Terrace Talk Liverpool: That start looks awfully like a death sentence

In the words of Bill Hicks, let’s plaster on a smile and plough through this shit one more time. 

It hasn’t been made easy by a not so long and not so hot summer, with no international tournament to distract us from a lack of any proper football. Diversions are important when your last game was a 6-1 defeat at Stoke.

With all of the pre-season euphoria along with the usual grab-bag of new players and fortune cookie quotes about achievement and “putting things right”, they think we’ve forgotten that.

Most expected Brendan Rodgers to be put out of our misery.

Last season seemed to endorse every snide comment about him being a chancer, a vacuous loudmouth, a loser with a big book of tactics but no brain to decipher them.

Suarez didn’t just win a treble at Barcelona last season, he was unofficially handed all the credit for anything good that’s happened to Liverpool in this decade.

Unfair? Very, but it’ll take a ton of wins without him to disprove the theory, which means Rodgers is really up against it now.

He’s regarded as lucky to still have his job, but what if (and bear with me on this) he really is THAT lucky? One of those Napoleonic generals that’s so fortunate he’ll be a success despite himself? The odds aren’t great. Feel free to waste your money, though.

I’m not sure why we all still get so worked up about it. A lack of anything better to do, of course, but then that was also the case when Liverpool were masters of all they surveyed.

I regard myself as one notch above idiot usually, but I’ve only just now worked out the grim statistics; watching the Reds’ matches regularly for the last 37 years, it was only for the first dozen of them they ruled the roost and it’s been 25 years now since they did so.

My generation has watched twice as much football looking upwards as it has looking downwards, yet we still have an inclination to believe we should still be top. A few good players in, a few stiffs out, a bit of luck – and who knows? This is the collapse of logic that’s fully befitting of the football supporter.

Of those new boys, James Milner should provide a certain solidity. Boring though it is, it was the lack of same that bore down on Liverpool and flattened a promising bunch of players into quivering jellies by the end of last season.

Benteke always tormented us for Villa but that doesn’t always translate into optimism when a player swaps another shirt for yours. Stewart Downing always has a good game against Liverpool. Need I say more?

Firmino is yet another Brazilian. We’re told he’s not typical, stronger and more suited to Europe. A blend of Lucas grit and Coutinho trickery could be very useful indeed.

You can’t help feeling Rodgers still has too many attacking midfielders and even after spending around £250m in just over a year there are frustrating gaps and a lack of true quality. How’s that even possible?

Selling Sterling helped pay for the latest batch. Even accepting modern football’s embracing of sleaze and contempt, that whole episode stank to high heaven but we’ll be reminded every time he scores for City that “he made the right decision”.

That’ll be a continuation of a new song first sung by Suarez; The Leaving Of Liverpool, with absolutely no grieving but the prospering thereof. Sadly they can’t all be Fernando Torres, and even he got medals.

The big debate before immediately going back to Stoke (almost as a penance) is “Lovren or Sakho”, which some regard as a choice between gallows and electric chair, with Skrtel the bullet to the head.

It’s a gloomy old soul that automatically thinks of death methods when previewing a new season, but have you seen the fixtures? The first seven away games are the five clubs that finished above us last time, plus Stoke and Everton.

They have the nerve to keep telling you not to be paranoid, then that happens. You always need a good start and the odds on Liverpool getting one are high.

Like we weren’t doing a good enough job of shooting ourselves in the foot, they bring out their own Winchesters and start blasting. Thanks ever so.

Mourinho’s pettiness is already being painted as “shrewd strategy” while United are spending all kinds whilst predicting all manner of autonomy. It’s like the same year played out over and over.

The one straw left to clutch is the old adage “stranger things have happened”, football’s voodoo response to any inconvenient truth like, y’know, facts and your team facing the obvious oblivion.

So let’s plaster that smile back on again, here goes. Strange things can happen.