It was Sunday 12th May, the top story on the BBC website was the conclusion of the Premier League title race, and the last song I listened to was ‘Jerusalem, New York, Berlin’ by Vampire Weekend.

When I wrote the conclusion to this blog, or what I thought would be the conclusion to this blog, whilst hungover in a sweaty University halls room in Cape Town, I had to try desperately hard to turn a 5-1 win against Arsenal that I didn’t watch into the ending of something.

It just wasn’t a natural break, in the way that the final game of 2017, Phillippe Coutinho’s final game in a Liverpool shirt and the last home game before Virgil Van Dijk’s arrival, naturally became.

It was nothing like my blog about the final league game of the 2017/18 season, against Brighton (of all teams) when I got to expound on how the final game of the season was a kind of death, really, where an incarnation of the team leaves forever, never to be seen again besides mid-morning summer repeats of Premier League Years.

The cast for 19/20 will be different. There will be no Daniel Sturridge, no Alberto Moreno, possibly no Adam Lallana. There will be Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, as well as Timo Werner or whoever else we buy in the summer. But this group, specifically, will not be seen in the league, or at Anfield, again. The team that arrives back in August will be different.

That’s why this post exists. To mourn the team I spent the Autumn writing about, and to mourn the loss of what I spent so long thinking they could be.

It is to process the end of a team, and the end of a title race.

So let’s go through the stages.

Denial

Or “actually, Liverpool can count this season as a success…”

Liverpool won 97 points, the third highest total in the entire history of English football.

They had a player win PFA Player of the Year.

They had a player win the Golden Glove.

They had two players be part of a three-way tie for the Golden Boot.

They won 17 out of 19 home games, the second consecutive season unbeaten at home.

They lost a single game.

On a statistical level, all of these achievements are remarkable.

Taking a wider view, they represent staggering progress for a team that finished 8th in 2016, scraped 4th in 2017, then scraped 4th again in 2018 despite the visible fatigue caused by a deep run in the Champions League. They were 25 points behind at the end of last season, they are only one point behind now.

They have made us all very happy, for most of the time. They have played wonderful football.

But we have league tables for a reason. We award just one trophy, for a reason.

The best thing I have seen this season is having people on a team who can grab a game by the scruff of the neck and just win it, and can withstand anything thrown at them to grind out a 1-0 win away from home.

Because I was sick of Liverpool being a nice team that played some pretty football, who got compliments but not wins or trophies. They have become something more than that this season, and the sheer effectiveness of the football they have played will become legendary. The table, however, tells its own story.

We didn’t win, we came second. The trophy we wanted more than any other, that we have waited so long for, is going somewhere else.

Klopp’s inspirational words this week about how the players have done everything they can, and we can be proud of all they achieved, are important. They help us be positive, while waiting for next season to begin.

But they would be hollow if this were the last game we play, and we had to ponder another total failure – the fact that we don’t is the only saving grace.

Anger

Or “i’d rather lose the league every year than have owners like they do”

For neatness sake, I’ll use a couple of paragraphs from the third blog I ever put up, written last January for a game that we won 4-3.

“The Abu Dhabi United Group for Investment and Development is a private equity firm based in the United Arab Emirates, closely associated with the government of Abu Dhabi, which specialises in property investment and entertainment properties. Its primary investments are in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, with secondary investments in Spain, Japan, and Uruguay.

Its owner is Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan bin Zayed bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Presidential Affairs of the United Arab Emirates, a key member of the ruling Emirati royal family, one of the richest families on Earth. The United Arab Emirates is an autocratic dictatorship, with citizens having no ability to affect the way the country is run; it ranks 119th on Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index, and is given a rating of ‘Not Free’ on Freedom House’s annual ‘Freedom in the World’ ratings, meaning its citizens lack basic civil and political rights.

That is, of course, if you are a citizen: most of the population of Abu Dhabi are immigrant workers from South Asia, brought to the country to perform cheap labour in exchange for a meagre salary, living without employment protection in slums far removed from the gleaming skyscrapers the UAE would like to present.

Members of the Emirati royal family, meanwhile, have been connected to torture, human trafficking, and creating and sustaining the ongoing armed conflict and humanitarian crisis in neighbouring Yemen.”

None of that is disputable. Neither is it disputable that the owner, himself, cares little for football, only visiting the stadium for a game once in the eleven years since the purchase. Or that the reasons for choosing which club to invest in were based on location, stadium, and the previous owner needing to sell in a hurry, rather than the tiniest affection for the club or its history.

This is not philanthropy, or passion for the club or the sport. This is sportswashing: the deliberate use of the world’s most popular sport to try and create a positive impression of a dictatorship, and to divest oil wealth into a potential growth industry.

