Red Letters / November 29 2019: Fly Liverpool fly, and feeling concerned, hopeful, optimistic and thankful

LFC Stories: The latest instalment of our Red Letters series as the duo discuss the win over Crystal Palace, Napoli and watching the Reds from the air

Welcome to Red Letters.

Football, soccer, is a truly global game. It is also a game which means so much more than 22 players on the pitch and the two managers in the dugout. For 90 minutes at a time, this is what matters most, but surrounding that is culture, identity, and relationships.

To be a part of a club can often mean to be part of a family, a kinship, which only a small percentage in this world can experience. On the field, the collective and the individual combine to bring success. The same happens with supporters. It is a true collective game, where it is easy to feel as one with thousands of others; it is also individual, where the emotions you feel are your emotions, the experiences you feel are your experiences, and nobody else can understand.

Over the course of the 2019/20 season, two Liverpool fans, friends, will write to each other about those emotions and experiences. Michael MacCambridge, born, raised and living in the United States, is a best-selling author and journalist. Most importantly, he is a Liverpool fan, and can often be found watching the games at his local supporters' club.

His friend Neil Atkinson, born, raised and living in Liverpool, is the host of worldwide podcast phenomenon The Anfield Wrap. He, too, supports Liverpool, and has been a season ticket holder for 20 years.

Separated by the Atlantic Ocean, but brought together by a passion much stronger, this is their correspondence throughout the campaign, as they share their highs, lows, hopes and fears around Liverpool FC on a regular basis, as well as what it is to simply be part of their community following Jurgen Klopp and his side. 

We are fortunate enough to have access to everything they write. We hope you enjoy.

Best,

LFC Stories.

Previous editions: November 22 / November 15 / November 8 / November 1 / October 25 / October 18 / October 12 / October 4 / September 27 / September 25 / September 20 / September 13 / September 6 / August 30 / August 22 / August 16 / August 14 / August 9 / August 2

******

Red Letters

28 November 2019

Hi Michael,

Happy Thanksgiving! Hope you have a good one. I am pleased to be back working. A change has indeed been as good as a rest.

Let’s go back to Seoul - we board the flight and I am checking out the price of wi-fi and what you get for it and it gets throttled quickly. I spend the first five hours of the flight contemplating my options but then find there is a live television streaming service from Sport 24 in Germany. It is showing golf. But then it screens Tottenham against West Ham - I see that on someone else’s screen. Suddenly I flick back through to see that Spurs lead 1-3.

Then they put the Crystal Palace and Liverpool team up at 2pm UK time. But no one else’s. This has my attention. Then it is confirmed - they will have Palace/Liverpool.

It would be fair to describe me as overcome. It is practically a miracle as far as I am concerned. A miracle of planning and a miracle of science. How do they do it? I cannot imagine. What a thing, what a time to be alive. They have it as part of a goal rush style presentation. Our game kicks off and it is x:00; the minute hand suggesting that the stream isn’t wildly out. The picture is good. And Liverpool put Palace under early pressure.

This is a significant win on personal level under the circumstances, going from no way to watch the game to it being streamed, a match Liverpool need to win as is always the case. But my brain can’t stop thinking this: How is it easier to watch a 3pm Premier League game via a German station on a flight going from Seoul to Frankfurt than watching said game in Liverpool? How have we let this become a thing? There is a level of sheer ridiculousness which is off the charts. The irony was staggering.

There is a prosaic answer here - that the 3pm blackout exists. But it just can’t be right that live footage can be viewed over international waters. The 3pm blackout has been a major problem this year. There are distinctly fewer bars showcasing the 3pm than there used to be and that is a massive blow.

It’s fast becoming increasingly daft. Fanbases in this country have hundreds of thousands of supporters being blocked from watching their side out of a desire to protect gates in non- and lower-league football. For most clubs there will be more supporters who can’t get to grounds watching the match at home than those in the ground themselves. But the blackout is all powerful. There isn’t a lot of proof for the idea that all this works, that protecting live football in person is getting more people going to games. It feels intuitively good but that is no pathway home. Currently - and for 10 years - games can be streamed relatively easily to private homes and attendances are what they are. There hasn’t been a massive deviation in activity from football supporters.

In your country you can watch any Premier League game you can get out of bed for. That just is not an option here. That situation may change - Amazon getting involved in the market could shift that - but let’s be honest here, these are not knights on white horses saving the day. Instead there is a diversification of providers of Premier League football but still the 3pms are unavailable. In adding Amazon we are onto our third provider of the season - fourth if you count the BBC. The expense spirals for the supporter. We hear a lot about the money spent by the match going fan but less about the cost from the armchair supporter.

