“Base, base, all is base/Cry sooth, the goodly Childe is thwarted at the tourney by the coarse Coxcomb/And the angels do weep salt tears in lachrymose rage at the marble hearted foulness of Prince Providence”.
My own words, penned in the style of the Bard but possessing, of course, a certain, felicitous refinement of which Shakespeare himself, not being London-born and hidebound by the iambic meter, was incapable. These were the words I bellowed upon the final whistle's blast, and my fellow Arsenal fans nodded, before taking up the chant themselves. A trilogy has drawn to a close, one which has turned out to be Euripidian in its tragic outcome. Mute is the songbird upon its perch, silent the swan upon the lake of lamentation. Of course, the very fact that this troglodyte rabble, this Liverpool Football Club, won the Champions League in 2005, gives pause – not unlike turning up at the Civic Hall annual ball and finding one's master butcher in attendance, the entire event is cheapened altogether. Dirk Kuyt; does his countenance not have the unmistakable air of a cow's backside following repeated battery with a banjolele? How can our players, men of the most exquisite sensibility, be expected to mark a cow-man from whom they are compelled to avert their eyes in disgust?
They say there's only two teams in Liverpool – the one Rafa Benitez picks one week, then the one he picks the next. Well, this was the one he picked last night, and we walked tall in the shirt. There's been some memorable nights in Anfield, especially in the 90s – there was Racing Boys of Berne in 1996 (0-0), FC Lederhosen, 1997 (0-0), St. Ponce, 1998 (0-0), matches which brought the blood rushing to the acne on your forehead, pulsating results which summoned up all the passion you think of when you hear the words “Liverpool, Wednesday, November.” But this was special, this. This was a night that made you realise just how much Liverpool is Liverpool and how much everywhere that isn't Liverpool isn't, how much Steven Gerrard is Steven Gerrard and how much you down south aren't. “Liverpool, Liverpool, we walk tall/You are not, so you walk small.”
It was the invidious task of the stalwart staff of the Emirates stadium to play host not once but twice to the barely sentient fans of “Liverpool FC” (“Faecal Crust”?) wended their way, in some base parody of the Jarrow March, to London. To watch them set foot in our beloved cathedral one felt like the curator looking on in horror as swine were herded through the National Gallery. I myself felt the anguish keenly, as, in my capacity as Senior Corporate Interior Design Consultant, had a hand in some of the finer details of the construction of the Arsenal stadium. It piqued me no little, therefore, when I heard reports of the behaviour of some Liverpool fans upon completion of the game last Wednesday. With Arsenal stewards urging them, as politely as is appropriate, with bullhorns and wolfhounds, to take their leave, it seems that a great many of them did not comply but rather tarried. These malodorous refuseniks later complained that they could not find their way out of the stadium. What balderdash. At the away end, at my specification, there is a sign clearly marked “EGRESS”. What can you do with such barnyard dwellers?
I remember me first trip down to London, me, on the Wally Arnold in 1987 to see them play Arsenal in that Milk Cola Final. As we were going down towards Wembley Way, there were these Arsenal fans, right, waving little bunches of paper at us with the numbers “5” and “10” on them. We all turned to each other and said, what the frig's all that about? It was only a couple of years later when I saw Degsy Hatton in WH Smiths hand over one of them that this was London money. Well, I'm telling you, after tonight's performance, I reckon Jamie Carragher deserves to be awarded one of those bits of number ten London paper – and if it were up to me, he'd get one every year of his life till the day he dies, a Red through and through. We look after our own. Other players tackle. Not good enough. Not good enough for Liverpool Football Club. Jamie TAAACCCCHHHHKKKLLLEEES. He slides on his backside through his own saliva to save the day. For Cilla. For Margi. For Carla. For Liverpool Football Club. We wear the shirt.
