Following the Reds since the age of six
‘Supporting a team is about the feeling and emotions that come with winning’
DESPITE THE venue, my first Liverpool game wasn’t exactly memorable. Wembley Stadium seemed huge for six-year-old me, and the sparse crowd said plenty about the occasion - the pre-season Makita International Tournament.
I honestly can’t even remember the opposition, it was either Dinamo Kiev or Arsenal, because those were the two teams Liverpool played that weekend.
I know I wasn’t allowed to go to both, which annoyed my little self, but that was probably a prudent decision by my father, considering my now faded memories of the occasion.
It was late summer in 1989, the Hillsborough disaster was still a fresh nightmare most Liverpool fans were working their way through, and families were still grieving; it was the most nothing of tournaments.
Living there, I got more intense experiences of Liverpool in action around London that season and the one that followed.
Initially that was on the terraces, but with me perched on my dad’s shoulders, those days were hugely detrimental to his back so seating soon became a more attractive option.
Amongst others, I got to see a perfect hat-trick form Ronnie Rosenthal at Charlton, a St. Stephen’s Day clash with QPR at Loftus Road, a hammering against Arsenal at Highbury, and a game against Wimbledon at their adopted Selhurst Park base.
Memories of a six-year-old are obviously dotted with big holes, but I do recall kicking football in Crystal Palace Park - former home of an actual Crystal Palace that burnt to the ground in 1936 – with a wireless radio on, as Liverpool won their 18th and last league title.
By the time we moved to Ireland in the summer of ‘91 I was already hooked. It was many seasons before I got to another game in person, but I kept following through the Souness era, the Evans years, and into the Houllier era as Liverpool struggled to find their way to former glories.
There was exciting football under old boot room stalwart Evans, but no league title.
Frenchman Houllier brought more discipline to the team, on and off the pitch. He achieved cup success but struggled to keep pace in the league where his approach was just too cautious to win the number of games required.
Fan, of course, is short for fanatic but I guess there are different levels, and I moved more into the fanatical side when Liverpool turned to Spaniard Rafael Benitez in 2004.
I had watched his Valencia team dismantle Liverpool in the UEFA Cup the previous season and frankly had never before seen a team play football like them.
Most people wanted Porto’s Jose Mourinho at Anfield before he agreed to take the reins at Chelsea, but Benitez was always my first choice.
I was 21 when Benitez took over and didn’t realise I knew nothing about football. Actually, that’s wrong: I knew plenty about football, too much, but I didn’t really understand the game.
Watching and tracking how Benitez worked changed that. Eventually I knew what he was doing, and often knew what he was going to do.
The former Real Madrid player would substitute a left-back for another left-back with Liverpool behind and would take all sorts of abuse for it.
It was a footballing chess masterclass, week after week. Almost always the substitution changed the pattern of the game for the better. People called it lucky, but for me it was a complete education, and it opened my eyes fully.
The reaction by old ‘football men’, who were probably in the process of realising they didn’t actually ‘know’ the game either, infuriated me, but that fire changed my life.
I had completed an honours degree in law with business in W.I.T. but was bouncing around trying to find my passions in life.
I loved almost all sport but it never seemed like a career for me. I’m not sure why, but maybe it had roots in my lack of confidence at the time.
But picking up paper after paper, reading article after article completely missing the point of what Benitez was doing with much smaller resources than his rivals, made me realise that even if my prose couldn’t match up to theirs, I could offer more from an understanding of what was happening point of view.
So I started writing with a mind that tried to look beyond the perceived wisdom. I wrote to Alan Aherne here at the ‘People’ and started doing a few match reports for him.
I guess I was serviceable because here I am, twelve years later, still typing away! Sometimes I lose sight of why I started out doing this and it gets on my nerves. I do always dress myself down and resolve to do better.
In those years I also got more chances to go to Anfield. I was at an age where I was able to turn up at the airport in the afternoon, fly over, go to the game, back to the airport to sleep there until the morning, and get the plane home.
My biggest concern at that stage was doing everything as cheaply as possible; the cheaper I could do it, the more often I could make the trip.
