A few weeks back, Waterford United made much of the fact that they were holding the price of a season ticket at last season’s rate. “The Airtricity League First Division is expected to comprise 12 teams this season, which will mean 16 or 17 home matches” went the blurb.
Oh silly Blues! Did they not realise this was the FAI they were dealing with? The big reveal for the 2012 Airtricity First Division is that despite efforts to get Red Star Oughterard and FC United of Moycullen on board, there will be eight teams in the division for the new season. So the proposition that the season ticket represented great value for money, always a bit of stretch as it assumed you’d be in a position to go to all 16/17 games, has now completely gone down in flames. It’s like trying to fit a pint into a quart pot.
The worst part is the quality of the opposition. How are you meant to get the blood up at the prospect of meeting any of this lot four times a year? At least in previous seasons you had the likes of Derry City, Shelbourne and whatever flavour of stout was oozing out of Cork that wasn’t Guinness coming to the RSC. In 2012, the most exciting prospect is a notional derby with Mick Wallace’s crew. Liverpol v Manchester United it ain’t.
And you don’t even need to look cross-channel to see more exciting clashes. It’s conceivable that the matches between the Dublin heavyweights of Shamrock Rovers, Bohemians and St Patrick’s Athletic will generate more bums on seats than every game in the First Division combined. And thus the rich (relatively speaking) get richer and the poor get poorer, all so we can prop up the flawed concept of the two division League of Ireland.
No doubt some would argue this is a self-serving Blue trying to perform an end-run around Waterford’s repeated failure to get promoted, and there’d be some merit to that argument. But it isn’t just Waterford fans who must find it hard to get enthused by the fixture list. Would a potential Wexford Youth not be more energised if they knew Shamrock Rovers were coming to Ferrycarrig at least once a year? Is it not galling for Finn Harps fans to be trudging around the country, all the while passing Sligo and Derry but never getting to take a pit stop there? Won’t someone please think of the children?
I’m sure the First Division was started with the best of intentions, a reaction to the need to give meaning to dreary end-of-season games where there is no promotion or relegation. And I guess that problem will return in a one division League. But can anyone say that’s an inferior scenario to the current one, where a micro-league exists just to put the fear of God into those in the proper league that they might be banished from it? It’s time for the authorities to cut their losses on the First Division. Time to give every club a chance to sell a season ticket that’s worth buying.
No doubt it was meant to be ironic. In the week that saw the political incineration of the Blueshirts, the Déise boys treated us to the return of the Blueshorts. It’s not right. Watching the intermediates beforehand, knowing that the seniors were going to be wearing the same ensemble most famous for being hockeyed by 31 points in the 1982 Munster final, it wasn’t right. All due respect to Monaghan, but it’s simply not as aesthetically pleasing as the white shirt, white shorts, blue socks number. Blue shorts . . .
The era of darkness is over, ushering in the pure, White light. The blue shorts that Waterford have worn for the last ten years have never sat (pun unintended) well with me. It wasn’t ‘change’ that bothered me. When Bill Shankly decided to kit Liverpool out in red shorts for the first time in November 1964, it brought to end 68 years of tradition. But all the fans I have spoken to who were around at the time – both of them – were insistent that it was universally popular from the beginning. And besides, there was hardly anything official about the white shorts back in the day. I’m pretty sure that the reason everyone wore white shorts was because County Boards wouldn’t provide shorts for players, so white was the universal short colour. Seemingly timeless kits such as those of Down and Dublin in black/navy blue shorts are relatively recent inventions, lacking the lineage dating back to Brian Boru that so many zealots claim for everything GAA. My problem was that it looks aesthetically wrong, lacking the pristine splendor of the all-white kit. And, for some (probably Freudian) reason, it makes the players look a little Munchkin-like. All through the last decade, with all our undoubted success, it has never stopped bothering me.
So imagine my joy today then, to see the new kit being unveiled in WIT, the white overwhelming in its pearly brilliance. I’m sure Azzurri and the County Board were more motivated by a desire to justify the new shirt. We had to have a new one owing to the new shorts, eh? Never mind though. It looks great. Now all we need is Clann na Poblachta back in the Dáil and victory will be ours.
