Emotions affect us all differently, and in the world of Liverpool FC – whether as a player or supporter – they can be felt more intensely…
AS IT TURNS OUT, three isn’t a magic number. De La Soul, amongst others, lied to us.
It’s been a tough week where practically nothing has gone right. In fact, things have gone rotten since Hugo Ekitike took his shirt off in the League Cup. That angered some God somewhere.
And it’s not just one thing. It’s everything. I mean, where to start?
There’s a scene in Fawlty Towers where Basil Fawlty, the hotel owner, is paranoid that a visiting psychiatrist might think him unusual. Psychiatrists were ripe for comedy tropes in the 70s. In any case, this one has no interest in him whatsoever so it’s funny when, following another fresh humiliation, he chances upon Basil grovelling on the floor like a lunatic. The doctor turns to his wife and says: ‘There’s enough there for an entire convention.’
Yes, it’s hard to put your finger on what’s going wrong for the Champions now. There’s enough there for an entire convention.
You can boil it down to reasonable soundbites such as ‘We’ve played five fullbacks this season and the manager doesn’t seem keen on any of them’ or ‘At Chelsea we played two midfielders at right-back and centre-back when Joe Gomez was on the bench,’ but that doesn’t come close to addressing all the issues.
After the game, Martin Fitzgerald messaged me to say: ‘There isn’t a single vertical relationship in the team at the moment’ and he’s right. Mini partnerships can seem odd (see Luis Suarez and Jose Enrique), but you need them all over the pitch. Vertical relationships? This week our lads look like they’ve never met.
It’s strange how sleep can alter your view though. On Saturday night I was exhausted with them and not a little truculent. Sell them all! What’s the manager doing? Endo? That sort of thing, but come Sunday I was more philosophical. Two thoughts have dominated my mind since.
Firstly, football is really, really hard. I feel I’ve been saying this a lot lately but it’s the one thing that’s easy to forget. Yes, you can point at £450m spent or whatever, but it doesn’t mean a thing without a system and a strategy to beat all the other expensive footballers who are trying to beat you.
You need coherence and an all-round philosophy which can be altered to deal with anything when fate comes up against your will, and even then, you’ve got to rely on some luck. You can’t just fall into that because you feel you deserve it or have spent a fortune.
Look at Alexis Mac Allister. Arne Slot is trying every combination going to find that blend and to do that he has to get unfit players onto the pitch to get them stronger.
Hence, we had 85 minutes of the Argentine despite him being miles behind the play. The only way to establish match fitness is to play people in matches. Sadly, he has to do this in real games where everything matters rather than a kickabout behind closed doors.
And secondly, well, it’s as the captain said and it’s the most obvious element in all this.
They lost their mate in the summer and every single day they have to come into the workplace and see reminders of his absence. Now, you can have the most expensive therapy in the world to deal with that but there’ll always be times when you wonder what the hell you’re doing kicking a football around when your world is upside down.
We’ve all lost people and we’ve all had to go into work and act normal about it – even months later when outsiders might think that you’re alright. That alone can be physically draining. Now, do that while trying to defend a title.
That’s not offered as an excuse. It’s just something they’ve had to live with and we have no way of knowing what it’s doing to them on a day-to-day basis.
Somehow, Arne Slot has to deal with that and the pressure of being champions while corralling a huge squad into a consistent winning machine. And he’s going to be losing most of them to the internationals for the next two weeks. And then it’s Man Utd.
So I’m shouting back at my angry Saturday night self. “Give them a break, Karl!”
Football is hard and life is harder. They didn’t choose to play like this. They want to win too and have a happy autumn, but sometimes you can’t always get what you want.
And it’s frustrating for us as fans. We don’t get to see behind the curtain and can’t give anything to the lads other than support. So, let’s do that. Ultimately, it’s all we can do, and it might be all they need.
You pay for the good times by coping with the hard and this week there’s been enough of that for an entire convention.
Sing louder now.
