Tribute to the Reds faithful departed as Liverpool secure title number 20

The fortunes and failures of Liverpool Football Club coloured these fans' days.

John Fogarty and Ger O'Brien at Anfield. Pic: John Fogarty.

Ger O’Brien, lately of Freemount and Liscarroll, was a Red. The fortunes and failures of Liverpool Football Club coloured his days.

Following another of his great pursuits, Ger passed away while riding his motorbike north of Youghal earlier this month. I am married to a niece of Ger’s. The shock of his death will reverberate for his wonderful wife Moira and family for a long to come. His absence, of course, longer. He gave a lot of love and had plenty more to give.

Liverpool lost one of its great supporters too. Ger was raised on a diet of league titles, FA and European Cups. Parts of his home were shrines to his club.

He christened his chocolate labrador Torres. He convinced Moira to name her horse Fernando. His birthday falling in September, the latest jersey was the obvious present. He was a historian on the club. He couldn’t be anything but.

In his seven teenage years, Liverpool lifted six league titles. Another four followed in his 20s. For half his life, he and his club were in clover and then cabbage mostly for the next 30.

His yearning for renewed glories was relentless. We first travelled to Anfield together 11 years ago. Emre Can put Liverpool 1-0 up against Chelsea only for Gary Cahill to equalise and Diego Costa to score the winner.

The Brendan Rodgers era wasn’t yet circling the drain but the portents were there. Our mood wasn’t helped by having to share a bed. Moira had booked us into a double room in The Adelphi and there was no option to change.

Cheek-to-cheek, derriere to derriere, we tried to sleep off the disappointment. The rap of a door early the following morning and behind it an angry Scouse voice bellowing that we had to check out, at a most unreasonably early time it must be said, didn’t help matters.

With separate beds and our better halves, we returned to Liverpool on New Year’s Eve 2016 where Gini Wijnaldum did the decent thing and made it a winning visit for us and a victory for Jurgen Klopp in his first meeting with Pep Guardiola.

The revolution was in its infancy, Virgil van Dijk and Mo Salah had yet to join the club, but there was spirit. From the outset, Ger was absolutely certain Klopp was the man. Heavy metal was his bag music-wise too. On the German’s Crazy Train, Ger was a first-class passenger.

We messaged each other after the important results. The wins, especially against Everton, and the defeats. “Does life get any better?” he messaged when Manchester City were put to the sword in the second leg of the Champions League quarter-final in 2018.

“Still in shock” was his response an hour after the comeback of all comebacks against Barcelona a year later. Even if it didn’t work out in the return leg, he took great satisfaction from Liverpool’s smash-and-grab victory over Paris St Germain last month.

When Klopp said he was leaving, he cried. When it appeared that announcement might have impacted the Premier League tilt, he raged. When it became evident Arne Slot was going to make it all better, he cheered.

Through Liverpool, Ger lived it all.

Ger O'Brien outside Anfield. Pic: John Fogarty.

Forty-seven. The number of days that passed between Klopp’s final game in charge last May and Slot’s first press conference. The buffer the club and the new man agreed he needed after the seismic departure of a manager who catapulted Liverpool Football Club back to sustained relevance. His shadow loomed.

As Bob Paisley said of his fabled predecessor, “You opened a drawer and you felt Bill was there.” Slot would have felt it in everything he heard, saw and touched. Even the bricks and mortar. Klopp had an input in the design of the new training centre in Kirkby and dressing room in Anfield.

Of course, there was the squad he inherited. Klopp realised the weight of his own legacy too, chanting his successor’s name as he signed off. It all seemed very Fergie-Moyes but we prayed otherwise.

Adjustment or mourning, call it what you want but only an appointment like Xabi Alonso would have shortened that period. For a relatively unheralded successor in Slot, putting as much distance between Klopp’s departure and his greeting made complete sense.

As frustrating as that void was. His contract may only have commenced on July 1 but Slot would have been putting in the hours long before that. We wanted to hear about his vision. What made him tick. The lack of activity on the transfer market compounded the exasperation. The longer the summer went on, the more it became clear he wasn’t going to rip it up and start again.

With only the promise of a new goalkeeper and the arrival of an injury-riddled if stylish Italian winger by August’s end, we bargained that it was going to be okay. This, after all, was year two of an entire midfield overhaul. Mac Allister’s reading of a game will be even sharper. Szoboszlai will definitely not fade out in the second half of the season. Endo can surely be more than a disrupter. And doesn’t Slot have a reputation for improving players?

Be that as it may, his reinvention of Ryan Gravenberch into a holding midfielder of note was something few envisioned. The early signs were promising. Gravenberch glided through the first home game against Brentford.

In the following game in Old Trafford, his elegance and poise was pronounced. A few days after Manchester City lost their majestic anchor Rodri for the season, Gravenberch was underlining against Wolves that Liverpool no longer had difficulties in that department.

