160 years, football in England has belonged to the men , women and kids who have followed their teams up and down the land. However, the rulers of an autocratic Middle Eastern state with no free speech or democracy and a dire human rights record have decided that it now belongs to them , and , sick of the “tyranny of the majority” , they want it to be run their way.
Despite having had a virtual monopoly on the Premier League title these past seven years they feel they have been discriminated against by the league because they have been asked to comply with the financial fair play rules that they freely signed up to.
For a club that claims to have done nothing wrong they seem to be attempting to put a lot of obstacles in the way of the investigation into their finances.
The Premier League cannot afford to give in to City’s demands if they want to save the soul of English football.