Some charmers will always walk through a storm, heads held high

IKNOW there’s a certain anxiety out there, and that some parts of the community are more vulnerable to it than others. I know it has thrown a lot of us out of our stride, and made our lives a bit more complicated.

I know too that there are some who believe it’s going to be like this for a while, that we’ll have to get used to these days in which the news is not good. Indeed it would be no exaggeration to say that a few people out there have been in a state of panic since it started.

But I’m here to tell you to take it easy — take a chill pill baby!

Liverpool losing a few games, far from being a sign of some fundamental disruption in the cosmos, is in truth a demonstration of the opposite. It shows that until the recent misfortunes against Atletico Madrid, Watford and Chelsea, it was the almost incessant winning that was disruptive of the basic laws of the universe.

And by somehow managing to lose a few times, if anything Liverpool have deepened our awareness of the extraterrestrial nature of what they had been achieving.

Often it is the other way round — I have called it the Emile Heskey Effect, this thing whereby you do something, and it only draws attention to the fact that generally, you don’t do it.

Heskey was the then Liverpool striker who had failed to score for a long time, but who somehow found the strength of character to get a goal, at which point the caption immediately went up on the screen, declaring that this was the first time such a thing happened for the

Hesk since the Crimean War or thereabouts — a lesser man might have figured that never scoring again was perhaps the smart play.

But you can turn it the other way too, in which case you’re calling it the Jurgen Klopp Effect, in which Liverpool lose a few games, which merely draws attention to the fact that this is something that they haven’t been doing for an absurdly long time.

To think that we were once waiting, waiting, waiting largely in vain for Emile Heskey to somehow put the ball in the back of the net, and now we’ve been waiting, waiting, waiting even longer for Liverpool to lose — to actually lose — a football match.

So long, that a kid in Donegal wrote a letter to Kloppo beseeching him to stop winning all the time — echoing the feelings of other kids in earlier times, whose young lives were being destroyed by Alex Ferguson and his grim refusal to entertain even the concept of United lowering their ludicrously high standards.

In fact some of those kids were in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, and no doubt they will be feeling this sense of the divided self — on the one side, nobody ever enjoys it when their football team has a dip in form; but in this case there is also a sense that the transformation of this Liverpool team into roughly what Manchester United used to be, is now complete.

Oh how the fans of

Liverpool (and everyone else really) used to take our meagre pleasures in the occasional losses of that awesome football team, that apparently invincible corporation.

It was all we had.

They’d have these strange lapses from time to time, maybe losing anything up to three games in a row, and some of us would even write articles in which we’d try to convince ourselves and our readers that this was a portent of worse things to come.

Yeah, we wrote that one a few times over the years — for all the good that it did. It is quite disturbing indeed, how clearly we can still today recall these games — a 6-3 loss away to Southampton, or Newcastle beating them 5-0...

No doubt in decades to come, the enemies of Liverpool will remember exactly where they were, when they heard that Watford had scored a third goal against the Pool — and they will certainly be mad for it this week when Atletico Madrid come to Anfield for the second leg. Because it does need to be mentioned that one of these Liverpool “defeats” in the Champions League wasn’t even a defeat, in the sense that the final result will not be known until Wednesday night.

And the loss to Watford came at a time when many shrewd observers are becoming increasingly confident that Liverpool will be there or thereabouts at the business end of this Premier League — we’ll say no more than that.

But if any Liverpool fans out there are still anxious, bear in mind that there are others whose only hope in life now is that a pandemic might for some reason cause an asterisk to be placed beside the winners of this year’s title, or that the league might be won in the style of Charlie Rich — Behind Closed Doors.

An asterisk and Charlie Rich, that is what is left to them.

We’ve all been there.

‘By losing, Liverpool deepened our awareness of their extraterrestrial achievements’