When The Best Days End
I think the first time I realized I was getting old – or the first time I was forced to reckon with it – was when Steven Gerrard left Liverpool.
I’d been a Reds supporter for more than ten years, and the one immutable constant during that time was the club’s world-class Scouse captain. It was just a given that no matter what else Liverpool Football Club had – and it would be less than what Chelsea, Real, and United had – it had a generational talent in midfield, a blood-and-guts local lad making the machine go.
It was a given, but, really, it was a gift. You needed to have been around for a while to have known how precious and how rare it is to have one player wear the armband for that long, let alone have it be someone who grew up a bus ride away from Anfield, who was also an unquestioned one-of-a-kind elite talent. But if you jumped on the wagon sometime around Michael Owen’s final years, that was what you had. Whoever else it was elsewhere on the field, whether it was Joe Cole or Andy Carroll or Josemi or Jonjo Shelvey, it was also Steven Gerrard.
And so to have to see him go away – and go without the league trophy his effort and talent surely deserved -- meant the undeniable and inescapable deliveries of other, more unwelcome news with the same subtlety of a sledgehammer: things will change, things will end, and not in the way you wanted it.
Then and now, hearing men older than me – older than I am now, nine years later – belt out HE’S FOOKIN HARD until the walls of Anfield echoed and shook, seeing Stevie hoist his kids up and circle the pitch and try to not melt into a pool of tears tore me up. I’m thinking about it because this coming Sunday will be the closest-possible analog to all of that.
But, true to a theme, Jürgen Klopp’s final game as manager will mean more.
Klopp’s farewell on Sunday is easily the most momentous Liverpool curtain call since Steve Gerrard’s final game (which was garbage, by the way: Crystal Palace came from behind to win 3-1). It is also an even bigger deal.
Eight and a half years with Klopp in charge was unquestionably also the most successful period in Liverpool FC history since… well, before most of us were born. And it went by faster than the second half of the Paris final.
Trying to put it into perspective is making my head hurt. Almost a quarter of my life? More than half of twenty-plus years waving a red scarf around and singing Gerry and the Pacemakers? An era is ending, in both this hobby and overall.
I won’t try to argue that Klopp’s Liverpool career is ending in a similar way to Gerrard’s, which to me felt more bitter than sweet, because it is not.
To play the hits yet again: Liverpool are back in the Champions League. The club has to update The Champions Wall yet again. It’s not the biggest trophy Klopp has won and it’s not something as so insane as a quadruple, which for the second time in three years was absolutely possible as late as March.
But those are the qualifications you can make – not his best work, not quite what we hoped for – when you have been as blessed and as spoiled as we were for the last 8 seasons.
We won it all. We sang all the songs. Nobody had more, not for a very, very long time, if not ever. And we may never see anything like it ever again if we follow the club for another 30 years.
That’s the thing about the good days. Most of the time they’re over before you knew it. Maybe that’s the one gift Jurgen gave us back in January, by letting us know he was leaving: we had at least a moment or two to savor and appreciate the now, even as we hoped for ever more down the road.
All the things have already been said that can be said, but just to remind: Jürgen Klopp did transform the culture of the club. That is a serious accomplishment and it is objectively true. Liverpool contended for the 2013-2014 title, Gerrard’s penultimate year, but they were not contenders year in and year out. They did not sign the best goalkeeper or best center-half available, they did not have the best right winger or right back. They did not make three European Cup finals in five years, they did not win the league or seriously compete (and occasionally defeat) a state funded all-star team.
That’s not all Klopp’s doing but like Ange Postecoglou said the other night, you can only do so much by yourself. Everything around you also needs to hit: ownership and manager and players and fans. Sometimes you come close. Only rarely do you get it all.
And we had that. We had all of it. We got to enjoy it. We will remember it for as long as we wear red shirts with a corporate logo on them – and then for a few years after that.
But here is the thing about accomplishments, like midfielders or managers: they’re here, and then they’re gone. That’s the bitter part of the bittersweet. But try to find the sweet. Look at Jurgen standing by himself in The Kop, standing by himself at midfield staring at The Kop. Find the good place, find the good times. And then hold on.
I don’t have any sage advice about savoring moments or how to make the best ones last and the shit ones vanish. All I can tell you is that I was here and I saw the Jurgen era, too. We saw it together. We got lucky.
I hope you enjoy the memories as much as I do. I hope you get to bore your children with them, as I hope to do one day. We had the best days. Maybe we’ll have good ones again, but we won’t ever have these.
But it was all real. We are the fortunate ones.
Outside the Dalglish Stand
I heard a Kopite singing,
Jurgen, it was time to go away
But you gave us what you said
The Premier League was Red
And it will be ours again someday.
Credit: Flickr/iainmacw5
