It’s nonsense to talk football when we’re in middle of a crisis
IT had started as one of those weeks when the topics for discussion were arriving thick and fast.
Manchester United and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer had dominated my thoughts early in the week after their fantastic derby victory.
Then Liverpool came to the fore. They threw everything at Atletico Madrid in an attempt to stay in the Champions League and they had played as well as I have seen in a long time.
It was a brilliant game but I knew how difficult it was going to be with Diego Simeone in the opposite dugout.
Atletico did to Jurgen Klopp’s team what Benfica did to the squad which I played in back in 2006. Going out in the last 16 when you think you have a chance of taking the biggest prize of all really hurts.
But everything changed early evening on Thursday. I had been in London for the day and, before heading home, I’d called into a pub I know for a drink. The atmosphere was as you would expect in those hours when work is finishing — buoyant and noisy — until Boris Johnson appeared on the TV.
Usually, TVs in pubs provide a bit of distraction in the background. Unless there is a game of football on, nobody really pays much attention but, on this occasion, the banner across the bottom of the screen brought hush across the room.
As the Prime Minister spoke, the topic of football quickly became irrelevant. The only thing that I could equate the situation with was being at Queens Park Rangers’ old training ground watching the news about 9/11 filtering through. Everyone stopped what they were doing. Everyone listened.
Imagine me trying to talk today about how well I feel Odion Ighalo has done since arriving at Old Trafford on loan. Or me discussing how Liverpool going out of Europe doesn’t make one bit of difference to how well they have done this season. It would all just seem irrelevant.
You will know by now how much I love football and how my weeks revolve around it but it would be a nonsense to attempt to talk about something around the game when we are in the middle of a crisis and nobody knows how it will pan out. We’re all anxious. It would be wrong to suggest otherwise.
Sometimes I wonder whether people assume, because we are in football, that we don’t pay attention to the wider world but I can tell you that dressing rooms are no different from any other place of work.
We all talk; we all have concerns about the same issues.
I haven’t got the foggiest idea what the outcome for this will be but I am certain the decision to postpone football until April 3 is correct. Will I miss watching games this weekend? Of course. I won’t know what to do with myself and I don’t like the idea of not being busy.
This, however, is an unprecedented time. I had planned to go to the Cheltenham Gold Cup yesterday — I absolutely love a day at the races — but I decided against it. I was supposed to go to a fundraising dinner in
Liverpool last night for my old team-mate Stephen Darby but that was cancelled.
Was it frustrating not to go to Cheltenham? Of course. Would I have loved to have been with ‘Darbs’ to help fund the Darby Rimmer MND Foundation, which has been established to win the fight against motor neurone disease? Absolutely. I would have been there in a heartbeat. Further down the line, I won’t get the chance to play at Anfield in two weeks either. I was due to appear for Liverpool’s Legends against Barcelona and was relishing the prospect of pulling on a red shirt in front of a 50,000 crowd for the first time since 2008.
It’s human nature to feel disappointed when something you have been looking forward to cannot happen but disappointment in these times lasts for a split- second. What we are experiencing at the moment is unprecedented for our generation and there is no room for putting yourself first.
We have to look after each other. The more we work together and listen to the advice we are being given, hopefully the impact of coronavirus will not be as damaging as has been suggested. This is so much bigger than worrying about sport. I know a number of Liverpool fans who will be fretting about whether the season finishes so they can win the Premier League and I know Manchester City fans who are wondering if they will be denied a glorious chance to win the Champions League.
I would love to be writing about both those things — and everything else that comes with the game we love — on this page over the coming weeks but, as it stands, we have to put our foot on the ball. And rightly so. The Premier League had to shut it down. They had to shut it down now.
The conclusion to the domestic season, the coronation of Europe’s best teams and the European Championship this summer — all of it can wait.
The priority for us all is our health and that of our loved ones. It would have been ridiculous if I had written about anything else.