It was Saturday 28th April, the top story on the BBC website was about Sainsbury’s and Asda, the UK’s second and third-largest food retailers, being in advanced merger talks, and the last song I listened to was “Lakeside View Apartments Suite” by The Mountain Goats.

The team was: Karius; Gomez, Klavan, Van Dijk, Moreno; Alexander-Arnold, Henderson, Wijnaldum; Salah, Firmino, Ings.

Another week, another useless draw against a team that will be relegated anyway.

So it goes.

The magic number is four, and it would be awfully convenient if someone could beat Chelsea.

Will we have to play Alexander-Arnold and Woodburn in midfield in the Champions League final? Maybe.

The news I should have been talking about was the apparent détente between the leaders of North and South Korea, including some powerfully symbolic diplomatic theatre, as well as a commitment to de-nuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.

A meaningful and insightful commentary on these events is definitely beyond me in my professional capacity as “some guy” so I’m not even going to try. Instead, a short rumination on events closer to Anfield, which have been one of the other big news stories of the week.

The Alder Hey Children’s Hospital is one of the largest children’s hospitals in the United Kingdom, one of several specialised NHS hospitals in the Liverpool area. At Christmas, the Liverpool squad traditionally visit to give presents to the sick children, and the LFC Foundation counts them as an official partner, meaning they benefit directly from the club’s charitable efforts.

This week, the hospital has been the focus of national and international attention due to its treatment of Alfie Evans, an infant tragically suffering from a terminal and inoperable degenerative brain disease that has left him in a prolonged vegetative state. Alfie’s parents filed a series of injunctions and appeals attempting to have him moved to a hospital in Italy which had offered treatment, going as far as gaining him Italian citizenship and the personal endorsement of Pope Francis, alongside appealing to the European Court of Human Rights.

Every court upheld the court’s ruling that there would be no medical benefit to any further treatment, and that only pallative care should be offered. This did not, however, make a difference in the court of public opinion, with American conservatives in particular jumping on the bandwagon to denounce the evils of socialist medicine and the fundamental right of the parents to make medical decisions.

Due to some erroneous legal advice asserting their parental rights, Evans’ parents were involved in an unfortunate confrontation with hospital staff, who prevented him being removed from the hospital, an incident which in recent days prompted protestors to gather outside the hospital, asserting that the hospital was unjustly imprisoning him.

I contend often that I have very few radical opinions, but one is this: we live in a nation of laws and of due process, and those laws should be respected.

Alfie Evans’ parents deserved to have their case heard; they had the right to make a legal and medical case that their child should be flown to Italy for treatment. They were unable to make a successful one, but that is not a travesty of justice. It is the law-abiding society we live in.

Similarly, a man was convicted this week in Scotland of posting a video which was “grossly offensive and contained menacing, antisemitic and racist material”, an offence which carried an £800 fine, in another case which those same far-right ideologues are claiming to be a symptom of a fundamentally broken society.

This was another case in which due process was followed, where a man had a chance to prove that a video in which the phrase “Gas the Jews” was said repeatedly was not as criminal as it seemed. This is, I would argue, something that everyone would find grossly offensive and undoubtedly anti-Semitic, but if the defendant wished to prove otherwise, then there was an opportunity for him to do so.

He ended up falling back on the argument that his opinions should not be literally illegal to express, which is not the law that currently applies in the United Kingdom, nor in any other European democracies, whose citizens do not seem any less free for the lack of an absolute freedom of speech.

The point of both these cases is not merely the media fallout — the far-right are using the stories for their own ends, but they would do that with a non-existent story if they wanted to.

The point is that, in both, the opinions of experts in the field were irrelevant. No matter how well-structured the twitter threads, or overwhelming the legal judgements, actual knowledge of the relevant facts and expertise in the field did not make the slightest difference.

This is the world that we live in in 2018: a toxic media and political culture divided into simplistic tribes, where Michael Gove’s dictum that “the British public is tired of experts” has become government policy, and we are confronted with an American President who does not read books and cannot construct sentences.

This rebellion against nuance and detail, in favour of a perspective that can be summed up in a tweet, serves only to embolden the worst of the human condition: the parts which refuse to change our minds based on evidence, that prefer to hate and fear anyone and anything we do not understand, that prefers confrontation to reconciliation, that valourise the ignorant opinion over the considered one, that prefer anger and hatred to love.

In particular, these worldviews embrace a narrow and petty nationalism which, undeserved or not, Stoke have come to embodify in the English football imagination. Journalists and fans alike have relished the idea that foreigners might not be able to cope with a windy night in Stoke, that there is one outpost of the football landscape playing Eighties hoofball and relying on being loud, cold and windy.

Never mind that their initial success was based on smart use of data and recruiting to outsmart richer contemporaries, or that their best team of the past nine seasons was when they took the ball down and played a bit.

If booing Aaron Ramsey because he suffered a horrific broken leg is what the people want, then that is what we must celebrate.

That is the kind of thinking that people like Paul Nuttall, who failed to be elected by the voters of Stoke last year having fraudulently claimed to have played professional football and to have lost friends in the Hillsborough disaster, might say: Stoke are good British football that foreigners don’t like, and more clubs should be like them.

Never mind that the facts do not back up that assertion.

We’re tired of experts, Brexit means Brexit, et cetera, et cetera, forever, screaming into an angry hate-filled void.

To support Liverpool, especially in the week in which a mother explained how much Mo Salah means to her Muslim family and Jurgen Klopp said that Brexit makes no sense and we should vote again now we know more about it, is counter-cultural.

It is to embrace a larger community, one which embraces different identities at its very core, whose diversity in religious and ethnic and social backgrounds has mever been anything other than something to be proud of.

It is the kind of community where a player suffering a bad injury pays tribute to the fan who suffered a worse one outside the stadium, who received tens of thousands of pounds in donations and had his name sung by all of Anfield.

The truth, as a famous Liverpool fan once said, resists simplicity.

The feeling that this Liverpool team gives me resists explanation.

I need to know that a complex and diverse team can be a success, and that a community that reaches across national boundaries, that relies on expertise and knowledge and not on existing prejudices, can be a force for good in the world.

To quote Jurgen: “History has always shown that when we stay together we can sort out problems. When we split then we start fighting. There was not one time in history where division creates success.”

This year, more that ever, has shown us that.

In 2018, I need to know that football generally, and Liverpool specifically can unite people across nations and continents and cultures.

I need to believe in what Liverpool Football Club can be at its best.

I need to hope, to believe, to dream.

I am lucky that this team has let me do it.