Why oh why do supporters of Waterford feel the need to look for a crisis where there are none? Michael Ryan’s first big decision as manager, leaving Eoin Kelly off the panel, has produced a predictable bout of angst. Ryan is flexing his muscles, it’s a publicity stunt, there has to be something more to it etc. We even had the bizarre sight of Damien Tiernan darkly suggesting that “there is more to the Eoin Kelly/ Waterford hurling management dispute than has been said”. Um, isn’t it your job to find out for us? A case for Prime Time Investigates, perhaps. Then again, given their record, we never know what might come out of that.
The truth seems straightforward, or at least people would want to have stronger evidence than a-feeling-in-me-waters to dispute Michael Ryan’s account, one that doesn’t seem to have been contradicted by Eoin Kelly. He was asked to discuss his lack of fitness and refused to do so, fully cogniscant of what that refusal meant. Please don’t take as a cut at Eoin Kelly, a suggestion that’s he’s lazy or feckless. God knows how much effort he put into turning himself into an inter-county quality free-taker, effort that no other player would have had to put in. This is clear evidence of his commitment to the Waterford cause throughout the years and his willingness to put in the hard yards. And there’s no obligation on him to put in any effort if he doesn’t want to. But there are consequences to rebuffing the manager. There have to be, and he knows it. Yet that still won’t stop people speaking on his behalf, because [sarcasm] he’s always been such a demur character up until now [/sarcasm]. Thank goodness we have the unsilent majority to speak up for him.
It’s almost as if we want to justify our failure to land the McCarthy Cup on the basis that there is too much feuding in the county rather than much more obvious sources such as bad luck (yeah, I’ve said it) or not being good enough. And the killing part is that these things become self-fulfilling prophecies. People post on the internet about the infighting in Waterford GAA that they’ve read about on the internet. We really need to give Michael Ryan some space. At least give him the chance to screw up before we start calling him a screw-up.
Liverpool FC never listen to me, and they are usually correct not to. Quite apart from the club being a multi-million pound enterprise with multi-millions of very opinionated fans all over the world, I’m the kind of guy who gets agitated if I don’t have a glass of milk to go with a bar of milk chocolate. Not the kind of person you’d turn to in a crisis. But if only one request of mine could be acted upon in all my life supporting the Reds, it would be this – please persuade Luis Suarez to drop any appeal against his eight-match ban for using racist language against Patrice Evra.
The club have stood behind Suarez up until now, and reading between the lines I think this is because Suarez has been privately quite vociferous at the way he has been treated. He didn’t think it was racist, he didn’t mean it to be racist and to accept the punishment would be to admit he is a racist. Reading Rodney Hinds in the Guardian’s Comment is Free relaying as fact Evra’s claim that Suarez used the term “at least 10 times” would be galling in the extreme for Suarez. Accepting as fact the account of a man whose evidence the FA dismissed as “exaggerated and unreliable . . . an attempt to justify a physical intervention by him which cannot reasonably be justified” when Man Utd made all manner of accusations against Chelsea’s ground staff after the post-match fracas at Stamford Bridge in 2008. Comments from Evra that he doesn’t think Suarez is racist are a case of shutting the stable door after the horse is bolted. Suarez will now be labelled a racist, and Evra’s attempts at who? me? will probably only add to Suarez’s feeling of victimisation.
And make no mistake – Suarez is being victimised. Like so many organisations the FA is happy to sign up to high-profile campaigns to eradicate racism, encouraging clubs to employ the Moses-like cadences of their local George Sefton to read out stirring denunciations of racism (“in all its forms”) at matches. But actually doing something practical about it is a lot harder. No-one wants to be the one who tars someone with the tag of ‘racist’, and that’s even before you consider their hysterical reluctance to antagonise potential English internationals, exemplified by their hiring of some of the finest products of the Old Bailey to appeal on Wayne Rooney’s behalf to Uefa.
