The first game of the Premier League season brought with it the usual dose of drama as Liverpool found a way past Bournemouth at Anfield…
THIS CLUB can put you through the wringer.
Dan Austin summed it up perfectly on the Post-Match Show when he said that we went through ‘everything, all at once.’ From sadness to exhilaration, through periods of joy and irritation and then more joy and relief. Then it ends with songs and the hard-to-watch minutes of one of our greatest ever players in pain.
This club.
What strikes me most is that while football will always be drama, will always be theatre, there’s something about that rectangle of turf in L4 which pulls it all to us. Everything is extreme at Anfield. Everything. The colour beige doesn’t exist. Liverpool is the game exploding onto the biggest canvas in the brightest colours and featuring a thousand story arcs that fiction could never reach.
Friday looked like a trailer of the best bits from a season. It wasn’t, of course. It was just one league game. It’s just how Liverpool does things.
I often wonder how fans of other clubs do it.
I mean, I’m not here to say that we’re any better than anyone else when it comes to emotion, power, obsessiveness and dedication and all of that, but how can they live a footballing life where drama comes as a rarity rather than a regular experience?
There are times during the almost commonplace periods of emotional exhaustion that I admire their ability to handle a, say, goalless draw. A draw for Liverpool is almost an insult these days. Liverpool games will inevitably have a story attached to them.
Look at the six goals. Bog standard goals in a linear narrative? Of course not.
The new signing gets the first, then he lays on the second which has a glorious finish that would make headlines for most other games, but is, in fact, a more or less standard Cody Gakpo goal.
Then the third happens because we’ve decided that we can’t just see the game out. Oh no. We have to keep the tension going. Like a villain in a James Bond film who has 007 captive and can just shoot him there and then but insists on giving him a tour of his weapons factory first – whilst leaving a side door open.
The fourth, their equaliser, is magnificent — it really is — but only because we’ve decided that we haven’t learned from the third and can always go a little madder if we want. For some reason, we always want.
The fifth is the most important and comes from the lad who may not even be here next week. Again, to borrow a movie analogy, he’s the returning character from the first act who we’ve forgotten but turns up with a gun at the door and the audience goes ‘Ohh! Him!’
And then the final is about the star of the film, because he’s got to do something special on the opening night.
And you’d think that’s that. You can’t go anywhere emotionally now. Your heart has danced around your chest for so long that we just need a rest and a long chat about it. But, no. It’s Diogo. It’s Mo and Diogo. It’s all of them and Diogo, but Mo’s sharing it with us because he wants to make sure that we’re alright too. Because these things go both ways.
I doubt I’ve ever seen a more powerful image at a football match than that – Mo in a silent dialogue with thousands of Reds.
It was hard, tense and somehow beautiful. I wish we didn’t have to see it. I wish none of them and us had to go through it, but unscripted moments like that make you want to grab the world and cling onto it. These things somehow tend to happen to us.
This isn’t a football club. It’s a rollercoaster and it’s one I can never get off even when there are times I just can’t handle it and have to.
And this is only the first weekend.
Fiction couldn’t come close to this and though some of it is unedifying (ban him for as long as you can. No messing around), it’s why this club holds us in the extraordinary way it does.
Week 1.