Before the commencement of the game, a Liverpudlian official – the man the city sent out of the town to university, presumably – bade us observe a silence. Decency, compassion and the Corinthian way being our hallmarks, we Arsenal fans did so, and duly observed it for the duration of the game. It disgusts me to report that the silence was frequently interrupted throughout the match, however, by the Liverpool contingent, who maintained a constant drone of base lowing and a urinal shower of verbal derision. The Arsenal team are noted by their manager and moral mentor M. Wenger on a weekly basis for their “resilience”. This, they are. They ask only for their performances to be greeted with the sort of deference one would expect at Crufts when a high pedigree poodle is trotted out to compete for the rosette of Best In Show. Even this rudimentary level of respect is lacking among the “Scousers” (why are their self-created nomenclatures almost deliberately designed to be such that one must wipe oneself down with a chamois leather when they utter them at you?). The contrast of styles was marked from the outset. Arsenal's play was like some advanced, exquisite form of calligraphy, Liverpool's the equivalent of a pig scratching out a mark in which to defecate in the dirt. Whenever Liverpool put the ball in the box, it was with the finesse of a Liverpudlian fan attempting to scratch an “X” in the box in lieu of his own signature, as presumably required upon his fortnightly visits to the Labour Exchange. And yet, it was Arsenal who were forced to endure the vocal brickbats. Small wonder they were occasionally put off their stroke. Small wonder that Adebayor played like he was wearing giant fucking bricks instead of fucking boots, small wonder that Eboue couldn't fucking well find a fucking space on the fucking pitch without being a fucking waste of it, small wonder that fucking Gallas, Captain of fuck all except his own stupid fucking haircut, was such a fucking non-influence. Let us cast our mind back to the heyday of twentieth century modernist literature, before the “masses” had crawled out of their chimneys to lower the tone. Virginia Woolf is at her writing table, composing To The Lighthouse. Would she have produced such an elegant tome, ripe for the edification of her many social and intellctual inferiors, had the fans of rival author James Joyce in a fit of baseness, gathered about her bellowing, “AAAAHHH!!!! SHIT! C'MON JAMES! JOYCE FANS TILL WE DIE! JOYCE FANS TILL WE DIE! CLOSE HER DOWN! DON'T LET HER GET HER HAND ON THE QUILL!! C'MON JAMES! USE YOUR STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS! STEAL HER FUCKING INKPOT C'MONNNN!!!!” She would not. Neither, understandably, did Arsenal.
There were eleven players on that pitch last night. Pride. Passion. Heart. Commitment. Guts. Honesty (Experience, 65 min). The Shirt. Spittle. The spirit of Stan Boardman. Gerrard. Carragher. All of them, especially the Shirt, were fit to wear the Shirt. They took John Lennon, George Harrison and Brookside from us but they cannot take away our Shirt. What does it represent, the Shirt? To me, to everyone who holds Liverpool Football Club dear, it represents one thing – and that is The Shirt. What Liverpool fan, when the see the Shirt cannot think of the word “Shirt”? Every letter in that hallowed word counts, every letter, like the Liverpool team, plays its part. Take away the “r” and what are you left with? Shit. Makes you think, eh? That tells you everything you need to know about The Shirt. Last night, we were Shirt and you know we were. Every Liverpool player, he's like a letter in that word. When we are on song, when we are Kings Of Wednesday Europe, we are Shirt. Except when we reach the final, then we are Shirkewell.
Laughingly, the municipal trough that has Liverpool has been dubbed City of Culture. This “City”, whose sole contribution to the gaiety of nations has been the televisual dramas of a Mr Alan Bleasdale (if you count as “drama” men in donkey jackets mumbling unintelligible imprecations at one another as they hatch a plan to steal a spade) and the supposedly popular singing group by the name of The Cockroaches (or some other form of insect infestation, I am too enamoured of Mozart to inquire further into the matter). What is for certain is that, to the eternal shame of we who hold the values of liberty, equality and fraternity dear, the city of Liverpool was founded on the spoils of slave labour. This is an obscene stain upon the conscience. Reparation must be made. But what? Here is my suggestion. That the citizens of Liverpool become our slaves in turn. One per household. It seems, if Mr Bleasdale is any guide, that these people are anxious to find employment – well, we could put them to proper work, tarring our rooves, cleaning our Agas, or, of an evening, as simple footstools. There is a spittle problem with these people, but that could be fixed with a small and inexpensive operation, performed at the same time as when they were taken to be spayed. They could live in your stables, subsisting on oats, excreting in the straw. Only by such radical measures can justice for the people of Africa be secured – but who is strong enough to grasp the nettle? Arsenal! Always next season! Or the season after that! Or when we're dead and buried! . . .
This result, this represents, quite literally, the renaissance of a city. This reminds everyone what Liverpool is all about. We're supposed to be City Of Culture, right? Well, let's us be having some of them plum jobs, then. Instead of that Russell Davies writing Dr Who, get Carla Lane writing it. Get some of the fun back. “Dalek? I'll Dalek you in a minute!” “Cyberman! I'll Cyberman you in a minute!” We'd be falling about. Instead of that kecks bloke, Paxman, on friggin' Newsnight, get Cilla Black on the job. She'd asks the questions we all want asking of them politicians (“What's yer name and where d'yer come from?”). How's about Margi Clarke starring in a six-part telly drama about Queen Elizabeth I? With Michael Angelis as Sir Walter Raleigh and Tom O' Connor as court jester? (“Remember when you were a kid and your mam used to give you castor oil?”) See, we do stuff like this better. It's like tragedies. Look at that Shannon kid in Yorkshire. Crap! I tell you, if that'd been Liverpool . . . Walk tall! 'Ello! 'Ello! That night in Istanbul! The Shirt!
