Written by TTT Subscriber Mike Taylor
(*with apologies to Charles Dickens for nicking and then inverting his quote! – Ed)
Is it weird that I’m kind of enjoying this?
These are great days to be a Liverpool supporter.
No, really.
Look, I’m not saying I’m enjoying the actual games. The Spurs and West Ham wins were, it turns out, aberrations in our present streak, and those aside it’s been rancid to watch. Early in the season when we were dropping points to terrible refereeing decisions, it was at least energising to rage against the world. Now, we’re just … playing badly. It’s been interesting to see how nearly unanimous Liverpool fans have been in saying that Brighton deserved their win at Anfield. And they did, because they were the better of the two teams on the day — but not because they did anything particularly brilliant, but because we were so bad. There are lots of reasons for this, of course, and I won’t go into them now — plenty of other articles are doing that.
But what I want to cling to is this: what we’re experiencing now is what 90% of football fans experience all the time. Deep disappointment in players we love; frustration at what seems like a sequence of wrong decisions on and off the pitch; the feeling that we’re never going to score again; a sense (rightly or wrongly) that the world is stacked against us.
And this is the real stuff of football-supporting life nearly all the time for nearly all fans. It’s the backdrop against which the shining moments stand out. It’s what makes the Anfield win such a glorious thing for Brighton fans, who are used to scrapping around at the bottom of the division hoping to stay up. It’s what made Aston Villa’s 7–2 win earlier in the season a literally once-in-a-lifetime experience for their fans.
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