They're lucky to have us: Liverpool vs the Mighty

NOT the Charity Sheild

Stream of consciousness football blogging is the where it's at. You might believe from watching the media that people want banter and heat maps but actually they want free form writing that makes no sense on any level unless you are inside the writers head.

Personally, I think the drivel that ex pros spout would be vastly improved if they were allowed a small amount of acid before any given show. I'd love to see Jermaine Jenas describe Arsenal beating Liverpool in the Charity shield as 'like the pitch turning into a dragon, but the Liverpool players were unable to hold on and fell off into boiling lava, then the dragon flew off into the sunset which folded in on itself and left me here, contemplating the silence which is more beautiful than any sound I've heard before'

A bloke on a podcast analysed all the trophies on an aesthetic level and decreed the Charity Shield the worst. They're completely wrong. It's clearly the Premier League trophy that has none of the charm of the 1908 trophy. Yes, it's a bit ugly, but it looks like a big, fancy version of something you'd find in a scout hut for winning the under 15s county league and for that, I quite like it. Every year it surprises me that it's not called the 'Charity' Shield any more. It's the 'Community' shield and nothing says 'community' like keeping the game behind a paywall. Apparently the FA hadn't been properly clear about who, what, where and when in terms of the money, so they had to change the name. Well done everyone. At least we have them to thank for stepping in and saving Wigan and Charlton. Oh.. wait.

We're seeing in Wigan an absolute lesson in the madness of football. Fans raising well over half a million quid in less than a couple of weeks and that money being worth a few percent of the shares or maybe keeping the club going for a couple of months or so. The relentless drive for higher wages has an impact on everyone, the cost of keeping up spirals and without outside investment, clubs either flounder or fall. It's not new news that supporters are powerless, but the strength of Wigan's fan's collective effort oddly highlights how weak we all are. All that energy and money raised in a town that is far from rich and yet, it's really a long way short of what is needed. That's no critique of Wigan, it's a comment on the way football is so far removed from being a community sport that it literally hurts.

Talking of community, Joe Fagan's house is mad. The ex Liverpool boss alway fascinated me a bit for being a ridiculously successful but ultimately obscure footnote in football history. Everyone's heard of Shankly and Paisley but Fagan is far less revered, despite winning a treble and reaching the European cup final in 100% of his seasons in charge. How football has changed to the degree that a club like Wigan Athletic are needing raise millions just to stay afloat is illustrated by Joe Fagan's house.

This is where he lived, for the duration of his Liverpool coaching and managing days. In a house within a mile of Anfield that sold after his death for less than £80,000. Now, wages have escalated to such an extent that players and managers are property tycoons and yer average top flight players second car probably costs more than Fagan's house. Lest we forget, this is a man whose success came long after the maximum wage was abolished and who won the biggest trophies he could, who sat right at the top of the tree. Living in the heart of the community. Yes, doubtless Fagan could have moved to Southport or Formby had he wished but the home of a football manager, even into the 1990s was likely fairly indistinguishable from the home of a bank manager or doctor. Football had not been disconnected from the rest of the world.

It's not that the days of the salary cap were glorious. Far from it. 'When Footballers Were Skint' is a glorious collection of tales from the days of low wages. My favourite stories from it involve players with second jobs, ranging from sheet metal worker, university lecturer to movie star double in the case of Millwall's Len Tyler, a doppleganger for the 39 Steps star Robert Donat. The question that dominates the book is 'what happened to all the money?' Those who play the game at the highest level do so in front of huge crowds, in stadia that receive very little ongoing attention, with very limited support and medical facilities and yet receive a pittance.

Bolton's players describe being let on the tram from the training ground to the cafe where they ate after training for free, because the conductors often took pity on their low wages. Poignant and tragic tales of former footballers sinking into a mire of unemployment and low skilled jobs after their careers ended abound and the energy and righteousness of the crusade to end the maximum wage leaps of the page. It's also hard to overlook the words of the very pros who sat and voted for an end to their own penury who now look on the game's excesses as perverse and immoral.

Of course, the top stars are still looked after but even for someone like Stanley Matthews, the ability to run a hotel alongside his career (something he could never have bought on his wages) ends sets him apart from the crowd. He's different from the crowd, but not so different that he might as well be another species.

Which is what I sometimes feel that Premier League supporters are. (see what I did there?)

