It just won’t be the same without Dad

YOU’LL have to forgive me if the battle for top spot, Rafa’s op and the end of a 50-year wait to see Real at Anfield does not stir the emotions as much as they ought.

You see my dad died last week. He was 74. He lived and breathed football, and not just as a fanatical Red.

An amateur he may have been, but he was a damn good goalkeeper in his youth, an even better manager and then helped run the County FA. How he didn’t end up as UEFA president is a mystery. It’s not what you know…

You thought I was hard to please, I’m nothing compared to him. After following this team for eight grim years in the old Second Division he felt he’d earned the right to a whinge every now and then.

Shankly would have seemed like a god to men like my father, given immunity from ceaseless Evertonian mockery and dragged from painful failure to the promised land that most of us take for granted today.

The dues he paid in the 50s were rewarded a thousand fold, and the magical 60s strengthened a passion for Liverpool FC that he instilled in me from the moment he first peered, misty-eyed, over the cradle.

It’s a bequest I’ve never regretted once. No, not even when Souness betrayed, Evans whimpered, Houllier bored and Rafa rotates and irritates.

Being northern males we never went in for weepy bonding sessions or confessionals, but I knew he was proud of what I did. He would take the fanzine and these columns to show his friends, even the Blues who’d say “You’ve made him as bitter as you are” — probably realising that it was the nicest thing anyone had ever said about either of us!

At times like this you’re supposed to quote Shankly and how he was wrong to place football above life and death. It boils my blood every time some hack makes this heinous error.

The great man was simply using exaggeration for comic effect, and whenever someone on the outside sneers about (urrgh) “perspective” it’s too painful for words.

They just don’t get it do they? Football is important, and it meant so much to my father.

I’ll miss seeing him after a game to be greeted with “and what did you think of that rubbish?” – only he didn’t say ‘rubbish’ – and listen to him correct all Rafa’s mistakes.

Telling him we were still top wouldn’t stem the flow by one drop.

The game’s not so all-consuming that I’d have left my grieving family on Sunday so we watched the Arsenal game on TV.

Merriment was in short supply of course, apart from that precious moment when a combination of “hoof!” and “booooo!” stuck in the back of Gooner throats as Keane blasted that beauty into the roof of the net.

It had all been fairly routine until then. We certainly looked the more likely to win before the red card, and then it mysteriously fell away.

Unless of course you concur with the preposterous assessments of the Arsenal manager, a man who can even give self-parody a bad name.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d have happily taken the point beforehand, but it all seemed curiously anodyne once we had that marvellous opportunity to ruin a rival’s already slender hopes. It’s been like that for weeks now.

Babel was awful again and, despite his wonderful equaliser, the notion of Robbie repeating any such feat seems alien to Rafa.

On a personal level another absentee concerned us most. We tried valiantly to fill the cavernous void.

We told Wenger to go and boil his beaky, one-eyed head. We racked our brains to think of anatomically impossible things Andy Gray could do with his microphone.

But there was no-one to mutter, whenever Almunia parried the ball to safety, “I’d have held that”. It wasn’t the same. It never could be, and never can be again. Not for us.