The release of the documents contained in Football Leaks by Der Spiegel over this season paint a compelling picture of who they are as a club, one that holds the whole edifice of European football in contempt, and are willing to throw money at problems – any problems up to and including legal problems caused by UEFA attempting to legally enforce Financial Fair Play — that get in their way.

They will end this season with more pending investigations into their financial affairs (four) than trophies won (three, potentially).

They have bought, and will continue to buy, every good young player in Europe. They will spend more than any club spends, and will do it every season they can, for as long as they can. They will ruin English and European football, if they have the chance.

You can ignore this, if you choose to. You can claim it’s not important, or that every football club is in some way complicit.

But you can’t deny that a club owned and run by a country is not normal. You can’t deny that any other club, that finances itself through competitive success and player sales, is at a complete disadvantage.

And you can’t deny that, having succeeded once, they’ll do it again and again, for however long they want to.

Bargaining

Or “it’ll all be worth it when we win our sixth Champions League in Madrid”

Last Tuesday night, that night of all nights, I was sitting next to a fan of that team that plays in sky blue I’m not naming.

She leant over to me, after the whistle blew, and offered congratulations, saying she hoped we would win the Champions League.

I immediately replied: “Want to swap!?”

Such is the irony of the end of this season – while they have the trophy our fans want the most, we have a chance of getting the trophy their football club wants more than anything. If we offered to swap, I think they might take it.

I am optimistic about the final in Madrid — because Harry Kane won’t be fully fit, because we dominated both league games, because we have the experience of playing big games under huge pressure (and neutral-site European finals) and Pochettino’s Spurs have a tendency to lose their heads in those games. We dominated the first half an hour of last years’ final when our gameplan still worked, and there’s every reason to think we can do it again. The league table shows that we are a better team than Tottenham, and better teams tend to win games against inferior teams.

Yet we know, don’t we, how strange things can happen in a Champions League final, for better and worse. Teams lose from 3-0 up, or on penalties. Teams have their best player get injured, or their goalie get a concussion, or a player lashes in an unstoppable overhead kick from 20 yards. You’re not guaranteed to win, no matter how well you play.

Klopp quoted Sepp Herberger’s famous aphorism in an interview last week: “The ball is round, anything can happen.”

We know that, as much as anyone, and we know that it means that, as much as we want to bargain, we have nothing to bargain with.

We have a probability of a trophy. They already have theirs.

And if we had the one they have, we wouldn’t care about the Champions League final.

Depression

Or “I don’t even know what the point is, there is nothing else we could’ve done…”

Writing all of this down has been, like this entire project, a way of me attempting to process everything that I’m feeling about the end of this nine-month odyssey that wasn’t, in the end, enough.

I thought I was OK, late on Sunday night, maybe because I was distracted, or maybe because I was focusing on all the positivity around Anfield at the end of yesterday’s game. I even managed to turn on Match of the Day after they’d finished the highlights of the two title-deciding games, because I knew that would be too much.

What I didn’t anticipate was that, after that, the BBC would show a recap of the moments that decided the title, making me watch Liverpool’s only defeat again, then Harry Maguire scoring the equaliser for Leicester at Anfield, and, worst of all, Salah’s one-on-one being saved by Jordan Pickford at Goodison Park.

Seeing that was enough to plunge me back into my hole of sadness, before, to rub it in, they cut to a trophy-lifting celebration at the Etihad where Vincent Kompany and the rest were dancing about on a stage in front of some choreographed pyrotechnics. It was the perfect event for them really, the kind that requires multiple marketing professionals and events management firms to organise. The kind of thing you’d organise if you preferred digital banners that don’t interfere with your advertising, rather than real ones made by your fans.

Because, if everything that went our way wasn’t enough to win the title this year wasn’t enough, what will be? We’ve been top at Christmas three times in the last ten years, and have failed to win the league each time; having broken an English record by coming 2nd with only two defeats in 2009, we have now broken our own record with only one defeat in 2019.

The word “Narrative” has become trendy within football journalism, which reminds me of how often we want the teams and individuals to fit into the established narrative tropes that dominate Western culture. It’s why Pep tried to peddle the idea that the media were in favour of Liverpool winning the title – because it suited his agenda, sure, but also because we find underdog stories more compelling, as they map on to a standard heroic journey more easily. A dominant force remaining dominant is not nearly as good a story.

But to call Liverpool the David facing a Goliath would be overstating the case – Liverpool remain one of the richest clubs in the world, though not the absolute richest. What they are, instead, is a Sisyphus.

