End of an Era
AN ARTICLE BY MATTY
<So often I find myself at odds with today’s culture and society. A man of faith in a time where faith is ridiculed. A man who values loyalty and respect in a time where those morals are dead. A man who dates because he wants to marry in a time of rampant hookup culture. A man who just wants to spend time with good people yet finds good people very hard to find. A time where double standards are rampant. And I admit I’m guilty of this. I hold myself to a high standard and don’t hold others to that same standard. It’s things like this that made me fall in love with Liverpool. The feeling that we were underdogs, that we valued the things that society has done its best to devalue. Things like family, enjoying your job, expressing yourself and helping others reach their dreams.
It’s why it pains me to see where we are now, what the fans have become, what the club has become. We are a soulless husk of our former selves, our fighting mentality giving way to apathy, our always hopeful manager feeling hopeless at the sight of the task ahead. Truth be told, this season felt like someone or something sucked out all the life this club had. It feels like we have finally admitted defeat to the hands of our rivals, our days of overachieving now over, back to fighting for top six or top ten like we were before Klopp. It’s a sad end to an era that brought us so much joy. Fans of modern football represent modern society as a whole: nothing is good enough, no patience is given, everything is expected instantly. It’s a bleak outlook for a sport I once enjoyed.
Sports for me and likely many other people my age was a way for us to enjoy ourselves, to forget about the pressures of life for a few hours and have a good time with friends. Yet the reality is that sports is no longer an escape from reality, but rather just a continuation of the corruption that has brought about a world where hope for the future decreases with each passing day. There’s many things I want to do in the next ten years of my life: buy some property, a modest house, not too far away from a city but close to farmland and nature. I’d love to cultivate a massive garden, get all my meat and fruits and veggies from trusted farmers or a farmer market. There’s an underlying theme to all of this: I want to be as self-sufficient as possible. I don’t want to deal with corruption and the best way to do that is to be independent. I’d also like to keep my money and the best way to do that is to make sure I’m not wasting tons of gas every day and not spend $500 on groceries that could easily be made or bartered for by myself.
Alright, back to footy. I don’t know where Liverpool go from here, I don’t know exactly what UEFA does with the problem they’re facing: that the over-saturation of football in recent years has created a dearth of quality this season. Almost no team playing this season is actually good. Everybody looks tired, unable to complete the grind of a 38-game season, plus a World Cup, plus European competitions. Can’t blame them, really. I find myself falling out of love with this game. Much like Liverpool, the soul of it is gone, replaced by politics and money. Success is the only thing that matters. There’s a reason I’ve been paying a lot more attention to my hockey team lately, the Buffalo Sabres. They’re slowly being built into the type of team Liverpool used to be. A team built on the values of loyalty, family, and making each other better every day. They only missed out on some knockout round hockey by 1 single point. Sound familiar?
It doesn’t sit right with me that we want to get rid of everybody after what they’ve done for us. Yet it makes sense considering they all seem too old for this game now. I guess “You’ll Never Walk Alone” is just a slogan rather than a way of life. We’re not better than anybody else, are we? We want players gone as soon as they aren’t useful, loyalty and respect be damned. You’ll never walk alone, until you get injured. You’ll never walk alone, until you make a mistake. Then you must leave because you’re no longer good enough. You know who that sounds like? Pep Guardiola. Joao Cancelo was arguably the best fullback in the world last season, didn’t matter to Pep. He wasn’t good this season, Pep was transitioning the way his team played, and Cancelo was no longer in the plans and told to leave. At the time, we were surprised, but we shouldn’t have been. That’s exactly what we want now, isn’t it? A cull. A liquidation event, everyone must go, go, go!
“Poems and closing time, oh sweet love of mine, I’ve found it so hard to find truth. Poems and closing time, only true friend of mine, it’ll always just be me and you. So don’t try to pay me and don’t try to play me as one of your sorry fools, poems and closing time, oh sweet love of mine, in a world that’s growing so cruel”. I guess I’m just not ready to accept that my loving heart and caring personality doesn’t mean shit anymore. I could be a cold-hearted cynic, maybe I am already. I just want to find a pocket of space somewhere in this world where I can escape that cruel nature of society. And some sports just don’t do that for me anymore. I want to live, I want to be free, I want to love, I want to be loved. Is that so hard to ask for?
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