The King and Us
For Americans who associate with Liverpool Football Club (among them John William Henry II) it’s useful to be occasionally reminded of the club’s context. Saturday, Coronation Day in the U.K., is a good opportunity.
Generally speaking, neither the royals nor the Tories who venerate the monarchy are well-received on Merseyside. In the local context, it is easy to unravel why. Something like half of the citizenry of Liverpool claim at least partial Irish ancestry. The Irish, turns out, have had a bad experience with the monarchs next door going back nearly a thousand years.
And all scousers have reason to be suspicious of Tories, even it it weren’t for Hillsborough and what came after. In the 1980s, under Margaret Thatcher’s cold iron gaze, unemployment in the industrial port city was double the national average. Sympathy from the Conservative government – let alone relief – was not exactly forthcoming. (Important context: the Liverpool City Council at this time was literally Trotskyist). It was during this time the city took refuge in LFC and in Everton, who between them won seven straight Football League titles between 1981 and 1988. Football was what the city had, because the rest of the country wasn’t giving it much of anything at all.
So if “God Save the King” is greeted with jeers and boos before kick-off with tricky and annoying Brentford tomorrow afternoon at Anfield, and if the mostly Tory print media has a practiced and cynical fit about it, that context explains why. It’s what everyone expects, because it’s what everyone knows: These are ancient wounds that predate us and will survive us. The weight of history is heavier than any rock King Charles will sit on tomorrow.
(This is also why, and maybe this is my American talking, I can’t find it in myself to celebrate the idea of Everton going down. Championship Blues mean nothing good, for half the city and for the Liverpool waterfront. It makes me feel like a Thatcherite, and that is not an outfit I am comfortable wearing even behind closed doors.)
But what about our context? We have the here and now and the near future, and the summer transfer news is already mostly all bad. We are told that Real (that would mean royal) Madrid, a club whose bleached-white garments will never hide the stain of its sins during Franco, is likely to be Jude Bellingham’s home, with an absurd billion-euro release clause the cartoonish cherry on top of an already-bitter sundae. And the price that Brighton, the next stop on James Milner’s remarkable odyssey, will exact for World Cup-winner Alexis McAllister, who stole two precious points off of United on Thursday, is likely north of £70 million of John Henry’s money. The market is hopelessly jacked and we haven’t even seen the worst of it yet. Pointing out FSG does spend from time to time (Darwin Nunez doesn’t play for free the last I checked, and securing Cody Gakpo’s services is an increasingly obvious coup) gets you branded an apologist for the ownership class, for some reason. There are fissures within our own sphere, and they are likely to widen.
Yet because the Reds have won five in five, we don’t have to satisfy ourselves with playing Football Manager quite yet. There is a race for the Top Four. All we need to do is be perfect and for Manchester United to step on a couple of rakes, and that is something to cheer for.
Just three more weeks of this, you know.
