‘You’re a Liverpool fan are you?’
‘A tortured Liverpool fan.’
You know how you can tell the Liverpool fans from the tortured Liverpool fans?
If you were biting your nails when the Reds were leading 5-2 at home against Roma in the first leg of a Champions League semi-final, you’re most definitely a tortured Liverpool fan, and in some respects it can be hard to blame you.
Liverpool are the only team in the last decade to not win the Premier League title after leading at Christmas so the nail biters can be afforded some slack here. There’s a track record of misery.
Liverpool fans are frequent visitors to the Heartbreak Hotel with their last check-in recorded in May, 2018, after their Champions League final loss to Real Madrid.
Like most sports fans, they have suffered different levels of agony and ecstasy but they’re not alone.
In baseball, the Boston Red Sox were cursed for decades and now they have won four titles in the last 15 years.
Dublin went 16 years without winning an All-Ireland and now they’re so accustomed to winning them that they can’t sell out an All-Ireland semi-final with one of the best teams Gaelic Football has ever seen.
The Chicago Cubs went 108 years without a World Series win but they got there eventually. Liverpool might finally win a Premier League title and Leeds United may finally get back to the Premier League after years of turmoil and toiling away in the lower leagues of English football.
Sport works in cycles, there’s good times and there’s bad times, and if you watch enough of it you’ll experience both agony and ecstasy, sometimes in the same night.
My housemate is a Liverpool fan, the tortured kind, and he ran around our house recently after the Merseyside derby screaming for Divock Origi only minutes after slating him.
‘City bring on Gabriel Jesus, United can call on Lukaku and we’re bringing on Divock ‘f**king’ Origi! What are we doing?’.
King Divock, as he was soon to be known, was being shouted around north Dublin only a shortwhile later. He’s entered the Shane Long category for many fans. Defensible in the face of all criticism.
‘Ahh yeah I know he is all that, but do you remember when he scored that goal against _______’.
This is what sports fandom is. Defending a player for a goal he scored four years ago or immortalising an average player like Will Grigg for years to come in song because he fits a catchy tune.
It’s illogical, irrational, at times makes no sense whatsoever, but fans aren’t always held to the same standards as pundits or journalists.
I’ve a friend that will go to the grave with a conviction that Munster winger Keith Earls is overrated.
Making the Lions squad at 21, catching Johnny Sexton’s crosskick prior to his match winning drop goal in Paris last year, his Rugby Players Ireland Player’s Player of the Year award last season have all been highlighted on multiple occasions but have no relevance to him, in his mind Earls was at fault for three tries when he went to watch him play in a match a few years ago.
What can you do?
Earls’ perceived shortcomings that day stuck with him, like Long’s goal against Germany or Jason McAteer’s strike against Holland can stick with many others for many other reasons, and it’s ultimately what sticks with us when we reflect on our matchday experiences.
Istanbul 2005, cork winning ‘99 all Ireland … besting Holland in lansdowne https://t.co/92yE6BQmZI
— Kevin D Murphy (@KevinMurphyIE) January 22, 2019
Worst gut wrenching loss you've ever experienced as a sports fan?
— Peter Burns (@PeterBurnsESPN) January 21, 2019
These two questions have done the rounds across social media on Tuesday, as has Dick Clerkin’s unbelievable assertion that eight-year-old’s should be left at home on All-Ireland final day, and for many of us we experience the joy and the agony from an early age.
The earliest sporting picture I have is of my dad dressing me up in a Dublin jersey with a big smile on my face.
We’re from Meath but it was his insistence that we wouldn’t ‘grow up and support the culchies’.
His efforts lasted a few years before they naturally subsided but growing up in Meath in the late 1990’s we were exposed to some of Sean Boylan’s great All-Ireland winning sides.
They were good times but I still have an irrational fury towards the 2001 Meath side for having the nerve to lose to Galway in an All-Ireland final.
To this day I can’t recall the score, who played well and who didn’t play well, who was at fault, I was too young, but I do remember the pain when they lost and subconsciously I don’t think I’ve forgiven them since. Sorry Meath.
Sports fandom begins around that stage and it never leaves.
My friend’s granddad is a Dublin hurling fan and he cried when they beat Galway to win the Leinster championship in 2013, the first time since 1961.
This man was in his elder years and apparently wailed like a child after waiting 52 years to see the Jacks win a provincial championship again.
The beauty of sport and following sport is that we rarely go through any of this alone.
In my experience, you remember the fun you had on 12 hour drive from Brisbane to Sydney to watch the Lions beat Australia in the third Test of their tour and you also remember repeatedly refreshing your phone because you thought something was wrong with it when you read ‘Half-time: Ireland 19-0 New Zealand’.
Walking in the door to see Ryan Crotty cross in the corner to deny Ireland their first ever win over New Zealand was akin to walking in on the ‘we’re selling the house and moving’ conversation at home.
It had the same sort of tension in the air.
Ultimately, sport is the experience. It’s the tea and sandwiches. Sausage and chips. The walk down Jones’ Road on a day that means something. Watching a Scottish fan rescue a football from a balcony and lift it up like it was the World Cup itself (as close as they’ll ever get). Watching Irish fans serenade a nun on a train at the Euro’s.
Having it in for one player for no apparent reason and equally defending another for some sentimental reason you felt when he or she did something good one day.
It’s big business, it can be used to legitimise horrible regimes in places as far as Abu Dhabi and Qatar, it can be corrupt, dodgy, miserable and all kinds of stupid, but for most of us it’s just a day out with our friends and family and the wins are only great because the losses are hard to swallow.
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