Forget Europe, I want domestic bliss
In my case it’s true. I’ve never had the wanderlust others have. I ditched the landlocked habit of a lifetime by travelling to Turkey in 2005.
True, I left my fingernails embedded in several aeroplane seats but it was totally worth it.
It feels like that particular itch has been scratched. There’s also unease at my fellow Reds’ selective memory. As United gained experience through the Champions League, Scousers scoffed and yearned for the day when only champions qualified.
A day, purely by coincidence you understand, when we were the top dogs in England with a satisfyingly smug regularity. When a gap finally appeared at the cash-trough’s outer edges we buried our snouts deeper than the rest.
We do that a lot. Contempt for Chelsea’s achievements has never abated despite half a decade’s shameless panhandling of our own.
A trip to Moscow might have been useful, if only to flush out another billionaire looking for an incredibly expensive hobby.
My final plans have only been disrupted by having to press a different remote control button; it doesn’t mean I don’t pity the thousands who had every intention of going.
Or feel for the players who would have had the chance to add an unprecedented page in an already unparalleled history.
Ignore the “Ha! Rather you than us” sniggering about airline extortion and roughing it in whichever 10th-rate hotel room is still available — this defeat stung.
More so since there were numerous turning points that screwed us.
Riise’s ghost clearance, Kalou’s ghost offside, Hyypia’s ghost penalty.
Sorry, three years of listening to the other lot whining has rubbed off.
Skrtel’s injury didn’t help either, but even when Torres equalised it all seemed curiously half-hearted. Chelsea were rattled at that stage and starting to look tired.
And yet it was almost as if they were the ones welcoming another 30 minutes. So much for rotation and a weekend’s rest.
Admittedly Benitez did send Pennant on as a reward for turning relegation teams inside out, but Babel might have been better since he’d already performed well in Europe.
This is the danger with being such a hands-on manager; you get blamed for absolutely everything. If Drogba did try harder because of the diving jibes it says little for his professionalism, and as for Rafa’s comments about the referee it was hard to decipher what he was implying.
Not only did the mind games fail, someone told me the manager looked slightly uncomfortable in a tv interview about Torres’ substitution. Apparently it isn’t enough for a Liverpool manager to just lose — he must be nationally humiliated too. The goal on Saturday got tongues wagging even more.
In the end it boiled down to this: in cup football anything can happen. We’re not so schizophrenic that we can lose to Barnsley and beat Inter Milan in three days.
The measure of how good you really are has always been your performance over a season. Subsequent comments about next season’s title ‘threat’ led some to think we probably won’t be too close next year either.
After four years you don’t want to see a Liverpool manager trying it on so blithely with references to the seven years it took Ferguson. Perhaps we’ve discovered the main reason for my Euro-scepticism.
For the majority of this decade talk of a title tilt has been ingenuous and cheap. While Champions League success fills the coffers and presumably pays the Americans’ loans, Shankly’s “bread and butter” looks singularly unappetising in comparison.
It shows you how long it is since we’ve genuinely challenged that I told a friend I just wanted to take a radio to an April league game to find out how the others are faring.
“You can get text updates nowadays” he remarked tartly. I could see all of his sinews straining as he resisted the urge to call me granddad.
City was another exercise in futility. They never threatened, even when they were losing. Since the result didn’t matter in the slightest inexperienced observers might have expected both managers to loosen their shackles a tad.
The rest of us counted down the seconds till summer begins. It can’t come soon enough.
* Steven Kelly
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