To them, Suarez must have seemed like manna from heaven. While ‘El Pistolero’ seems like an engaging enough character in the few interviews I’ve seen with him, he isn’t a high-profile foreigner in the way that (say) Dietmar Hamann was during his life in England. There’s no danger of Luis putting down roots here and managing Stockport County. Then there’s his extended reputation. This is the man who once bit an opponent. This is the man who not only handled a goal-bound effort in the last-minute of the World Cup quarter-final against Ghana, but – gasp! – was unrepentant about it afterwards, thus reinforcing the image of the sly, pinch-the-lace-from-the-ball South American. There was no way the FA were going to let an opportunity like this slide to be Tough On Racism, and be seen to be Tough On Racism. To understand the depths of the cynicism, you only need to look at how they made sure Gordon Taylor was onside (how else to explain the delay over the weekend if not to get soundings from interested parties?) before they announced Suarez’s punishment – the same Gordon Taylor who in 1994 said, of England’s Brave Stuart Pearce’s alleged racist abuse of Paul Ince, that it was ”in the heat of the moment . . . Stuart regrets what he said, and he’ll be ringing Paul to apologise. Hopefully that will be the end of it.” Times change – but not so much that Johnny Foreigner doesn’t get the blame.
And yet, while sympathising with the plight of Luis Suarez, the overriding advice to the club remains the same: please persuade Luis Suarez to drop any appeal against his eight-match ban for using racist language against Patrice Evra. For a start, the chances of winning the appeal are practically nil. The FA is not like the criminal justice system with its notions of habeas corpus or reasonable doubt. It’s like a gentleman’s club where you sign up and agree to adhere to the rules, even if some of those rules permit you to be royally screwed. Take the charge of “bringing the game into disrepute”. It ultimately means “anything we bloody well like” and the FA have used it in that manner since the year dot. But even if they abuse that rule or apply other ones in a scattergun fashion, that doesn’t change the fact that they are following their own rules. Remember when Sheffield United objected to the punishment meted out on West Ham United over the illegal contract arrangements they had for Javier Mascherano and Carlos Tevez? Every effort by the Blades to get a meaningful punishment, i.e. a points deduction, foundered on the fact that the FA had followed their own procedures. The same will apply to Suarez. He was charged with using racial language, he was convicted of using racial language. End of. Any attempt to claim otherwise will have to overcome the fact of him, well, admitting he used language that could be construed as racist and is only going to be seen as being a nuisance appeal.
But even if we ignore the kind of narrow legalese that keep QC’s in the cocaine-powdered wigs to which they are accustomed, you have to ask what the FA were meant to have done. As soon as it became clear that something was said, every eye belonging to those in (for want of a less pejorative term) the racism industry was turned on the FA. It’s all very well putting up hoardings and having high-profile players hosting training sessions in disadvantaged areas, but here was a high-profile player for one of the heaviest hitters in the world using dodgy language. Chris Rock once expressed regret that he had laden one of his acts with the ‘N’ word as he came to realise that people would point to his use of it as an excuse for their own use of it. You can be certain that if the FA had given Suarez a free pass the FA would be accused of introducing the thin end of the wedge. The next person who was charged with using dodgy language would say “well, you let Suarez off and what I said wasn’t that different to what he said”. It wouldn’t matter if this was hypothetical. The FA would still have to face the accusation, and it wasn’t unreasonable on their part to decide that it was better to err on the side of making a harsh example of one person rather than having to defend themselves for setting a lenient example down the line.
Now let’s look at the reaction of Liverpool FC. I’m fairly certain that the rush to defend Suarez is less motivated by naked partisanship – our player, right or wrong – than genuine sympathy for a man who feels he has been wronged. But if ever there was a case for ruthlessly applying the notion that no man is bigger than the club, this is it. There has to be a point past which defending Suarez becomes counter-productive. We are heading down a road where any attempt to cast the FA as the villains will become increasingly problematic. In fact, the longer it goes on the more the FA will be tempted to cast themselves as standing up to racism in all its forms, a line of attack which will lead Liverpool to use the mantra about we being against all forms of racism too BUT . . . the ‘but’ will get more and more hollow with each invocation. Do Liverpool want to be that guy, the one who has many black friends BUT . . .?
