When the struggle hits
Hobbies – those cherished habits and rituals, how you choose to spend your precious, finite free time - are supposed to be fun, or at the least rewarding. When they prove a chore or a bore or actively offensive, there isn’t much point.
You can claim this. You can also step back and observe that in today’s broader context it’s very hard to declare with a shred of self-awareness or dignity that sitting in safety at home or at the pub, watching a professional sports team that just won a league title on TV, constitutes “suffering” (even if you are, say, a Jets fan). But palette cleanser in Frankfurt aside, it’s impossible to say watching Liverpool Football Club in the wretched month of October was anything close to enjoyable.
Because, on its own terms, it was intolerable. Restating the obvious is a needless exercise – if you are reading this, you were there – but:
Six losses in seven, four straight in the league, flirting with history in all the bad ways. Hitting posts. Harry Maguire’s preposterous head, again. Conceding first, again and again, even in that qualified success in Germany. Dog-walked – again! – by a ruthless Crystal Palace side that brought on recent hattrick hero Jean Philippe Mateta at half time up already up two-nil. (A striker. What a concept.)
Sent slinking back north in silence on a long throw, a long ball, and a penalty might feel like being on the harsh end of a smash and grab if it weren’t for the long periods of irrelevance in between. Going from that to watching emergency center-half Andrew Robertson (!?) chase straight after the ball like a left back might; seeing the confounding Milos Kerkez, still on the field, still standing around lost like the rest of us; witnessing Wataru Endo forget that Ismaila Saar exists.
But if I am cursed enough to remember crashing out in the League Cup 3-0 to Palace in October at all, it won’t be that, or the fans leaving early, or poor Amara Dallo, 18 years young, collecting his second red card in his second senior appearance. It will be Federico Cheisa collecting a long ball over the top and attempting to dribble past against four, five, and then six Palace defenders — something like that, I don’t want to watch again to be sure of being right — before realizing the next-nearest red shirt is somewhere closer to Taggy’s than it is the Palace goal.
At least that man is banging on. But he’s banging his head against a wall with no door.
“The EFL Cup is the EFL Cup.” Fine, yes. Making the final three out of the last four years and adding two more titles to the pile creates a risk of becoming jaded. Tell that to City who won four straight. And the problem with the cliches and excuses about pointless competitions and packed schedules and a gang of teenagers is that Wednesday’s soggy effort at Anfield came on the heels of Saturday’s nightmare in London.
Two games with very little upside. All grinding. No joy. Nothing really seems to be working, at all. If there’s a path out, Arne Slot hasn’t found it yet. He isn’t getting fired and anyone demanding his head simply has no idea. But after all this fruitless tinkering, we are right to ask what Slot’s idea is, exactly. Surely the players are asking.
Is this as bad as it gets? Say “Jonjo Shelvey” or “Roy Hodgson” in a room full of people with liverbirds on their chests and see the reaction you get. It can get worse - just ask a Luton, Sheffield or Jets fan. But that is a banality, and it is no salve. Nobody who watched Richard Hughes spend John Henry’s quarter billion on a couple of strikers and a Bundesliga stud expected a run quite like this. Hughes is associated with a title contender, all right. The issue is that club plays in Dorset.
The professional jabberers and self-appointed vlogging seers have declared Liverpool a club in “full blown crisis.” (And here comes the banter: Sometime after the Chelsea game, before he lost three games in a row for the first time ever, a Wikipedia wag cut “one of the best managers in the word” from Slot’s Wikipedia page and added “second coming of Erik Ten Hag.”)
The truth is that there are multiple “crises” hanging over the club. There is a miniature injury crisis, there is a significant identity crisis, and a profound personal tragedy compounding all of the above.
Who is the best right back? Who is the best left back? When is Florian Wirtz going to click? Is Mohamed Salah gone forever? Was buying Alexander Isak a mistake? If he isn’t in the best XI, why didn’t Curtis Jones get a start in the League Cup? If we only have two center backs and a rotation is important and Ibou Konate can lose track of his man, why can’t Joe Gomez get a start?
After your friend and colleague dies, who even cares?
Hobbies are not always fun. Sometimes they are drudgery. Learning verb declensions is a chore. Using them improperly is clunky and embarassing. That is how you master a new language. Cutting yourself on a chisel - for the fifth time - and making shitty dovetail joints are the price of learning woodworking.
Is this wisdom or is it cope? (Yes.) What does “perspective” make pulling on the shirt with a sigh and watching, with gritted teeth, Villa and then Real Madrid and City march into view? Duh: it’s all a fucking gift, dummy.
This Liverpool side’s ceiling is much, much higher than its present state. (Speaking of City: that side lost 9 out of 12 a year ago.) Knowing all that, and seeing the golden league winner’s lion on the shirtsleeves, doesn’t make the struggle any easier.
