The audacity of 30 years of hope
For the past 30 years, avid local Liverpool fan, GIDEON NKALA, and former Mmegi editor, has watched, from miles away, as his favourite side huffed and puffed. At times it was a case of going agonisingly close to the Holy Grail, but at times, his side’s di
Only rivers are endowed with patience. They meander through valleys and highlands; they are broken, stuffed, clogged, decrease and increase until they ultimately reach the ocean.
Like a rock that is hewn from the mountains by the marauding waters, passing through the decelerating lowlands before it settles in the company of sea shells and fine sands in the expanse waters of the oceans as a refined pebble; the sports fan is probably in a similar emotional journey. In this, the Liverpool fan is prototypical.Over the past 30 years as a Liverpool Football Club fan I felt like a rock that has been on a river journey, yearning to arrive, believing I will settle soon enough yet not knowing when I will settle.
Supporting Liverpool
I was initiated into the ‘Liverpool faith’ before the club reached its regressive phase. Ian Rush was banging in the goals.
Bruce Grobbelaar, the crown prince in goal, was hogging all the limelight in our part of the world. At the time there was another Bruce who was trail blazing and his movies still crowding cinemas, the martial arts Lee. I swear on the altar of allegiance that the similarity of the two Bruces did not only go as far as the first names.
Grobbelaar was the umbilical cord between Southern Africa and England’s most successful football team.
He was the rallying point and the poster boy in the back pages of our regional media. It was, however, the Jamaican born John Barnes who took my fancy. Barnes was a live wire and had many defenders sprawled on the green in his forward forays. I adored him and Liverpool were winning. There was a good feeling.
The love for Liverpool was a transplant handed down from my Zimbabwean teacher during my formative years, moistened by a growing expatriate community in my hometown and engrafted (read fossilised) in my mind by foreign newspapers which were collectables from the terraces of Palapye Hotel.
The burden of carrying this long distance affection has not been as easy as walking into Anfield Road ; it often involved walking distances only to watch through a window or seating at the edge of a rickety couch of a reluctant host, staying up late to watch canned games in very cold common rooms.
Struggle and hope
In 1991, before Arsenal stole the show on Liverpool season, Kenny Daglish resigned as
Liverpool coach. Even without King Kenny at the helm, there was still a lot to be optimistic about. Young stallions were coming into the Liverpool assembly line. The likes of Steve McManaman, Robbie Fowler, Jamie Redknapp to take up the cudgel from the ageing soldiers of the golden era.
The ‘Spice Boys’ as they were insidiously called, only flattered to deceive.
Along the way, management bought experienced players such as Paul Ince, formerly of United and the likes of Gary McAllister who chipped in with some important goals but still the holy grail of English football seemed elusive.
It is not as if Liverpool had become a worthless club, some seasons the team were runners up, an occasional FA Cup and the League Cup. Gerard Houllier delivered a treble of Europa Cup, the FA Cup and the League Cup in 2001. Rafael Benitez riding on Steven Gerard’s industry won the Champions league in 2005 under very audacious circumstances.
We found our voice and we were at our most voluble.
You see a fan’s greatest stock- in- trade is to brag, the same vanity that accomplished men recede into when they talk about their German toy things or farm studs.
“We are going back to where we belong,’’ was our new enthusiastic jab.
Privately in various Liverpool platforms there was a foreboding fear that Liverpool could have been emasculated. We argued amongst ourselves, commiserating and licking wounds while publicly we projected a posture of a wounded lion that knows its way back to the summit.
Tshimologo Boitumelo, the late fellow scribe and long time lonely fellow traveller through the Liverpool lean years bore the emotional scars of Liverpool’s capitulation.
He would throw tantrums at some of the non-descript players that wore the crest bird of Liverpool such as Florent Sinama-Pongolle, Soitirios Krygiakos and flops such as El Hajj Diouf, Fernando Morientes and Sean Dundee.
On a good day he will amble his bulky body into my office often accompanied by another local kopite, Ernest Molome, and we will all talk ourselves into a trance as we eulogised over the exploits of Xabi Alonso, Fernando Torres or Patrick Berger or the not so trusted goal getter, Milano Baros.
I never understood whether it was continental patriotism - that primal instinct to gravitate towards your own - or was it the inner desire to make Liverpool reflective of its wider support base; we somehow thought the Guinean Titi Camara will be a George Weah at Liverpool but he never came close and still we kept hoping even as he tinkered out.
Brandon Rodgers in 2014 got Liverpool playing their high octane football that saw Luis Suarez, Daniel Sturridge, Raheem Sterling and Steven Gerard bundling off teams. We almost had it in the bag but we collectively slipped in that Stephen Gerard fall. I was inconsolable.
Jurgen Klopp
Jurgen Klopp came to Liverpool with a solid credential as a David who slays giants, he had usurped the Bundasliga from the clutches of German giants Bayern Munich and claimed the scalp of accomplished sides as Real Madrid on the road to the UEFA Campions league final.
To top it all he had conjured up some avantgarde type of intense football code named Gegenpress.
In the virtual streets of social media we were derided for raising our hopes on a coach who is at best a hugger and a touch line busy body. Klopp was not the one, they said.
A Kenyan friend of mine reminded me that Klopp was a perennial loser at finals.
Liverpool, he retorted, is a football version of Raila Odinga, always showing promise and never delivering the real crown.
That hurt.
On Sky Sports, there was a regular Manchester City caller from Washington DC whenever he was asked about Liverpool chances to upstage City to the English Premiership throne, would chuckle and nonchalantly dismissed Liverpool’s chances.
‘’Liverpool! Don’t worry about them, they will choke.’’
And the truth is that we choked on several occasions and we feared that 2020 will turn out to be a heartache of 2019. Coronavirus surfaced as the last man in a long line of party spoilers’ defence. But it too, could not stop the crowning moment.
Perhaps all these years of waiting and near misses were just a long preparation for the awakening of the football behemoth; all these 30 years of waiting could have been the realignment of a volcanic eruption of joy out of the kop, meandering into the River Mersey to the crevices of the world.
“We are champions,’’ I sent out my first message to David Fani. How I wish I could have sent the same message to departed kop faithful such as Tshimologo Boitumelo, former High Court judge Moatlhodi Malombo Marumo, crack private attorney, Joe Malatsi and veteran broadcaster, Cebo Manyaapelo.