Some will say that’s not the point, that an injustice is an injustice no matter who it is meted out to. If you truly believe that then I suggest you give up following football and become an activist for Amnesty International. I’m proud of the fact that I’ve managed to get this far without mentioning John Terry, and I’m not going to mention how much worse his comments would be if he is proven to have said them and how the FA must be praying the problem just goes away – mentioning them there doesn’t count as a ‘mention’. And the only reason I’ll mention him is to ask people to be honest: you’re delighted Mongo is experiencing such discomfort and you hope the sobbing sap is nailed to the wall by the CPS or the FA or the PFJ or whomever it takes. For double honesty points which you can cash in against any future stay in Purgatory, admit that you’d feel none of the above if he played for Liverpool and would be holding a metaphorical pillow over your head going lalalalala every time you hear about the accusations. In short, you can believe that Suarez has been hard done by without having to think it is essential for the club to devote all its credibility to his defence. If that means he flounces off to the continent because we wouldn’t back him every step of the way, then so be it. No man is bigger etc.
Perhaps (hopefully) the conversation has been had behind the scenes. We’ll defend you thus far, Luis, but there has to be a point where we cut our losses. It’s painful, but people will forget. When you see Jan Molby, do you see the fat Dane with the Scouse accent and the brilliant passing ability, or do you see the man who did six weeks of porridge for drink-driving? People’s memories for bad stuff among their idols has the life expectancy of a Wayne Rooney follicle. John Terry’s travails will soon swamp the headlines. We’ll stand by you. But we won’t go over the cliff with you. It’s make-up-your-mind time. For both player and club.
Having found myself with some time on my hands recently, I vowed to review most/all of the Waterford GAA books that have come out in recent times. Alas – not that there’s anything ‘alas’ about it, if you catch my drift – my circumstances have changed to the point where the time available for reading has diminished significantly.
This is a good thing, and not just because of the obvious reason. It was with a sense of dread that I surveyed some of the books. I don’t want to be vicious to people pouring their hearts out on paper, but if a book is cack then it’s the duty of the reviewer (sez he, donning his pomposity hat) to say it’s cack. Worse still, it would have been tempting to compare them to the first – and, by the looks of it, last – book I read, David Smith’s marvellous study of John Keane.
It’s the book that keeps on giving, as I found out when discussing locating his grave in Tramore with my father and brother. Not only did I find out that John Keane and my grandmother were on first-name terms, Keane being a regular visitor to the house to check up on my uncle in Keane’s role as a Waterford selector in the late 1950′s. I also found out that the tickle in my memory regarding the Jack Flavin mentioned regularly throughout the book in his capacity as chairman of Mount Sion was correct, i.e. that the man who was even more Mr Mount Sion than Pat Fanning was my mother’s next-door neighbour!
One of the battier thoughts I had during my Luvvie Darling-like period of rest was to write a book on the history of Waterford GAA – if Kilmacow GAA can lend itself to the Senan Cooke-penned doorstop that I saw every day while doing research in Waterford library, then why not our entire county? It’s not going to happen for me this time around, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a gap in the market. Knowing Jack Flavin is gone, resting at a point roughly equidistant between my grandmother and John Keane in Tramore, and that my uncle who knew them all so intimately has been ravaged by the cigarette curse that took Keane so heartbreakingly early, it seems urgent that someone do this before the memories of a pre-digital era are lost forever. Will no-one step forth to perform this task for their county?
(Image: the 172 pupils of De La Salle College when it opened on 4th September 1949. My uncle Billy Shanahan – no relation to Dan or Maurice – is no 23, middle of second row from the front. The late John Barron of the 1959 All-Ireland winners is no 81, second last from left to right in row five.)
The recent revelation, dissected by Shane Stapleton here, that Antrim had to race around the parish county kicking people out of bed to field an Under-21 team, should lead to a lot of hand-wringing about the championship – and that’s even before you consider the beating that the Glensmen took, a cringeworthy 32nd defeat at this stage, two of them against Waterford. Much and all as I like to whale on Antrim and their sense of entitlement, in this case the problem can be laid squarely at the door of the competition itself.