That is sort of right - supporting is an action, not just a word but many supporters are blocked from going to matches by virtue of games being a sellout and not having the connections others do. Supporters participate in the contest, creating mood music for either side to have to be able to work through. But the armchair supporter now financially props up the programming of Sky or BT or any other third party who emerge and by extension is part of propping up entire football clubs though the television money. But he or she cannot even begin to move the nature of a match, can’t start a chant or barrack a referee. The wants and needs of this type of fan is totally different to that of the supporter who attends.

There is a dark sea change at the centre of all this - that a television subscriber could be more important for clubs in enough numbers than anyone paying through the gate. This strikes at the very nature of the sport as it has always been but it is true to say that television tends to vastly outstrip gate receipts, certainly for top flight clubs. Where this goes on to take the sport is only really now beginning to be engaged with, especially at a worldwide level. There are no easy answers here.

The 3pm blackout does sustain an element of nostalgia and god knows it may be doing its job. But increasingly a solution that may eventually be hit upon could well be that no Premier League games kick off between 2pm and 5:15pm, that the league gives that ground over to the lower divisions but screens every game that weekend live, albeit spread out from 12noon on the Saturday until 8pm, add Sundays in there and suddenly there would be a way around the controversy which respects the lower league clubs.

Regardless, watching the 3pms at a cruising altitude was almost deeply comic, entirely unnecessary, watching our game unfold knowing this was practically impossible on my road and illegal in the bars but easy as anything here felt like a metaphor for something. Liverpool scoring another late winner as the refreshment trolley came back even better. Finally, seeing the German goal rush programme show me Norwich’s second against crisis hit Everton was a cherry on top.

•

The game itself was nowhere near as fun as you’d hope especially given its serendipitous emergence into the world. Nor was the Napoli match. Liverpool are suddenly a bit short of brio, of swashbuckling. The nature of the games didn’t give a lot of room to buckle some swash being fair and not just castigating Liverpool but at the moment this is a Liverpool side that looks so determined to win the right to play it occasionally forgets to play once it is won.

But it sits with its Champions League qualification in its own hands and with P13 W12 D1. So we do have to be careful not to have our mild criticisms be churlish rather than constructive.

We still aren’t entirely contextualising just how difficult Liverpool’s first 13 league games have been. They have had all of last season’s top six and Leicester plus difficult games at recently promoted sides. It hasn’t be any way plain sailing.

And this cannot be the time for complacency. It would though be lovely for a period of Liverpool putting clear blue water between themselves and the football match. It is crazy how long it has been since there was a clean sheet. Everything is grafted for all the time and yet the solidity doesn’t seem quite there either. I do think Liverpool have been more unfortunate than incompetent but now is the time to change matters, a run of fixtures to truly help rebalance matters.

Both Crystal Palace and Napoli have had plans to get at Liverpool. Being fair to Hodgson, Napoli clearly had the better players to sustain through the game. But it may just be Liverpool felt the Crystal Palace game (and Brighton) was a bit more must win. The selection against Napoli certainly suggests that may be the case. This seems nervier to me - Salzburg will relish one big day in the sun. They showed at Anfield what they could do and they will want to push Liverpool as hard as they can.

It suddenly occurred to me at Napoli that there isn’t the same breadth of competitions really in American sports is there? Or such a thing as an aggregated scoreline? Have I missed something? Could it catch on?

•

In terms of that, part of that chain of thought was something around VAR and its employment. Given that all European countries seem to do it differently I could help wonder if the referee for our game against Napoli was more used to regular decisions being made. The point is more that there isn’t a universal approach. This can’t be good. It also occurred that Dries Mertens might have been as calm as he was because he expected the goal to be chalked off and play to be pulled back.

Liverpool lacked brains and composure for the first time against Napoli and they are going to have to regain them soon. Fabinho being out could well give a couple of players a chance of more time on the pitch. I hope we use that to find someone who enjoys putting their foot on the ball.

A shorter missive this week from me. Let me know all about thanksgiving. What were the arguments? And which Liverpool player are you most thankful for?

Yours as ever,

Neil.

******

Red Letters

29 November 2019

Neil,

So glad you got to watch Liverpool at 38,000 feet. While you were in the air last Saturday, I was back at my lucky table at Riley’s. It was a later-than-usual-arriving crowd for the Crystal Palace game — somewhat surprising for a beautiful Saturday morning after an international break. But by the time we kicked off, we had our usual allotment of maybe 100 Liverpool fans in the pub.

Even when he’s not in form, Zaha still scares me, and Andros Townsend is, on his day, a terrific player. (Side note: Crystal Palace’s socks were ridiculous. The sort of thing you’d see on a senior men’s softball team in Florida. In the 1970s.)

As for the refereeing controversy du jour, I tend to not lose my head over VAR either way. It is both a) not going away, and b) very much a work in progress. For all that we ridicule Roy Hodgson, I thought his comment afterward — granting that it was a foul by Ayew on Lovren — was an exceedingly decent thing to do.