I’d target midweek games, get the bus to Dublin, flight to Liverpool, ticket to the game and transport to and from Anfield, on occasion all for under a hundred quid.
I started to travel to away games too, one of which was arguably the one that cost Liverpool the league title back in 2008-’09, an away loss to Middlesbrough.
It was one of only two league defeats all season, in which the rumours were that Jamie Carragher refused to play fullback, leading to a Martin Skrtel disaster there instead.
I think the best game I’ve ever seen in person happened that season too, a 4-4 draw with Arsenal, the only one of Liverpool’s last nine games they didn’t win.
They battered the London side in that game, but Andrey Arshavin seemed to score every time he touched the ball and it finished level.
That was a crazy ride of a season. Liverpool, without as much technical genius, were tipping the prime Valencia level of football in the campaign and were desperately unlucky not to win the title.
While it didn’t happen in the league under Benitez, the gaffer did give me one of the best nights of my life.
It’s astonishing that the word ‘Istanbul’ is more synonymous with a Champions League final than it is as the capital of Turkey with English football fans. The game is unforgettable, just for the sheer madness of it all.
I didn’t believe in miracles at half-time. I don’t think anyone did. You’d never give up on a game but this was, talent-wise,
one of the weakest teams to make a UEFA Champions League final opposite an AC Milan side with legends of the game smattered throughout their line-up.
But that was Benitez, he always had a plan. His changes that night were matched by the hunger and belief of the players as Liverpool did the impossible and claimed ‘big ears’ for the fifth time on penalties.
I watched it at home in front of the TV, and it was extra special because all the family, hardened Liverpool fans, were all together and it meant the world to us all.
I’m sure a lot of you will be familiar with my brother, Jason, who covers some games for the paper when possible and has taken the coaching pathway, currently getting ready for his first season as manager of Wexford F.C. Under-15s.
Jay was a spindly little nine-year-old at the time and I think it inspired him on his chosen career too. I know some of his work down his path has been based on Rafa Benitez, so he gets it too.
Things were changing at Liverpool at the end of the decade, and not for the better. What Rafa was doing was magical as far as the vast majority of hardcore supporters were concerned, but there were problems in the boardroom that became a distraction.
At times they spilled out for the world to see, and the relationship between managers and owners soured. Not to go too deep into it, but the club were slipping into huge financial difficulty and Rafa Benitez got this information out in his press conferences.
This didn’t go down well with American owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett, while rifts were also forming with other high-profile, big ego figures in the boardroom.
Protests started during and after games. I was around and involved in some of them. Staying around after the game, singing songs of displeasure outside the boardroom post-match when we got word that the owners were in town; getting the word out online - there was a mini-community feel to the whole thing, like it was a fight for the future of the club.
Liverpool is huge business but they were just days from potential administration owing to the financial mismanagement.
By the time it all came to a head, the owners had long since sacked Benitez and the club was in turmoil. It was run by people who didn’t have the club in their heart, and that crushed me.
I had to take a step back, as I wasn’t able to recognise the monster Liverpool Football Club had become, a soul-less, bumbling cesspit of money-grabbers just casually waiting to strip all the cash they could out of the club.
A few men helped save Liverpool, and one of those was Martin Broughton. He had his faults but at the end of the day the man appointed by Hicks and Gillett as Chairman, with the help of the High Court, ousted the Americans. In debt, they were forced into a sale to Fenway Sports Group.
From my time following baseball and the Red Sox, I knew a decent bit about John W. Henry and his fellow owners at ‘FSG’ and immediately knew this was a great move.
They had worked wonders in Boston by running the club as a business but doing it properly, and that’s exactly what Liverpool needed.
Kenny Dalglish was back but deep down it didn’t feel right, like it wasn’t supposed to be. He didn’t last long under Fenway and in came Brendan Rodgers.
With investment under Fenway amped up, he was able to compete but he just wasn’t a good fit for Liverpool and, despite a second place finish, it was never going to last.
Enter Jurgen Norbert Klopp. I had been back to Anfield under Rodgers but it still felt like the soul of the club was missing.