And long before season’s end, the Gravenberch turn has become a thing. Maybe not to the extent of a more famed Dutchman’s pirouette but a trademark move nonetheless.

Of course, there has been a decline in his performance levels. Only van Dijk and Salah have played more football than Gravenberch this season. They too have flagged on occasions in recent weeks – Salah’s ebullient form dipped around the Champions League exit (were his tears after the penalty shoot-out for the prospect of it being his last European game for the club or the dying of his Ballon d’Or dream?).

But this was always going to be a season of doing more with less – only Nottingham Forest have used fewer players. To have achieved so much is a tribute to the veterans of that gruelling 2021-22 season that impacted the club longer after it as it is to Slot’s practices and sensibilities.

The Shankly-Paisley comparisons aren’t without warrant. Slot has embraced a legacy, refusing to fix what isn’t broken, while clearly being his own man in tinkering and tailoring the 4-3-3 formation to which both he and Klopp subscribe.

He might be categorised like Paisley as mild-mannered and unassuming – pretty much anyone was going to be after Klopp – but he revealed some of his fire in February. “If we don’t win the league, I’ll fucking blame you,” he reportedly told referee Michael Oliver after the last Merseyside derby in Goodison Park ended in a draw. You needn’t have feared, Arne.

Even if some of them haven’t been as convincing of late, the team continues to win. The theory that Liverpool have dropped off was recently debunked by analysis which before Spurs came to Anfield demonstrated they had won 12 of their last 17 Premier League games compared to the same number of victories in their first 16.

Much of that narrative was coloured by the exits from two cups in the space of five days, one coming in a final and the other after winning nine of their 10 previous matches. Of course, there was a period when we dared to dream about a quadruple but a league title has surpassed expectations. It is never not enough. “Our bread and butter”, as Shankly once described the league, has never tasted as good.

For it to happen on Liverpool’s own terms seems only appropriate after what happened in 2020. The muted celebrations were necessary yet hardly dignified a 30-year wait. As right as it was that The King presented the players with their medals, the event on The Kop was no coronation.

It was the best of a bad situation. No20 will be toasted with all the gusto of having won the competition twice. We trust you understand.

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Bill Cooper, lately of Avoca and Drimagh, was a Red. The fortunes and failures of Liverpool Football Club coloured his days.

My maternal uncle died four years this September, taken from us far too early. He was a rogue and a raconteur. Liverpool successes would launch him into hilarious flights of fancy. When No19 finally arrived in 2020, he returned to a reimagined version of himself as a former Liverpool player struck down by a career-ending injury.

The morning of the Champions League final the year before, he had felt just as inspired. “A very emotional day as I fend off calls from David ‘Super Sub’ Fairclough, Jimmy Case, Alec Lindsay and of course my old mucker John Toshack.

"First of European Cup finals I won’t be attending in over 40 years. I sent my best wishes to all my friends at Melwood where I spent my teenage years on trial. A career cut short due to indiscipline off the pitch. My heart bleeds red and tonight as I watch from afar I am content in the knowledge that the ghosts of Bill, Bob and Fago look over me.”

Like Bill, some of Ger’s ashes will go to Anfield. Two years ago almost to the week of his death, Ger lost a brother-in-law, John O’Sullivan. Another staunch Red, John’s passion for his team was quiet but fierce. 

Along with John’s brother Alan, they made the trips to Merseyside in the fallow years but always believing. Nostalgia can be intoxicating and disorientating and Liverpool sure isn’t short of it but in history there is hope and when their hearts broke they were always convinced they would mend.

As the James song goes, “If I hadn’t seen such riches, I could live with being poor.”

Last Christmas, I sent Ger a photo of his grand-nephew visiting Santa Claus, joking that he had just asked the big man in red for the three wise men of Liverpool to sign new contracts. To quote one of Ger’s favourite singers, two out of three ain’t bad. If Trent thinks it can get better than this, the best of luck to him.

For his final song, Ger had requested Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell. In the end, Moira felt it mightn’t be appropriate for the solemn surroundings of crematorium in Shannon. The alternative, Gun ‘n’ Roses’s version of Knocking on Heaven’s Door, still spoke to his rebellious, mischievous side.

In St Joseph’s Church in Lismire earlier, Ger left to a sweet rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone. “Liverpool better do it,” whispered Alan as the curtains pulled across Ger’s coffin later that afternoon. Thirteen points clear of Arsenal at the time, it was more than likely but so cruelly Alan was having to say goodbye to another of his best friends. His uncertainty was ever so reasonable.

Ger knew No20 was coming. There is consolation in that. For a family barbeque scheduled for May 11, the same day Liverpool host Arsenal, he had requested half in jest that his two Gunner nephews form a guard of honour upon his arrival.

When he passed away doing what he loved, his club he so truly cherished had one hand on the summit. Ger, from your perch with John and Bill, watch as your Reds return to theirs.