You'll Never Walk Alone

I began my last piece by stating the two, non-female related, loves of my being: Music and football. If music was the theme of that essay, then this shall concern – somewhat earlier than expected – football, and more pertinently the Premiership trophy.

The Premiership is the most watched football league in the world and is by some margin the highest grossing in terms of revenue. In fact, when one considers all sports only three leagues turnover more than the Premiership and all reside in the sponsorship-happy sporting climes of North America: The National Football League, Major League Baseball and National Basketball Association. So, there is much global kudos to be gained in one’s chosen club becoming Premiership champions.

My club, Liverpool, is the most successful club in England both in terms of domestic and European honours. It has eighteen league titles from before the Premiership started with the nearest challenger to that record being Manchester United who by scurrilous means have amassed fifteen. Liverpool also has five European Cups etched onto its roll of honour with the nearest rivals to this record having won just two (Manchester United and Nottingham Forest).

So you can see that Liverpool is a highly successful football club. In spite of lean times during the mid and late 90s, the honours have continued to flow into the Anfield trophy cabinet with satisfying regularity. The League Cup, the FA Cup, the UEFA Cup, the European Super Cup and the pinnacle in recent times: the European Cup, now known as the European Champions’ League, have all been welcome and much celebrated (just ask the manager of my local) additions. One trophy, however, has eluded Liverpool since 1990: The league title. Finishing above all else in the top flight of English football is, as legendary Red’s manager Bill Shankly put it, “Our bread and butter” and we Liverpool fans, whilst dining heavily on the sweet delights that cup competitions both at home and abroad have brought, have been starved of our staple diet for too long.

Sixteen years is a painfully long time without a league championship for a club like Liverpool. The thirst to be top of the highest echelon burns our throats like hydrochloric acid having a dust up with sulphuric acid while vinegar sits on the sidelines observing the whole sizzling melee. To watch Manchester United rack up eight titles without a solitary Scouse reply hurts like a rapier through the heart, particularly as no other club can match Man-ure for sheer arrogance and lack of grace in victory. Even Chelsea are not as conceited as That Lot at the other end of the East Lancashire Road and that’s saying something when one considers that Jose Mourinho is a walking ego.

My father is lucky. As boy and man, he has seen Liverpool win everything and experienced that feeling of a sporting empire being built, and then maintained, over the period of a quarter of a century. He was at Wembley when Kenny Dalglish – Liverpool’s greatest ever player and talisman – chipped the winner against FC Brugge to record our second European Cup success, he was at every game for a decade when Liverpool embarked on a procession of league titles, sweeping aside all that stood before us and consigning them to our all-conquering wake.

Unfortunately, he has also seen it unravel before his eyes, which must be doubly excruciating given the glut of success witnessed prior. I have only ever known underachievement in England’s domestic league, our last title arriving through the Shankly Gates when I was just a wee whippersnapper of eight years old. The memory is vague and the love for the club had yet to be fully forged in the atria and ventricles of my heart, but the burning desire for that elusive league title remains undiluted.

The Premiership trophy has become, dare I say it, the Holy Grail for Liverpool Football Club; the pot of gold at the end of the thirty-eight game rainbow that is the Premiership season. I’m sure one day it will take precedence in the Liverpool trophy room once more, but the emergence of Chelsea – financed by multi-billionaire ex oil-magnate and all-round dodgy dealer Roman Abramovich – has raised the standard to levels not experienced in English football.

It may just be a trophy. It may just be sport. But it’s this competition and this sport that has galvanised communities in Liverpool and countless other towns and cities across not just England but the world. When Thatcher was taking our jobs and our money, we had the escape of football at the weekend; we had the togetherness of 45,000 men and women united in common purpose regardless of race, religion, affluence and political leaning and despite the lack of league success, we never walk alone. We’re all the same in the Kop and we all covet the same thing: That pristine Premiership trophy, locked safely in the annals of Anfield and a nineteenth notch on the club’s bedpost.