You don’t have to look far to see ‘sleeping giants’ getting it all wrong, but Liverpool have walked the walk towards league title number 20…
WEAR red for the captain.
Paint a portrait of tomorrow with no colours from today.
One game, one point. An opponent offering a stark reminder of how quickly you can become unserious as an enterprise. Of how what we’re on the brink of can easily feel far away.
Lads, it’s Tottenham and 19 others who couldn’t match you over this wonderful campaign.
I want everyone to treat Sunday like the most enjoyable day imaginable. I want competitiveness from the off. I want to remind you that winning this league is so fucking hard to do.
There is no more salient reminder than Sunday being the 11th anniversary of Liverpool 0-2 Chelsea at Anfield, 2014.
The banter-derived Steven Gerrard slip to allow Demba Ba to bear down and slot past the eternal hologram that was Simon Mignolet.
It was a ghoulish fever dream. The sun came out as Jose Mourinho flaunted his ego all the way down the Main Stand touchline.
Mohamed Salah was on the pitch wearing Chelsea blue – unaware of the superstardom he would come to experience in that very stadium a few years later.
Chelsea blew the race open, they said. Dreams died. Manchester City’s villainous inevitability flashed at us with a nod to future affairs.
I still find it hard to watch. Gerrard was my footballing icon. The greatest player I’ve ever seen in a stadium. A warrior who could pirouette like a ballet dancer. Sub-human but maimed by time and the cruellest plot twist, at the point his character was about to arc into the sunset.
It remains possible that 2013-14 represents the epitome of Liverpool’s league title longing. Of the 30 years we went without the title, nothing ever felt this fun. Fuelled by momentum and sheer happenstance.
Nothing ever hurt like this.
The club is a different beast to that 11 years ago. We were chancers and dreamers. The shoots of a new transfer approach were taking shape. Data had led us to the likes of Luis Suarez and Jordan Henderson. Opportunity to Philippe Coutinho and Daniel Sturridge. Academy competence to Raheem Sterling. Brendan Rodgers to Joe Allen.
This wasn’t Liverpool acting the part. The part to me as a mid-80s kid was Manchester United. I was raised to idolise something which punched down.
My existence told me Liverpool Football Club were football royalty, but we acted like paupers who were repeatedly robbed by Darren Huckerby.
I was Cedric Daniels in response to a police lieutenant who tells him: “We need to get out there and show these assholes who we are,” to which he responds: “yeah, and who the hell are we?”
The Liverpool-isms of our time were inferior infrastructure, the closing the club shop the day after Istanbul and failing to sign Dani Alves, Gareth Barry and Nicolas Anelka.
Leagues can occasionally be won in the manner of Blackburn Rovers or Leicester City, and in some ways that’s what 2013-14 felt like. Liverpool won 17 of their last 21 games with Jon Flanagan and Aly Cissokho at full-back.
They had nothing really beyond 13 players. The manager was talented but untested. The whole thing was a mixture of hedonism and chance.
There was no journey to the pinnacle, so we had no right to expect to stay there.
It doesn’t work like that. Supporting this club from 1990 to 2016 told you that standing at the door and asking ‘do you know who I am?’, simply doesn’t cut it.
If you want further corroboration of this, look at United from 2012 to now.
Sunday represents so much in the context of what’s at stake for the squad and manager, for us because it’s the league and because of COVID in 2020.
But it ultimately represents a body of work by this club to act like Liverpool FC. It’s an accurate reflection of the bastion of invincibility we heard about who walked the walk.
Sunday feels exactly where we should be.
No more pretending. One more point and we’re home, perfect and real. Paint a portrait of tomorrow, with the colours bright and gay.
Wear red for the captain. He said so.