Today's opponents are Liverpool, who've taken up the mantle of being the latest set of supporters for whom their chief whine is the obnoxious - 'we don't get enough credit in the media.' This is a phenomena I will never understand. If you've won the league, why do you give a shit what the papers write or what some ex pro say, whose media and football expertise consists of doing whatever trolling his ghost writer or producer tells him to? You've won the league ffs. Be happy.

I'm not sure if these fans who get all vein bulging on phone ins and twitter about 'credit' and 'bias' are still stuck in some kind of pre teen scrapbook collection phase and see positive headlines about their club as some kind of reflection on themselves. I'd understand it more if the clubs at the top of the tree were treasured community assets and the success had been a result of some kind of group effort, but when most of the Premier League and all of the recent winners of anything are owned by complex foreign business structures and largely staffed with a global jamboree of football talent it seems a bit weird to take umbrage over a bit of praise or comment that is milder than you'd like it to be.

As for the game today, I'm a bit underwhelmed.

We got started against Stoke and now we're stopping again for another pretend game. All that pissing about with loads of subs and playing at 3/4 pace is fine at the beginning of the season but it's underway now and playing yet another practice game feels a bit like Critch is doing a favour for his ol' mate Jurgen.

Apparently we're supposed to be really grateful for the opportunity to play at Anfield and to pit ourselves against a great team. Fuck that. We're the Mighty and we don't need this. We need to come up against a load of lads who'll kick us up in the air and fire it up to the big man. That's what we couldn't cope with last year. Not silky show ponies who'll probably make us look like a bad photocopy of them. Our best game was against Peterborough, who are probably the nearest thing to the all out attack and pace of Liverpool in League 1 and we beat them. We also beat Oxford (albeit luckily) but it was limited cloggers we couldn't manage.

Yes, this isn't last year's team, but whilst our skill levels have gone through the roof, the question isn't 'can we play football' but 'what happens when we're not allowed to play football?' Liverpool will let us play football and it'll be a nice treat for the kids to see where Dad used to work and meet all the famous people he knows and maybe get some autographs along the way but I can't help thinking the best practice would be to play someone like Stoke again and see if we've learned from the way they managed to keep us at arms length by being very organised.

If I'm cutting a cynical figure, I'm sorry. I am very excited by what's happening at the club and I just want to get on with it. We're the Mighty and I'm not going to get excited about the opposition. They're lucky to have us and not the other way round.

It'll come as no surprise to anyone who has read this blog before (there's at least 10 of you out there), that I completely reject any stat that starts or ends with the phrase 'Premier League history/era.' I treat any journalist or supporter citing such abject shit with the disdain of Alan Partridge castigating Lynn for failing to spot the Rover Metro is simply a rebadged Mini Metro.

So instead of claiming some meaning to the fact we did the double over them in our only recent top flight season, I'll instead point out that whilst they're a club that we're supposed to be in awe of, we've not actually lost to them since 1966, are unbeaten against them in our last five meetings and our head to head record is almost level with theirs, as is our amount of Ballon d'or winners and English World Cup winners. The 1953 Cup Final is the most famous game in the history of the game ever. What's more loads of teams play in red, but only we play in tangerine. So in all honesty, they should be wetting themselves over playing us. Show some dignity fellow 'Pool fans. They're just a knock off Everton who only exist cos they got their ground built for them by the other lot. Still, they were very sporting last time we won there, so I'll give it a rest and get on with the real stuff. Us.

Against Stoke, we seemed to suffer from the front three rotating but forgetting to leave one of them in the middle to score goals. All the lovely football is grand, but you've got to finish the moves you build. We've got three new kids, one from Crawley who apparently runs down the wing and shoots like mad all the time and one from West Ham who joins an ever growing club of players who 'like to play on the wing or through the middle' who I know nothing about, plus a full back who seems like he's really a winger. All in all, it's to be hoped that we can pin Liverpool in their own half for 90 minutes as I'm not hugely confident in anyone but Husband if they get a chance to go at us.

I like to think Critchley will keep Notts on the bench first half and at some point drop back to the dugout and put his arm round the rangy fella with the weird square head, point to Virgil Van Dyke and go 'see him there, that's how I see you Michael, all you've got to do is believe.' I feel like narrative demands that Critch then disappears in a puff of smoke but that bit seems a bit far fetched. Probably more likely Notts nods his head because he feels he has no other choice, before wincing as Mane' goes past Big Marvin again whilst Critch ponders if another winger is the answer.

Anyhow. Bring on Barrow and Plymouth. Yeah, we're playing Man Utd or someone today, but I'm actually envious of the rest of the clubs at our level who seem to have proper games to play.

UTMP

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