Sisyphus, in Ancient Greece, was punished by the Gods for his misdeeds by pushing a boulder up a hill, for eternity. As soon as the boulder reached the summit, it would roll back to the bottom and Sisyphus would have to roll it back up again.

Sisyphus was embraced by the French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus, who praised him as the ideal of a hero in an Absurd existence, who cannot escape a world with no order or meaning, yet who returns to his rock anyway. He imagined Sisyphus happy, somehow, within his torment.

These last two days have seen Liverpool fans attempt to do the same thing. The Premier League is our rock, and it keeps on rolling down the hill. We can appoint Roy Hodgson and buy Paul Konchesky and fail to win the league, or we can have our best season ever with generational talents in every position, and not win the league. It doesn’t matter. The league title is our boulder, and however much it gets pushed to the top of the mountain, it always rolls back to the bottom.

And we walk down after it. Knowing we will have to haul it back up again. And fearing, in our heart of hearts, that this will happen to us every single season for the rest of our lives.

Acceptance

Or “I’m just glad I got to be part of something special.”

I think it is too early for me to accept not winning the league.

I think it will take a while, and is contingent on the result of the Champions League final.

Because not winning the league has defined my Liverpool fan experience, and we’ve lost what might be our best chance to end that.

But, on the other hand, I have been entertaining this possibility for months, since it was always self-evident that the number of points required to win the title would be startlingly high. I have memorised fixture lists, agonised over permutations, and stressed over the inclusion or exclusion of Naby Keita on the teamsheet for the entire hour between it being released and kick-off time, all because I knew that any one of those might be the deciding factor in determining the outcome of the whole bloody season.

Letting it go and moving on, never mind gathering myself for next season, is going to take a while.

I have found myself struggling to explain what this experience has been like for me, and in a way I’m glad that I didn’t have to blog about it since I’ve struggled to put it into words.

I haven’t enjoyed it, as I was so often told I must; neither have I hated it, nearly as badly as I have hated seasons where we have drawn or lost more frequently.

The emotions have been too intense for me to give a comparison, too difficult for me to give an explanation.

I can only offer an anecdote, and, typically, a couple of songs I’ve been listening to.

After losing the 2015 FA Cup Semi-Final to Tim Sherwood’s Aston Villa, one of the most crushing defeats I can remember watching, I went home and watched an ESPN documentary, “Catching Hell”, about the Chicago Cubs, then in the final years what ended up being a 108-year gap between championships.

Liverpool’s drought is not similar – unless it is longer than your lifetime, in which case it is functionally identical.

Watching that documentary made me feel an affinity with the Cubs, not because I particularly care for baseball, but because I felt deeply the same thing they felt, of wishing desperately for an outcome that you have not seen in your lifetime, and you fear you never will.

I have found myself listening to this song, by Eddie Vedder, the former lead singer of Pearl Jam, and it gets me every single time.

The first line is telling enough: “Don’t let anyone say that it’s just a game.”

Which is what I’ve spent every single post on this blog trying to explain, distilled into nine words.

What gets me though, deep beyond my rational brain in the depths of my emotional core, is a feeling this song conveys of absolute faith and certainty that there is a day, there will be a day when every thing goes right and every dream we’ve had come gloriously true.

You have to believe in that to go on as a football fan. You have to believe not only that your team can have its day, but that you will be there to be a part of it.

That is football’s magic, I think.

It allows us, in the most mundane way, to access humanity’s tremendous capacity for hope.

It’s the hope that gets you, in the end. Your ability to hope for the best makes it so sweet to achieve, but makes every failure so bitter because you’ve thought about how things might have been.

We know that almost every season ends in failure, that players leave or are sold, that mangers retire or are sacked.

Yet we cling to the belief that this time, this year, this game, this cup, will be different.

We choose to believe that, because we are humans, and that our endless ability to believe in a better future for ourselves and our social groups is what defines us.

Another song, one of my favourites by The Mountain Goats, so good that they haven’t even released it yet.

“We held on to hope / of better days coming / and when we did we were right / I hope the people who did you wrong / have trouble sleeping at night”

Football, like every single thing in this world, is not just. Players and Teams do not get what they deserve. Countries that own them for propaganda purposes certainly don’t.

We know this.

And yet we ignore, and deny it, and rage against it.

Despite everything, every law of probability and economic certainty that says we will lose more than we win in the long run, we choose to cling to all of our hopes.

“Make Us Dream”, the banner on the Kop said, all those years ago.

So we do.

We push down all of our doubts and we choose to believe instead.

Maybe Next Year.

Maybe Next Year will finally be our year.

We can only hope.