There must have been something in the water at one of the Congresses in the early 1960′s as both the inter-county Club and the Under-21 championships began in 1964. And both, in what must be a coincidence, have remained mostly impervious to tinkering with the format, the introduction of an All-Ireland series in the early 1970′s in the Club championship and a change in the way semi-final line-ups were decided in the early 1990′s in the Under-21 championship (something we’ll come back to in a moment) being the only obvious changes to the way each one works.
Of the two, it is the Club championship that has the air of something that, if it didn’t exist, you’d have to invent it. It slots neatly into the fallow winter period when there’s not much else on in the GAA, doesn’t put an annual imposition on each team (with the exception of Crossmaglen Rangers) and now that the Railway Cup is effectively no more the Club title has found an iconic place for itself in the GAA calendar. With all that in mind, it’s amazing no-one thought of it earlier. Oh hang on, they did – right at the birth of the Association, when clubs represented counties. Maybe Thurles Sarsfields should ask for their 1887 triumph to be added to the All-Ireland Club role of honour.
The Under-21 championship, on the other hand, has no such claim to obviousness. There was already a perfectly decent underage competition, the Minor championship dovetailing neatly with rhyme and rhythm of its Senior counterpart. It doesn’t have any obvious place in the calendar, the neat solution in football of running it before the Seniors swing into action not being advisable in hurling with its requirement for drier pitches. Then there’s that format. The age-old problem of teams like Waterford putting in the hard yards on the training pitch only to be mown down in their first match persists in the Under-21. And at one stage in the 1990′s we had the utterly ludicrous situation where the champions of Munster and Leinster met every third year, effectively giving Galway a bye into the final – how many matches have Antrim lost in the history of the competition again? The ludicrousness of that situation was in no way compounded by Waterford being stuffed by Kilkenny in the 1994 semi-final. Such a suggestion would be, uh, ludicrous.
Yet the Under-21 championship has one thing going for it – so many of the matches are utterly brilliant. Thanks to TG4, those of us who are not in the habit of traipsing up the country to see teams other than Waterford (or, to be truthful, even to see them – I’ve been to a total of three Under-21 matches) can now see the games as a matter of routine, and they rarely let you down. Losing to Clare in the 2009 Munster final was disappointing, of course. But it was heartwarming to see the joy on the faces of Clare supporters as they landed the Munster title after twelve defeats in their previous twelve final appearances. Although not as heartwarming as the simple displays of congratulations offered by so many of the Waterford supporters that evening. The hatchets of 1998 were well and truly buried that evening thanks to a competition that is important – but not that important.
Then there was this year’s Munster final between Limerick and Cork. It was breathtaking, two teams going at it hammer-and-tongs like two prize-fighters where victory would only be declared to the last man standing rather than who was ahead on points at the end. Two things came together to make it such a classic, and they both run through the competition as a whole. You have two teams of players who have the vigour of youth but are all shaving at this stage. With the best will in the world, Minor teams do sometimes look minor enough to be banned from Gary Glitter contests. Then there’s the despair-inducing one-defeat-and-you’re-out system. Despite being a long-standing advocate of the back door, I’m not labouring under the delusion that nothing has been lost with its introduction. The relief that you won’t be out if you lose your first game is tempered by the knowledge that if you win the other lot are still in it. Beating Cork or Tipperary just isn’t the same these days, unless it’s in Croke Park. And that dreadful dichotomy lives on in the Under-21 championship. Long may it continue to beguile and bewitch us with its promise.
One final thought. Louis Van Gaal, when asked whether winning the 1995 European Cup was the highlight of his career. He said that the first time was always the best, so winning the Uefa Cup in 1992 was sweeter. And for me, the Under-21 championship will always be the first.
It’s been a while since I held forth on the subject of Waterford United. Supporting the Blues is still a work in progress, and only attending two matches last season (I saw the Reds as often in the 2010/11 season) tells you there’s a lot of progress to be made.