My own words, penned in the style of the Bard but possessing, of course, a certain, felicitous refinement of which Shakespeare himself, not being London-born and hidebound by the iambic meter, was incapable. These were the words I bellowed upon the final whistle's blast, and my fellow Arsenal fans nodded, before taking up the chant themselves. A trilogy has drawn to a close, one which has turned out to be Euripidian in its tragic outcome. Mute is the songbird upon its perch, silent the swan upon the lake of lamentation. Of course, the very fact that this troglodyte rabble, this Liverpool Football Club, won the Champions League in 2005, gives pause – not unlike turning up at the Civic Hall annual ball and finding one's master butcher in attendance, the entire event is cheapened altogether. Dirk Kuyt; does his countenance not have the unmistakable air of a cow's backside following repeated battery with a banjolele? How can our players, men of the most exquisite sensibility, be expected to mark a cow-man from whom they are compelled to avert their eyes in disgust?
They say there's only two teams in Liverpool – the one Rafa Benitez picks one week, then the one he picks the next. Well, this was the one he picked last night, and we walked tall in the shirt. There's been some memorable nights in Anfield, especially in the 90s – there was Racing Boys of Berne in 1996 (0-0), FC Lederhosen, 1997 (0-0), St. Ponce, 1998 (0-0), matches which brought the blood rushing to the acne on your forehead, pulsating results which summoned up all the passion you think of when you hear the words “Liverpool, Wednesday, November.” But this was special, this. This was a night that made you realise just how much Liverpool is Liverpool and how much everywhere that isn't Liverpool isn't, how much Steven Gerrard is Steven Gerrard and how much you down south aren't. “Liverpool, Liverpool, we walk tall/You are not, so you walk small.”
It was the invidious task of the stalwart staff of the Emirates stadium to play host not once but twice to the barely sentient fans of “Liverpool FC” (“Faecal Crust”?) wended their way, in some base parody of the Jarrow March, to London. To watch them set foot in our beloved cathedral one felt like the curator looking on in horror as swine were herded through the National Gallery. I myself felt the anguish keenly, as, in my capacity as Senior Corporate Interior Design Consultant, had a hand in some of the finer details of the construction of the Arsenal stadium. It piqued me no little, therefore, when I heard reports of the behaviour of some Liverpool fans upon completion of the game last Wednesday. With Arsenal stewards urging them, as politely as is appropriate, with bullhorns and wolfhounds, to take their leave, it seems that a great many of them did not comply but rather tarried. These malodorous refuseniks later complained that they could not find their way out of the stadium. What balderdash. At the away end, at my specification, there is a sign clearly marked “EGRESS”. What can you do with such barnyard dwellers?
I remember me first trip down to London, me, on the Wally Arnold in 1987 to see them play Arsenal in that Milk Cola Final. As we were going down towards Wembley Way, there were these Arsenal fans, right, waving little bunches of paper at us with the numbers “5” and “10” on them. We all turned to each other and said, what the frig's all that about? It was only a couple of years later when I saw Degsy Hatton in WH Smiths hand over one of them that this was London money. Well, I'm telling you, after tonight's performance, I reckon Jamie Carragher deserves to be awarded one of those bits of number ten London paper – and if it were up to me, he'd get one every year of his life till the day he dies, a Red through and through. We look after our own. Other players tackle. Not good enough. Not good enough for Liverpool Football Club. Jamie TAAACCCCHHHHKKKLLLEEES. He slides on his backside through his own saliva to save the day. For Cilla. For Margi. For Carla. For Liverpool Football Club. We wear the shirt.
