A Final Adieu to the Long Season
The end of Liverpool Football Club’s “long season” – the still-unmatched 2021-2022 quadruple chase that was not, that led to a fifth-place league finish and “banishment” to the Europa League in spring of 2023 – at last arrived on June 15.
About 54 weeks prior, on that ugly afternoon in Paris, as the playing Reds lost on the pitch to Real Madrid, as the traveling Reds were beaten outside the pitch by riot police and then again in the press by a UEFA doing a faint impression of a Tory government closing ranks in support of the South Yorkshire Police, the business Reds suffered their own series of sharp kicks to the kidneys.
Among the extremely sensible reasons Jude Bellingham, the object of our desire, cited for choosing Madrid during his official unveiling in last month was that 1-0 result. That statistical anomaly, the cursed-ass final many have tried to forget? Jude will never forget. He was there in Paris as the honored guest of Zinedine Zidane, whose number he’s now wearing with the legend’s blessing.
Surely it is true that John Henry and Fenway Sports Group bear some responsibility for withdrawing from the Jude sweepstakes, in which Liverpool’s losing ticket was the final ignominy in a long streak of gut punches that began with Steven Gerrard’s Aston Villa collapsing, continued in Paris, and resumed on a sunny August Sunday in London. Surely John Henry’s money folds just as nicely as Real’s, so much of which is borrowed from the future.
But, surely again, Anfield would have been just as alluring as the Bernabeu had the big trophy come home? If Jude had sat next to ZZ while the legend sat in stone-faced silence as Jordan Henderson did another trophy dance, wouldn’t he have thought twice about life on Merseyside?
It’s all possible. It’s also all irrelevant. Liverpool lost the quad. Then we lost our man. All on the same afternoon, and every misfortune that’s followed since is part of the same nasty hangover.
(I thought I was being clever in applying the “long 19th century” theory to recent LFC history until I opened my Anfield Wrap newsletter a few weeks ago and saw Neil Atkinson make a similar analogy. Maybe we both read Hobsbawm. Either way, it’s a great lens.)
There’s so much more coming at us so quickly that gets at the very question of what we’re doing here and why. But let’s sit Jordan Henderson joining Steven Gerrard in Saudi Arabia to the side for just a second.
This is still about the last two playing seasons, which for me will forever be melded together in my memory like bars of Irish Spring in the dorm shower.
It’s still hard to declare with any certainty whether 2022-2023 was an all-around disappointing showing, an injury-plagued misfortune that deserved to have been better, or some return to the median, to “normalcy.”
Losing a game-changing forward like Luis Diaz to a terrible injury for six months surely cost Liverpool goals, games, and points – no small deal when you miss the Champions League by a handful of points. But surely neither Diaz’s nor Jota’s injuries, alone or together, do not and cannot explain how a team that buried United and outdueled City could simply fail to turn up at Forest, at Bournemouth, at Wolves, and Leicester too.
How does a talent like Darwin Nunez miss the goal so often? What’s occupying Trent’s mind when he doesn’t have the ball? How can a Jordan Henderson who made himself indispensable to Gareth Southgate be so off the pace so often for club? What on earth did Fabio Carvalho do to Jurgen? Is Arthur Melo a real person or just a simulation? What the hell did Trent and Jordan think they were up to, capering around with Jude in Qatar and getting our hopes up like that?
Maybe everybody did get old at once. Maybe the club did get found out, and Jurgen was too inflexible or too slow to adjust.
Or maybe getting to within arm’s reach of becoming The Best Club Ever – ground nobody else has trod - only to fall flat one point and a couple of goals short really was too much even for mentality monsters.
There is no answer here that does not resort to mawkish cliché. The past 14 months were what happened while we were making other plans. There doesn’t need to be a reason when shit happens, because it just does. And sometimes it happens to you.
If there was anything “nice” about the Inter-City European final - to watch what was the world’s most expensive reputation laundering machine until Saudi Arabia realized it could buy influence with Cristiano Ronaldo much more easily than it could buying American professional golf squeak by in a nail-biter, it was a sense of closure.
I don’t think I was alone in watching with some enjoyment Jack Grealish gleefully consume anything in liquid form poured his way for four days, Erling Haaland sport a fjord-sized grin for so long it became unclear if he wasn’t actually a waxen figure or an AI-birthed simulation, and all the while feel something.
It wasn’t quite envy, and it wasn’t irrational anger (given I am a well-adjusted middle aged man) but some sort of wistful saudade, a sigh and a sense of loss. That looks like fun. That should have been us. That was supposed to have been us.
That was supposed to have been us back in the spring of 2022, with every single trophy ever made in the back of the double-decker, the lid of the FA Cup lost forever after someone tried to skip it across the Mersey in a joyful delirium.
Envy is when you want something that’s not yours. What I felt was closer to being a victim of theft, or a bureaucratic snafu. No, check my ticket again. I have the receipt somewhere. Something is wrong.
You don’t really get to that position without some level of delusion or a crushing sense of entitlement. One or the other or some combination is what you are prone to develop, when you see your club in three European Cup finals in relatively quick succession, when you rack up 90 or more points season after season, when you have this or that best player in the world at multiple positions.
It’s easy to start thinking that this is just the way things are now, rather than very special salad days fans of other clubs would be tempted to commit violence in order to taste. All of that is very, very hard to sustain. To have it for a couple of years running isn’t something I’ve ever experienced in 20 years following the club.
That feels like something to celebrate. But what did we have, actually? Something no other fan base has quite experienced, though since nobody sings songs about second-place finishes – not even two in as many weeks – it remains a bizarre anti-achievement.
What’s coming next? Who knows. But, at long last, it is at least something else.
