While others try to whip up Liverpool fans before the visit of Manchester City, it’s their owners that should be accountable, not their fans…
I SEE we’ve been told to give Manchester City hell at the weekend.
The usual suspects have gathered and told us that Anfield is to be the first line of attack following the Premier League’s finding. Enzo Maresca, his boys and their fans are going to get it.
I appreciate the sentiment, and I’ve no issue with making Anfield as unpleasant as possible for any visitors, but this sort of thing doesn’t sit well with me. It’s too easy to be pushed into an agenda of someone else’s making.
The online discourse has called for non-stop venom from the first whistle, while opposing fans have discussed concerns about attacking the team bus. A bus, incidentally, that won’t contain any of the cheats who have led them, and by extension us, here.
A discourse that wants us to give the fans what for when they too were not found guilty of falsifying accounts. It all seems a bit performative and solely in the interest of content. Maybe something even darker.
‘Anfield will let them know,’ gleefully remarked one such commentator with little love of either club in his heart. Why not just leave it to us?
In any case, our relationship with City has always been a bit odd.
Older Reds are still coming to terms with how City have morphed from the regular donor of points to a global power to a major disgrace in a few short years. They were always just the other side from that city. The only thing we had in common was a mutual hatred of the other lot.
They were always a bit of a comedy outfit, albeit one with a bit of soul. In the 1990s, this was typified by the term ‘typical City’.
This was a moniker given to them under the tenure of our own Kevin Keegan, one he was keen to lose. In short, it became a byword for their often flawed tactics and haphazard approach to the game. Free-flowing one way, wide open the other. Both comic and tragic. If they found a tenner, they’d lose a twenty while they picked it up.
Coupled with that came some reckless decisions and incidents. None more so than the time The Reds visited them on the final day of the 1995-96 season when they needed a win to stay up.
A Steve Lomas own goal and an Ian Rush strike put them 2-0 down, but they muscled their way back to 2-2. Late in the game, a fan near the bench told them that rivals Southampton and Coventry were drawing, so a draw would be good enough to keep them up. I often think about that fan.
Enter sheer comedy.
Enter typical City.
Manager Alan Ball told his team to wind down the clock and take the all-important point. They were safe. This they duly did, this time attacking the corner flag rather than the penalty area with their usual vigour to waste time.
But the fan got it all wrong. City still needed to win and by the time they got wind of developments elsewhere, it was too late. They were relegated.
That version of City seems a world away from the walking pantomime of today’s incarnation. The truculent ‘we can do what we want’ vintage that’s brought the game into an irreconcilable disrepute. That version had character. This one less so.
A mate of mine, Jase, was in the City end that day, as was his Dad, and when the UAE money came in they quite rightly recalibrated their dreams. From fluttering between relegation and promotion to league titles, European Cups and a dynasty for the ages.
I’m fine with that. That’s only natural if you’ve had years hopping between divisions. For a fanbase who still took significant numbers to the away grounds of the old Third Division when they sank that low, it seemed only fair. Who wouldn’t want to finally be a noisy neighbour to the irritants down the road?
I’ve no truck with City fans here. My dislike of them stems only from the first word in their team name, and that’s where it will end.
I worked with Jase at the time of the takeover and through those early years. After they won their Champions League years later, he left me a voice note reminding me that I’d been the first to congratulate him on their first new-age trophy – the 2011 FA Cup win – and reflected on how far they’d come.
Don’t get me wrong here. I wish they hadn’t won any of it. I wish we had instead, but I can’t begrudge the real fans. There’s plenty of that to be done elsewhere with the people who have made a mockery of the game for the past 16 years.
My ire – and it’s visceral – is directed solely at the UAE, the Premier League, the City hierarchy and the Prime Minister, who may never utter a collection of such stupid sentences ever again. The fans who just want to see their team do well? Nah. Being told how to behave by the persiflage accounts? Double nah.
Jase wasn’t at their Istanbul victory. A few years earlier, he started to experience headaches and blurred vision. A few hospital appointments later, he was diagnosed with a life-threatening brain tumour. He survived, but isn’t quite out of the woods yet. I can’t find it in me to hate that.
I can’t get angry at someone for following their club. It draws focus from the actual cheats.
So the online posturing, the ‘what-abouts’, the fucking Gallagher brothers and the anger at fan level can take a powder, as far as I’m concerned.
And, yes, there will be City fans who will defend this and talk of a ‘Red Cartel’ holding them down, but we say all sorts of things to defend our club when it’s under attack. I certainly did over the Luis Suarez incident and regret it. I just didn’t want the club to be wrong. That too is human.
City will be punished and will forever be vilified, but it scarcely matters to those who sat through their glum years and know who Colin Bell was. They got the high, and supporters would rather have those moments than decades of ‘yes but’.
If anything, the last 16 years have been the most typical City thing ever. They won the lot and still managed to lose it all.
As Jase said to me this week: “We’re always a mixture of triumph and tragedy.”
Anfield will be raucous next Sunday and rightly so. We just don’t need it to be to satisfy a media narrative.
Their fans didn’t do this. Maybe just concentrate on the people who did and ignore the rest.