The main lesson from the League of Ireland season just passed was the impossible wicket that the Blues find themselves batting on. Limerick is a notorious problem for the LoI, the ‘franchise’ – Limerick United, Limerick City, Limerick 37, Limerick Foras Co-op (okay, the last one is completely silly) – lurching from one crisis and venue to the next. When playing Limerick in 2010, there was a piece in the match day programme from one Gary Spain. Quite apart from a name that is curiously close to the ‘Gspain’ who once stank out the GAA Discussion Board with his virulent brand of GAA-bashing, what struck me was his reference to both the Market Field and Rathbane as being “the spiritual home of Limerick football”. That’s enough spirit to get you drunk. During the 1980′s Rathbane was famously the grottiest venue in Irish sport – yea, even worse than Walsh Park! Yet here was a Limerick supporter being nostalgic about it, which makes you wonder just how bad Jackman Park is.
Yet despite this Limerick, managed by a LoI heavyweight in Pat Scully, played Waterford off the park. Speaking to my Blue Ultra friend about how this could be, I got a predictable response: JP McManus is in da house. Typical. He can’t win the All-Ireland with Limerick, so winning the League of Ireland will have to suffice. And given the state of domestic soccer, he’ll probably be able to do it on the cheap. How are the Blues meant to be able to compete with that?
No, really. That’s not a rhetorical question. How are the Blues meant to be able to compete with that? When I started out following the Blues in the 21st century, I promised myself that I would give them loyalty if they behaved themselves, i.e. didn’t try to buy success in the manner of someone like Drogheda United. But for a club with a long and illustrious history like Waterford, it’s galling to see teams like Monaghan United getting the chance to mix it with the big boys. Factor in the extra gall of always seeming to find equilibrium at the point just below where they can get into the Premier Division – had the promotion/relegation setup in 2011 applied in 2010, we would have been promoted – and it becomes increasingly difficult to justify pouring your hard-earned yoyos into the Blue money pit.
Yet it is precisely because no-one is willing to put their money down that the Blues are in the pit. As a peer of mine, you wouldn’t expect Mr Ultra to have any memories of happy times following Waterford. So imagine my shock when he said that a decade ago they were routinely getting crowds of 2,000 at games. Crowds like that won’t buy you the League, but they would ensure that the likes of Kevin Murray wouldn’t be lost to our fiercest rivals. You can’t seriously lose a player of his quality – or Graham Cummins or Alan Carey, both also lost to the Cawkies – and expect to keep pace with them. And what I said earlier about not going down the route of Drogheda United – or Shamrock Rovers or Shelbourne or Longford Town or Cork City or Bohemians, all clubs who suffered from Icarus syndrome – still applies. If the League of Ireland is to be taken seriously, it can’t have clubs going bankrupt on a regular basis. In the end, growth has to be organic or there should be no growth at all.
And that means it is down to the plain people of Waterford, the lost 1,500, to get off their arses. This isn’t about giving Paul O’Brien (or whoever) megabucks with which to sign players. It’s about giving him the wage power to be able to hold onto the players he’s got, to be able to establish an affinity with these players rather than seeing them sod off to Leeside at the first available opportunity – and, it has to be said, who can blame them? Ultimately the leap of faith must come collectively from muintir na nDéise. Nothing else will suffice.
Now, this may come across as being a wee bit smart from someone who only attended two matches last season. And that would be correct. In my defence, regular late shifts at my previous employers made it hard to get to the RSC on a regular basis, and when a chance did arise Friday nights at home seemed infinitely more precious. However, my new employers operate more civilised work patterns. And they are even based in Ballytruckle. So there’s no excuses for me. Come the new season I will be there. And if a GAA-head like myself can do it, then there’s no excuses for anyone else.
This website may have previously given the impression that Mr Willie Barrett of Tipperary was an incompetent match official possessing the visual infirmity of Mr Magoo, the backbone of SpongeBob SquarePants and the prejudice towards all things Waterford of Phil Hogan. We now wish to acknowledge that Mr Barrett is in reality one of the greatest heroes on Irish life, a Titan bestriding our land dispensing justice, virtue and self-sacrifice to all he encounters. We regret any previous impression to the contrary.