But coming home from the game, I just kept going over our recent history:

Southampton, 2-1.

Chelsea, 2-1.

Leicester, 2-1.

Spurs, 2-1.

Villa, 2-1.

Genk, 2-1.

Palace, 2-1.

Is there a legal limit on the number of 2-1 games you can win in the first few months of a season? Please consult the FIFA rulebook. Is it like accumulated yellows? After you’ve acquired a certain number, is there some sort of penalty?

This would be remarkable any year, but in an age of data sophistication, it feels even more remarkable, by which I mean even less plausible. By all rights, we just cannot keep doing it. But since we have been doing it, the most interesting thing to me is: How?

You start with the mindset cultivated by the manager, “doubters to believers” and all that is implied by that. As you can attest, that has affected not only the players but also the fan base, both at Anfield and the away ends around England and Europe. And then there’s our fitness. Every Premier League team seems clearly fitter than a standard Premier League team of a generation ago, but Liverpool can go at a level and for a span that our opponents are hard-pressed to match.

There’s also another quality, fostered by Klopp and forged over these past four seasons, and clarified by the arrival of Virgil Van Dijk and the ability to not feel like every lead was tenuous. The best word might be composure. We can get back into games when we’re behind, and we can close games out when we’re ahead. You made the point a while back that we haven’t been more than a goal down in a Premier League game since Manchester United a couple of seasons back. That’s remarkable.

But there’s still something else, that I’ve seen more evidence of this season. The other sides freeze up. It’s not just that our players and crowd have come to expect the fightback and late surge. The opposition does as well. Take a look at Firmino’s winner again, and how many Crystal Palace players had a shot at possessing or clearing the ball as it ricocheted around the area (roughly 27, by my count). So often, the other side is not composed. It’s one of the sweetest things about watching Liverpool. The world of sports is inundated with cliches and maxims and slogans. And it supremely satisfying when the cliches are true. These Reds never give up, and now the other sides know it. It is a palpable thing.

•

I had no complaints with the lineup against Palace. I know it has become standard to opine that Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain is out of position on the front line, and is far better coming from midfield. I tend to agree with that opinion. At the same time, with his run of play, how could you deny him a starting spot when Salah was out?

One other Ox-related point: At the pub on Saturday, a few of our lot started sing the new Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain song. And upon hearing it in that setting, I was reminded again how conflicted I am about the song.

I’m happy that Alex has inspired a song among our supporters, beyond the generic “He has a long name.” I’m less thrilled with the song itself. Am I being a snowflake here, or is the song — light-hearted though it may be — also kind of borderline offensive?

I mean, I guess I’d want to hear what Ox himself thinks about the song. Or, to put a finer point on it, I’d want to hear what his partner, Perrie Edwards, thinks of the song. At any rate, it has prompted me to wonder: Shouldn’t it be important that the players we sing the praises of actually like the songs we sing about them?

Curious to hear your thoughts. And whether you think the song is catching on at Anfield in the same way that the Virgil or Bobby songs have? Or is it more of a pub/coach anthem?

For now, I’m ambivalent at best. And guessing AOC might feel similarly.

•

You raise a whole range of issues with the 3 p.m. blackout of Premier League games in England. But I would guess that your idea of not having any Premier League games kick off between 2 and 5:15 p.m. will likely not come to fruition, in part because that 3 p.m. kick-off time (10 a.m. on the East Coast in the US, 9 a.m. in the Central time zone) is prime real-estate for the American soccer audience. And as the American TV contracts grow, I think American broadcasters will fight to keep that, especially in the fall, when the 9 a.m. Premier League kickoffs mean those games are done before the full slate/glut of college football games kick off at 12 Eastern/11 a.m. Central.

But trying to sort out the relationship between television coverage and tickets sales has been a burning topic since before we were born. When I was growing up, no home games were telecast in NFL markets — even if the game was sold out — because the feeling was that televising games at home was poor business, the reasoning being, How can we give people at home the game for free when we’re asking others to buy a ticket? One of the things that led the lifting of blackout restrictions in the early ‘70s was political pressure on the NFL from many circles, including by President Richard Nixon, an obsessive football fan who wanted to watch all the Washington home games in the Oval Office.

Do you know why the NFL’s Monday Night Football series, started in 1970, wound up on Monday nights? Because when NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle wanted to start showing games nationally in prime time, and the league was prevented by Congressional law from showing games on Saturday nights (to protect college football) and on Friday nights (to protect high school football). Since there was a fear of “over saturation” on Sundays, Rozelle decided on Monday nights. At the time, telecasting sports events in prime-time was considered such a commercial non-starter that all three major networks initially turned him down. (“What?!,” asked the flabbergasted head of CBS, “And pre-empt I Love Lucy?!”)

