HOW I PUT FOOTBALL IN PERSPECTIVE
Paul Tomkins 21 September 2005
The Manchester United fixture is one I endure, rather than enjoy. There's too much at stake: losing hurts too much.
Frankly, it's a fixture I hate, for a number of reasons: some footballing, some of a more personal nature. I'll never enjoy watching it, but I will no longer let it feel like the end of my world if we lose.
It may not feel like it at the time, but it's always just three points at stake. It's a fixture I struggled for some years to get into perspective, until I had no choice in the matter.
Unless a comfortable lead is built up early on (and that's been a rarity since 1990, when Peter Beardsley completed his hat-trick after the Reds led 3-0 at half-time), it's only after the final whistle that pleasure, or relief, can occur.
In fact, when the Reds are winning it can be even less enjoyable. Given a lead against United will invariably be slender, I always expect them to pinch their speciality late goal, and then you have the big plummet.
Come a long way
Having fallen so far behind Fergie's men in the 1990s, Liverpool have now come a long way since December 17th 2000, and the longest second half in the history of football (at least, so it seemed at the time).
Five years ago United seemed unbeatable. They'd just won the Treble, and their superiority over the Reds in head-to-heads stretched back to 1996.
(The 1996 FA Cup final was at that point the lowest I'd ever felt as a Liverpool fan. After the two league encounters I was certain we'd outplay them and win, but Evans' players froze on the day. To this day I cannot buy a cream-coloured item of clothing.)
Then, on a winter's Sunday lunchtime at the start of the new millennium, Danny Murphy curled a free-kick past Fabien Barthez. Half-time quickly followed; and then every minute of the second half seemed to last an hour. A recent FA Cup game at Old Trafford kept coming to mind: Owen's early goal cancelled out by two injury time United goals.
But this time the late goals never came. When the final whistle went, it felt like winning a trophy. Remember?
Since that day, Liverpool have won two League Cups (one against United), the FA Cup, the Uefa Cup, two European Super Cups, and a Charity Shield (also against United). In other words, won some actual trophies. Come to think of it, I'm also pretty sure we won something significant last season, but it escapes me at the moment. Any chance you can remind me, Sir Alex?
United fell under the Houllier hoodoo, and for a couple of years every game ended with a Liverpool victory. That then reversed towards the end of his tenure, but beating United had stopped feeling like The Impossible Dream.
Football is not a matter of life and death
Much has been written about the parallels between football and life. While football is a religion to many, it's also easy to overlook that Bill Shankly was being ironic when he said it was more important than life or death.
In these last five years, I have experienced a series of highs and lows that, bizarrely, have tended to coincide precisely with the peaks and troughs of the Reds. Manchester United feature heavily.
I started writing for an independent LFC website in December 2000, shortly after that victory at Old Trafford. By the following May Liverpool had won the Treble. A season ticket holder, I only made it to the first final, against Birmingham; the 2nd and 3rd took place during my unfortunately-timed honeymoon in Spain.
Life was good, as I savoured the remarkable events in Cardiff and Dortmund from a tv screen in a Spanish bar: ample consolation for not being at the games. The Reds won, and ultimately that was what mattered most.
The weekend in February 2002 when my son was born, the Reds, now so replete with confidence as to be challenging Arsenal for the title, won 6-0 at Ipswich. (It's a good job I never went through with my desire to name my son after the first Liverpool goalscorer that weekend. Little Abel Xavier Tomkins may never have forgiven me.)
But then it all went pear-shaped. Within a further six months the stresses and pressures of life had got the better of me. Liverpool's plight still concerned me, but my own life concerned me more.
I had been diagnosed with M.E. (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis) a couple of years earlier, and the new arrival sapped the last of my energy. My wife and I separated, and I had to find somewhere new to live. Battling illness and depression, I was stuck in a rut of despair.
The weekend I moved to rented accommodation – heartbroken at no longer being a '24/7' part of my son's life – saw the Reds face Manchester United at Anfield. I watched the game on TV, then moved the last of my stuff.
The game could not more perfectly have summed up how I felt. Perhaps the football compounded my mood; it certainly mirrored it.
The moment Jamie Carragher headed back to Jerzy Dudek, and the ball rolled through the Pole's legs, leaving Diego Forlan - he who had not previously been able to locate the farm, let alone the barn and its door - to prod the ball into an empty net, it all seemed so apposite.
Liverpool losing that day did not alter my life, just as the Reds winning would not have been a magic wand for my problems. There are no overnight fixes. Time is a great healer; but time is also needed to rebuild something, be it a football team, or a life.
To be honest, I never want to return to the person who got hysterical if the Reds lost, and had his whole week ruined by a bad result. If you put that much pressure on the team to appease your needs, then you tread a fine line.
There is a danger for anyone who treats football as his or her Prozac. If you look to football to cheer you up, or to fill a hole in your life, you are skating on thin ice.
But ultimately, that's your call. Conversely, if your interest stretches only as far as to read the results in the Sunday papers, that is your business – not mine. We are all different, and how much a result hurts us or affects our life is something that we have to deal with in our own way.
Although my health remains pretty much the same (good some days, bad others), life itself is much better these days. Less than three years after that lowest ebb I witnessed, first hand, the heroics of Dudek and Carragher, as Liverpool replaced Manchester United as the most recent English Champions of Europe.Football still gives me the incredible heady highs, like the mind-boggling delirium I experienced in Istanbul, but I have learned to expect, and accept, the comedown. Life cannot always be rosy.
Football, like life, has a habit of coming back to bite you on the backside.
Bad times eventually follow good – all teams, whoever they are, slump sooner or later – but then, as a Liverpool fan, good times have tended to never be too far away.
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