Neil Atkinson’s post-match review for The Anfield Wrap after Liverpool are crowned Premier League champions of the 2024-2025 season…
VIRGIL Van Dijk, when he signs his new contract…
“But when we do it, we have all the right to celebrate it for how long and how many days, weeks we want – because we should because it’s hard work.”
It’s about work. First and foremost, work. You want magic. You want it to be about magic. You want moments. You want it to be about moments. But it’s about work, first and foremost. Only the work brings the moments and the magic. And guess what? It always was about hard work.
When Bill Shankly referred to the league as the “bread and butter” he summed it up. It’s the thing you get that rewards the work. Part of why failing to win the league in 02, 09, 19 and 22 stung as much as it did is that on those occasions you feel the work had been done. The serious business had the elbow grease applied to it. They’d worked smart and hard, no one had worked smarter or harder. But that’s when the lines felt harder, when the lines started.
The work hasn’t just been this year’s. Indeed, hasn’t just been on the pitch. It’s a culmination. Liverpool’s last season wasn’t in my list of hard lines before in part because it was massively about beginning the journey to today. Today, everyone involved in that work got what they deserved. When the manager sang his predecessor’s name today that was what he was acknowledging.
You don’t always get what you deserve. In life, in sport. And his predecessor didn’t so often. To share that shows the collective humility but shows here, at Liverpool, there is enough glory to go around. When we deserve it, there is buckets full of it. This is our journey and absent friends will always be in there.
In 2020, we deserved. We deserved it all. No team had ever deserved anything more and we’d deserved the fruits of their labour. They were so indisputable it beggars belief. The culmination of five years work the like of which you’d never seen.
And then there was no culmination. Don’t get me wrong, there were moments. And in the darkness, there was magic. I’ll never forget being in the dark of the beach by ours with Dave Pownall’s Bluetooth playing Nessum Dorma with Adam Melia, Ben Johnson and Jay McKenna just there. Men I’d won with and lost with. I’ll never forget it. But it wasn’t the whole of the thing, the long summer of bliss.
Instead, that Bluetooth was the only real light, fractured light, in an elongated and scary dark, something we haven’t truly reckoned with. Something which ended lives and has damaged a sense of socialisation, and left half a generation of young people ruined, and ignored in a ruptured world built by and for the old.
It’s OK to cry.
You don’t always get what you deserve and we never got Melia’s summer of sitting in trees and smiling at passers-by. The summer of bliss. The thing you’d always wanted. The feeling of peace, of being with your people and knowing.
The best of it is, they knew its absence. They knew it burned. When he signed his new contract, Liverpool’s main man Mo Salah said:
“Probably because last time we didn’t celebrate it the way we wanted. I think we owe that to the fans. They deserve it, they deserve to enjoy it after that long time, with celebrating at Anfield and in the street and just enjoying ourselves winning the Premier League.”
When Salah cries receiving the Golden Boot in 2022, it is because this moment has been taken. No amount of personal achievement can ever make up for that. Not after all the communal words.
Today in the 73rd minute, whenever the chant of “Champions” echoed around Anfield I burst into tears. The first time ever acclaiming them as such. The first time. It is OK to cry.
I thought of Ben Johnson who referred to this today as his life’s work earlier in the week. Craig Hannan said the same thing on Sunday Best earlier today and I was struck by what that actually means, what it means to me. Back in 2020, Jay McKenna mentioned the people who never left for this moment, instead stayed here and spent a lifetime burrowing away for a day like this.
I wouldn’t trade one stupid decision for another five years of life.
When we sang “Champions” to them and for them, for the first time, I thought my heart might burst. I thought it might just explode. This moment and feeling which had been so craved was suddenly there. Needed and wanted. The thing and the whole of the thing.
In 1964, Shankly’s Liverpool dispatched a team from North London 5-1 at Anfield to win the league; his first. To crown a body of work, to bring a city alight.
Their goal then. The one. A lucky one out of the blocks. We can’t even object too much because it’s Dominic Solanke with a stretching one as the ball falls luckily for him and isn’t he one of ours anyway? This isn’t great and Liverpool need to settle down into this game. The midfield is looking very good indeed. They need to start again, take some chances.
And it’s not hard. Bang. Luis Diaz. He is running rings round their defence. Mac Allister and Szoboszlai are untouchable and they set it up for Diaz. The VAR stops and starts the celebrations, but we are all fine. Everything is going to be fine / 1-1 and we are champions again. But more. We look, feel, sound and smell like champions.
25 minutes in and Mac Allister scores a diagonal beauty past Vicario, and it’s beyond doubt. Tottenham aren’t totally rubbish, but they are pretty rubbish. Ten minutes later, Cody Gakpo finds the back of the net and we are three to the good.
When Salah gets his fourth and celebrates in the crowd, it is like he fires a starter’s pistol:
This is going to be a party, then.
Mo Salah’s party. Like it has been all year.
At this point, heads go. The point of this was to be all together. I start to think about all the people who aren’t here. Who are here in my heart but can’t be seen, can’t be spoken to, can no longer put an arm around my shoulder. I want them badly. That’s part of football. The people whose hand you held when you were a child won’t be here forever, except that it will feel like they are. And at moments like this, you long for them.
When asked what day in Liverpudlian history I’d most like to return to, I say that day in 1964. Imagine it. Imagine the acclaim. Imagine the city. Imagine the glory and the moment and then building and the love that went in. Imagine it. That has always been my one.
Imagine no longer. We live it. Luxuriate in it. This day. These days. This long blissful summer that is ours and ours alone. That no one can take. This joy in our life’s work. This gift from all of that work.
Deus Nobis Haec Otia Fecit
God has given us these days of leisure. Well, God and hard work. God and graft.
Everything brilliant is worth waiting for. Everything brilliant is worth working for.
Liverpool. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Where are your friends tonight?
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just wonderful what you have written. A work of art. Of soul. We are privileged to read it.
My mind goes back to the 5-0 against Spurs in 2013. When we were just whelps, unsure if we deserved a place amongst the big boys. Now all the giants of those days have become mere Lilliputians while to Red Colossus strides the Earth.
It’s impossible for me to think of our win without remembering all of the heartbreak over the years between Spurs 5-0 and Spurs 5-1. How many times it was offered up and snatched away – Suarez in tears at Palace, Salah in tears in Kyiv, the 11.7 millimeters separating us and City, the second half of the final against Sevilla, the fans brutalised in Paris – the heartbreaks go on and on.
The title does not erase those memories – the opposite is true. Those heartbreaks are precisely what makes today so delicious, so soul-healing, like a glass of water after a week in the desert.
This means more. And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time. Up the fucking Reds, we are The Champions, back on our perch overlooking the world below. YNWA
For you Grandad you saw the 1964 , long passed never forgotten . You spoke of Elisha Scott and Billy Liddell . The 65 final Saw us beat Everton at Wembley. Your ashes scaterred on the Anfield Turf somewhere. Yes this is for you
Even more beautiful than we are spoiled to expect from you. Thank you. Yesterday was all about love and friends. Being surrounded by both.