But Rozelle was ahead of the curve on a lot of things. He said that, for all the money and exposure television offered, he never wanted the sport to become “a studio game.” He recognized even then that the atmosphere at the stadium was part of the appeal for people watching at home.

This is now one of the major challenges facing American sports. Watch a major league baseball game these days, and you see a lot of fans behind home plate who seem more interested in their smartphones than the action going on right in front of them. The NBA is having high-level talks about shortening its endless regular season, amid fan complaints about teams implementing “load management” in which the best players regularly skip games they’re healthy enough to play in simply because the schedule is so brutal. (Sound familiar?) College football is facing declining attendance, in part because the games last so damn long (four hours is not uncommon), and because every game of consequence is also nationally televised. In the NFL, there is a continued concern over flagging live attendance, which is one of the reasons the league is playing occasional games in Mexico City, and more than occasional games in London.

But whether we’re talking about the NFL in the US, or the Premier League in the UK, I think Rozelle’s essential wisdom still holds true. The caretakers of the game have to remember that the stadium experience is essential to making those who can’t get to the stadium want to watch in the first place.

•

I am writing on Thanksgiving night in Kansas City, where at 7 p.m. on Thanksgiving night every year, the Country Club Plaza — the century-old shopping district whose buildings and fountains and statuary are modeled after the city of Seville, Spain — is bathed in Christmas lights lining the facade of each and every building. When I was growing up, my mom — and our friends Nicole and James — started hosting a “lighting party,” in The Raphael, a classic old hotel overlooking the Plaza. We still reconvene for Thanksgiving here every few years, my mom coming down from Chicago, Nicole and James traveling from Minneapolis. It’s a magical night that never gets old.

But Thanksgiving week can be an awful week for air travel, so I chose to drive the 740 miles from my home to Kansas City. I left Austin early Tuesday afternoon, drove to Stillwater, Oklahoma and stayed the night, then was up early the next morning so that I could drive five more hours and roll into Kansas City, straight to The Dubliner, in time for the 2 p.m. kickoff against Napoli.

I watched the game with my editor, Jean (whose 15-year-old son Jack is Liverpool fan, and plays for Sporting Kansas City’s academy team) and the designer, Spencer, both of whom did heroic work on my ’69 Chiefs book. I also ran into my peripatetic friend Ben, a Kansas Citian who went to school at UT in Austin and now travels around the country working on various political campaigns (he’s presently stationed in Kansas).

It was a great gathering, but the LFC crowd at the Dubliner was notably restless. There was vociferous yelling at the screen — I think the Kansas City crew is, for some reason, less forgiving (or perhaps just less patient?) than the Austinites. Yet I really like this place to watch games — it’s a great space, and an enthusiastic crowd.

As for the result, and all the ways it’s going to make our December more fraught and difficult, I am reminded of something my friend Sam likes to say, “It’s the Liverpool way: They don’t do anything easy.” I do think that’s part of it, and you mentioned earlier your theory that the squad responds best when there is a clear goal, and obvious stakes to be won.

But I also think the Napoli game says something about human nature. We longed for Champions League for so long, and then we got back in it. And now we’ve been to two finals in a row. The serious fans and true believers understand well how precarious our group-stage situation has been — how precarious its been for three seasons in a row now — but the rank-and-file fans, surely, are more preoccupied with winning the league, and also have perhaps become a little complacent about the Champions League —— they can’t get fired up for Napoli after two years of knockout-stage heroics. I sensed a little of that muted attitude from the crowd. And after the game, Rob texted me, “Felt quiet… maybe it was the broadcast.” No, it was Anfield. Everybody was a little flat.

We’re all human. Here’s a thought experiment: If I told you we’d win the Champions League again this season, but would falter in the league race, finishing second behind City, would you feel like this was a successful season?

Now, catch yourself — right there.

Regardless of what your answer is, consider for a moment the insanity of any season in which a team raises the biggest club trophy in the world possibly being considered an unsuccessful season. Yet I would argue a large group of our supporters would come away from such a scenario disappointed. That’s where we are. The chase for the Premier League title distorts everything.

So, yes, I’m concerned, too. I’m concerned about having to go into Salzburg and face a team with fire in their eyes. I’m concerned about having to go four to six to eight weeks without Fabinho. I’m concerned about the schedule.

But I’m also hopeful. And optimistic. And thankful. To answer your question, on this Thanksgiving, I’m most thankful for Big Virg. Because he makes me feel like, somehow, someway, everything’s going to be all right.

Starting tomorrow, I hope.

As ever,

M.

PS: I know it happened late this week, but I’d like to hear your thoughts next week on the Duckenfield verdict.

******

Neil Atkinson is host of the Anfield Wrap - download their free app on IOS and Android.

Michael MacCambridge is the author of ‘America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured A Nation,’ and several other books. He lives in Austin, Texas.

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