WRITE about your favourite ever player, he said. The one you always wanted to be as a kid in the playground or admired the most. Who’s yours? That’s not always an easy question. I mean, there’s your favourite and there’s the best. My hero lined up in the same side as...
“WHO is your favourite Liverpool player of all time?” It’s that ‘all time’ bit that gets you. Immediately your mind is cast back, like your life flashing before your eyes, but just the football bits. When I was a nipper, my grandad sat me on his knee and regaled me...
YOU almost feel daft for worrying about football at a time like this. Bill Shankly joked that it was more important than life and death, but Jürgen Klopp summed it up best recently by describing it as “the most important of the least important things”. It is such a...
I RECKON my early experiences of the match aren’t that typical of a footie-loving lad growing up on Merseyside. Those romantic ideals of dad and lad going to the Liverpool match together, passing down the traditions, sharing the routines, becoming versed in ‘the way’?...
I’M not sure this was my first game. In fact, I’m pretty certain it wasn’t. But rather than subjecting you to a fleeting, millisecond memory of a Graeme Souness side toiling against some claret and blue blur around 1992, I thought I’d recall the first game which...
IT seems strange to talk about my first game when I’ve no idea when the next one is, but these are strange days indeed. I’m not used to no football. I don’t suppose any of us are. And it’s not as if you can go and see a lower league game or even a kickabout in the...
“SELF-isolate,” they said. “Avoid mass gatherings and stay indoors” they said. “Great,” I said. “That’ll give me more time to write about football… Cancelled, you say?!” Yes, in these uncertain Coronavirus times, the football has been suspended. It is absolutely the...
THE footy being taken away from us has been cause for a lot of contemplation. Firstly, from a working point of view, what do we write about when there’s no games to talk about? Secondly, it makes you think about the football. Assess the impact it has had on your life,...
WHAT is to be gained from thinking about loss? I’m not being a smartarse. It’s a genuine quandary when equating the question to football, or life. We can spend so much time thinking about what we’ve lost or are losing that you dismiss all of the little wins which tell...
THERE is something horrendous about going out like that. Stilettos and broken bottles all over the shop. Let’s get it out of the way: The goalkeeper’s error is dreadful, it changes the game and costs Liverpool the tie. He’s not a bad person, is a...