During the warm-up before Ballygunner’s recent defeat to Na Piarsaigh, there was some manner of pow-wow on the sidelines. A desk, the like of which you usually see used by the staff at polling stations, was set up on the sidelines and . . . not much really happened that I could see. Perhaps it’s a Munster Council requirement like the need to buy your ticket from a van rather than paying at the turnstile. What it was for is not important. What was noteworthy was the presence of Willie Barrett alongside it.
Talk about bringing back memories. It helps that Willie hasn’t aged a day since the fateful time when he came into my consciousness – although it might be an idea to ease up on the Grecian 2000.
And seeing him at Walsh Park Sunday week last, the memories were overwhelmingly filled with guilt. It’s not an exaggeration to say that in the aftermath of the 1998 Munster final he was slandered by almost everyone in County Waterford. He would have been quite within his rights to tell the GAA world to stick their bias and bitterness where the sun don’t shine. And even if he took those low verbal blows in his stride, surely being given a physical beating on the hurling field should have been the last straw.
Yet there he was at Walsh Park on a clammy November afternoon, giving up his day for the GAA. It goes without saying that the association couldn’t function without the likes of Willie Barrett. But sometimes it needs to be said. So Willie, should you happen upon this (avid reader that you are), I’d like to say sorry for the vicious thoughts that I myself harboured towards you during that long hot summer. Long may you continue to be a visible reminder of my embarrassment.
The date was 2 May 2004. I found myself outside Anfield before a match without a ticket. For various reasons – it was only Middlesbrough, it was the tail-end of a less-than-stellar season (Gerard Houllier would be sacked a couple of weeks later), the money I was contemplating spending looked more useful going on my impending nuptials – getting inside the ground didn’t seem to be the most pressing matter in life. Yeah, I know, what a part-timer. Emboldened by this knowledge, I waited until a few minutes before kick-off then asked a tout, easily identifiable by their Uriah Heep-like demeanour (NB not really), how much a ticket would cost. “£45″, came the reply from the servile lick-spittle (NB not really). “Forget it,” I instantly declaimed, puffing my chest out in the manner of a cartoon astronaut (NB not rea . . . okay, you catch my drift). “Face value or nothing”. The tout knew the score. £25 changed hands and mere moments later I was in the Kop having triumphantly stuck it to The Man.
The incident contained a few valuable lessons. For a start, my triumph was not quite as Caesar-like as I first imagined. The couple sitting beside me asked what I’d paid for the ticket. It seemed their son had had to cry off at the last minute and they’d sold the ticket at the ridiculously knockdown price of £15, so the tout had still made a decent profit on the transaction. Still, it taught me that touts, a species that hitherto I had considered to lie somewhere between Evertonians and amoebas on the food chain, can serve a useful function. With the best will in the world there are going to be circumstances where someone ends up with a ticket that they don’t need. In this case the couple were refreshingly realistic about what had gone down. They were happy to take the hit on their ticket to save themselves the grief of hawking it around Anfield. So while I still think the tenth level of Hell is reserved for telemarketers and those selling a ticket for above face value, it was handy to know that someone shorn of the desperation of the day-tripper could pick up a ticket for face value by waiting until a few minutes before kick-off.
Or so I thought. Because on 5 November 2011 when Liverpool took on the might of Swansea City it became clear that the world had changed. Having circled the ground enough times to leave a trench for future archaeologists to inaccurately speculate over and having three touts say they had nothing, one finally offered me a ticket for £150. 150 knicker! Five minutes after the match had kicked off! For Swansea City! Mrs d was in the ground with a season ticket that on a per-unit basis cost one-fifth of that! All of the above was rammed into the derisive “No!” that greeted such a preposterous offer. Ten minutes later the price had dropped to 60 notes. This was haughtily spurned as well, and in the end I was able to console myself with finding out that Stanley Park was nice at this time of year and not paying anything at all for the dross that followed.
150 quid! The truly astonishing thing is contemplating how much the touts must have been charging for tickets a couple of hours before kick-off to some pitiful day-tripper who had travelled from far, far away in the hope of gaining access to the Holy of Holies – and yes, I realise that strictly speaking I was day-tripping myself, but I know there’ll be other opportunities in the near future. Anyone who has come from anywhere which involved travelling across Runcorn bridge – happy birthday, bridge! – or didn’t go along the M62 would be tempted by those crazy prices rather than endure a wasted trip. And a lot of people will have come from a lot further away than that . . .