The German was the man to bring it back. Unlike his predecessor, it was obvious from every word he spoke, every sentence he constructed in his own special version of English.
Personally I started to re-locate my connection to the club I first saw in person as a six-year-old. Liverpool did things with a touch of class again, they stood out from the pack, and that was down to Fenway and Klopp.
I started to go back more frequently, only once or twice a season, in midweek when it’s quieter around Wexford, but it has become something I could look forward to again.
Making the Champions League final in 2018 was a sign of a team improving, getting closer to what Klopp saw as his brainchild.
Progress has been constant and winning the European Cup for the sixth time last season was hugely special.
Being so consistently brilliant and losing the league was tough last year. I’ll be honest and say I didn’t see Liverpool winning 26 of their first 27 games this season to put them in an almost uncatchable position, but this group is truly remarkable.
The team plays in the spirit of the manager. As a whole they are good people and that makes rooting for them that much easier than some of those who came before.
To me that’s hugely important but not something that’s always easy to achieve within a club when egos are involved.
As I write this, Liverpool are two wins from becoming champions of England’s top league for the first time in 30 years, but the season has been halted by the outbreak of Covid-19. It had to be halted, but what happens next will interest everyone.
First and foremost, the most important thing are the people. It’s important that we as responsible people limit the spread of this virus and hopefully we can get back to normal sooner rather than later.
For football, things are being made to seem more difficult. The clubs met to discuss the situation and resolved to finish the league when it was safe to play football again.
That’s the only equitable, fair approach to take but money, and potential loss thereof, probably played a bigger part in the decision than the fact that it was the right thing to do.
It’s therefore almost certain that Liverpool will be Premier League champions 2019-’20. Like every fan, I’d prefer that to be on the pitch and it seems there’s an appetite for it to happen organically.
Having said all of what I have so far it might surprise some, and others might not believe me, but at the end of the day if it was decided that the league wouldn’t finish and Liverpool couldn’t be awarded the title, it wouldn’t kill me.
Supporting a team, a club, a sportsperson is about the experiences along the way, it’s about the feeling and the emotions that come with winning and succeeding.
Liverpool are far and away the best team in the league this season, it’s obvious, and if other people are too bitter to acknowledge that it says more about them than anything else.
For as long as I’ve lived, I’ve seen Liverpool competing for honours, experienced great games and moments. It’s not about one season or one trophy, it’s about living those experiences, wherever they take you.
When I’m watching a game, be it Liverpool, the Green Bay Packers or whoever, I want to win, I always look at refereeing decisions this way: what if the roles were reversed, would I be happy to concede a penalty or goal to that decision? If the answer is no, it shouldn’t be a penalty or goal at the other end either, and vice-versa.
I look on what remains of the season the same way and come to this conclusion: if it was Manchester United, City or Everton (as if!) going for the title, would I be happy that the season could be voided and they wouldn’t get the trophy? Absolutely not, that would not be equitable and fair, simple as that.
In my opinion it’s a very easy decision and I can’t really see what the issue is. The current season should be played to a climax whenever the planet is healthy enough to get back to playing sport again.
Finish out the nine remaining games, crown champions, allot Champions-League places if applicable, relegate the teams that finish in the bottom three after 38 games, and promote the best teams from the Championship to replace them. It’s so obvious and not at all difficult.
Unfortunately, tribal nonsense does somewhat dampen the enthusiasm I have for the game, and it’s why I talk very little about my support of Liverpool.
I guess I’m one of these people who gets my joy from my team success rather than someone else’s failure. There are plenty of us, but unfortunately there seems to be as many who live the opposite existence.
It’s weird behaviour. It goes way beyond ‘banter’ into the realm of hate, which in turn meshes with the problems we have in society nowadays.
I guess it was always there, but Twitter seems to spew out these morons in their thousands and they are as prevalent as ever in recent weeks.
In probably his most famous line of many, Bill Shankly said: ‘Some people think football is a matter of life or death, I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.’
Unfortunately, we’re about to get a big example of how false that statement is.
Football and everything that goes with it can just wait a few months. Simple.