Before the commencement of the game, a Liverpudlian official – the man the city sent out of the town to university, presumably – bade us observe a silence. Decency, compassion and the Corinthian way being our hallmarks, we Arsenal fans did so, and duly observed it for the duration of the game. It disgusts me to report that the silence was frequently interrupted throughout the match, however, by the Liverpool contingent, who maintained a constant drone of base lowing and a urinal shower of verbal derision. The Arsenal team are noted by their manager and moral mentor M. Wenger on a weekly basis for their “resilience”. This, they are. They ask only for their performances to be greeted with the sort of deference one would expect at Crufts when a high pedigree poodle is trotted out to compete for the rosette of Best In Show. Even this rudimentary level of respect is lacking among the “Scousers” (why are their self-created nomenclatures almost deliberately designed to be such that one must wipe oneself down with a chamois leather when they utter them at you?). The contrast of styles was marked from the outset. Arsenal's play was like some advanced, exquisite form of calligraphy, Liverpool's the equivalent of a pig scratching out a mark in which to defecate in the dirt. Whenever Liverpool put the ball in the box, it was with the finesse of a Liverpudlian fan attempting to scratch an “X” in the box in lieu of his own signature, as presumably required upon his fortnightly visits to the Labour Exchange. And yet, it was Arsenal who were forced to endure the vocal brickbats. Small wonder they were occasionally put off their stroke. Small wonder that Adebayor played like he was wearing giant fucking bricks instead of fucking boots, small wonder that Eboue couldn't fucking well find a fucking space on the fucking pitch without being a fucking waste of it, small wonder that fucking Gallas, Captain of fuck all except his own stupid fucking haircut, was such a fucking non-influence. Let us cast our mind back to the heyday of twentieth century modernist literature, before the “masses” had crawled out of their chimneys to lower the tone. Virginia Woolf is at her writing table, composing To The Lighthouse. Would she have produced such an elegant tome, ripe for the edification of her many social and intellctual inferiors, had the fans of rival author James Joyce in a fit of baseness, gathered about her bellowing, “AAAAHHH!!!! SHIT! C'MON JAMES! JOYCE FANS TILL WE DIE! JOYCE FANS TILL WE DIE! CLOSE HER DOWN! DON'T LET HER GET HER HAND ON THE QUILL!! C'MON JAMES! USE YOUR STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS! STEAL HER FUCKING INKPOT C'MONNNN!!!!” She would not. Neither, understandably, did Arsenal.
There were eleven players on that pitch last night. Pride. Passion. Heart. Commitment. Guts. Honesty (Experience, 65 min). The Shirt. Spittle. The spirit of Stan Boardman. Gerrard. Carragher. All of them, especially the Shirt, were fit to wear the Shirt. They took John Lennon, George Harrison and Brookside from us but they cannot take away our Shirt. What does it represent, the Shirt? To me, to everyone who holds Liverpool Football Club dear, it represents one thing – and that is The Shirt. What Liverpool fan, when the see the Shirt cannot think of the word “Shirt”? Every letter in that hallowed word counts, every letter, like the Liverpool team, plays its part. Take away the “r” and what are you left with? Shit. Makes you think, eh? That tells you everything you need to know about The Shirt. Last night, we were Shirt and you know we were. Every Liverpool player, he's like a letter in that word. When we are on song, when we are Kings Of Wednesday Europe, we are Shirt. Except when we reach the final, then we are Shirkewell.
Laughingly, the municipal trough that has Liverpool has been dubbed City of Culture. This “City”, whose sole contribution to the gaiety of nations has been the televisual dramas of a Mr Alan Bleasdale (if you count as “drama” men in donkey jackets mumbling unintelligible imprecations at one another as they hatch a plan to steal a spade) and the supposedly popular singing group by the name of The Cockroaches (or some other form of insect infestation, I am too enamoured of Mozart to inquire further into the matter). What is for certain is that, to the eternal shame of we who hold the values of liberty, equality and fraternity dear, the city of Liverpool was founded on the spoils of slave labour. This is an obscene stain upon the conscience. Reparation must be made. But what? Here is my suggestion. That the citizens of Liverpool become our slaves in turn. One per household. It seems, if Mr Bleasdale is any guide, that these people are anxious to find employment – well, we could put them to proper work, tarring our rooves, cleaning our Agas, or, of an evening, as simple footstools. There is a spittle problem with these people, but that could be fixed with a small and inexpensive operation, performed at the same time as when they were taken to be spayed. They could live in your stables, subsisting on oats, excreting in the straw. Only by such radical measures can justice for the people of Africa be secured – but who is strong enough to grasp the nettle? Arsenal! Always next season! Or the season after that! Or when we're dead and buried! . . .
This result, this represents, quite literally, the renaissance of a city. This reminds everyone what Liverpool is all about. We're supposed to be City Of Culture, right? Well, let's us be having some of them plum jobs, then. Instead of that Russell Davies writing Dr Who, get Carla Lane writing it. Get some of the fun back. “Dalek? I'll Dalek you in a minute!” “Cyberman! I'll Cyberman you in a minute!” We'd be falling about. Instead of that kecks bloke, Paxman, on friggin' Newsnight, get Cilla Black on the job. She'd asks the questions we all want asking of them politicians (“What's yer name and where d'yer come from?”). How's about Margi Clarke starring in a six-part telly drama about Queen Elizabeth I? With Michael Angelis as Sir Walter Raleigh and Tom O' Connor as court jester? (“Remember when you were a kid and your mam used to give you castor oil?”) See, we do stuff like this better. It's like tragedies. Look at that Shannon kid in Yorkshire. Crap! I tell you, if that'd been Liverpool . . . Walk tall! 'Ello! 'Ello! That night in Istanbul! The Shirt!
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