This is the point at which articles about touts and ticket prices veer off into the won’t-someone-think-of-the-children territory, but we’ll leave that for another day. Besides, it’d be a bit cheeky to bemoan touts having tried to use them myself. If the club can’t come up with a proper system for keeping tickets out of the wrong hands – wasn’t that what the Fan Cards were meant to do? – then it’s inevitable that a secondary market is going to emerge, and it’s up to the individual to not tout their ticket rather than expect touts to go all Francis of Assisi on us. No, what really struck home about the prices being demanded is the staggering potential of the brand that is Liverpool FC.
I realise that using terms like ‘the brand’ when it comes to a football club is anathema to most, the domain of ponytail and red brace-wearing ponces. But language is not neutral, and there’s no better term for explaining the value that lurks beneath the football club, the football club itself being [sickbag] like a mother’s love – priceless [/sickbag]. And it is that simmering Vesuvius of money-making potential that moved Ian Ayre to speculate recently on the merits of breaking up the cartel that is the Premier League’s collective bargaining deal with Sky. It’s often forgotten in the rush to pound the naked capitalism of the Dirty Digger – and throughout the ongoing phone-hacking scandal, few people have enjoyed News International’s discomfort more than myself – that the deal with Sky is a long way from naked capitalism. If a regular market consisted of twenty companies ganging together and selling their product exclusively on a five-year contract and splitting the proceeds amongst themselves, they’d be broken up faster than you could say Milly Dowler. When small clubs like Bolton and Everton (snigger) routinely bleat that they can’t compete with the moneybags clubs, they conveniently forget that there are far more brutal business models out there, ones that fit in much better with the anti-monopoly laws of the UK and the EU. Spain is the classic example, where each club flogs their wares individually. All the money inevitably flows to the duopoly that is Real Madrid and Barcelona. And it’s not hard to see something like that happening to Liverpool should we be released from the Bolshevik shackles of the collective Premier League deal.
Just think of it. Liverpool can sustain a business model where people are willing to pay hundreds of pounds for a ticket to see them play Swansea City. And this is despite over twenty years of mediocrity (with one shining exception, of course). There was a joke doing the rounds after the recent Manchester derby that Citeh fans hadn’t seen their team give Man Ure a five-goal beating since Chelsea did it a few years back. It’s a gag that would be often be re-tooled to dismiss glory-hunting Liverpool fans. Yet that would be to ignore that a whole generation of Liverpool fans around the globe have adopted the Reds as their club despite a distinct lack of success. We are a leviathan, and the Lilliputians are holding us back. The sooner we cast off their pathetic threads, the better.
And yet . . . Ian Ayre invoked the need to be released from said constraints by the need to be competitive in Europe. This makes sense. The long-run revenue projections of Madrid and Barca must dwarf those of any team in the Premier League – Man City are an obvious exception, but if Uefa succeed in making those rules on expenditure needing to be a percentage of turnover stick then they’re going to hit the skids soon enough. But is that how Liverpool really want to be competitive? We’ve shown we can cut it in Europe. Even at a relatively iffy period in that season we played them we swatted Madrid aside and have come out ahead in our various jousts with Barca over the years. The problem is that we can’t compete in England. Throwing out collective bargaining will benefit other teams too, Man Utd and Arsenal in particular. So while we may have fewer worries about playing Swansea, so would the other leviathans in England. All other things being equal we’d be no better off. In fact, the sense of anguish at repeatedly coming up short would be even more acute.
And besides, do we really want to be That Team? The ones who snuffed out any lingering dreams that a Nottingham Forest or a Leeds United could aspire to charge through the divisions to the very summit? My heart says yes: screw every last one of them against the wall, LFC comes first every time. My head says no: you’d be reducing the top flight to a La Liga-style farce against a succession of embittered teams without any guarantee that it would give us the success we crave. What’s the solution to that conundrum? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. . .
