For some, like This Is Anfield‘s Steven Scragg, the off-season is a time to switch off from football – meaning Liverpool’s Premier League opener was a fitting release.
It’s startling just how far life can travel in a short space of time. Sometimes, a summer stretch of 12 weeks can be either numbingly boring or comfortingly turbulence free, dependent upon your personal outlook on such matters.
From the last kick of the ball in Liverpool’s 2024/25 title-winning campaign and the beginning of the new season, I’m pretty sure most of us would have taken an at least marginally quieter last three months than the one we’ve just experienced.
Last May, Crystal Palace on the final day represented a party we had been waiting to throw for 35 years, and we embraced it like the longest of lost friends.
Joy unconfined, everyone with a streak of red through their heart and soul as one, with even those of us about to depart for the Spanish capital reaching their delighted inner child, amid the pyro smoke, the confetti, the pyrotechnics, and the silvery flash of a trophy lift to end all trophy lifts.
An open-top bus parade came and went the following afternoon; a magnificent day that had a dark shadow thrown over it at its end, an afternoon where the best and the worst of human nature was in evidence.
A summer of great change and unbearable loss
Less than a week later, Jeremie Frimpong arrived as Trent Alexander-Arnold made his exit, but the signing of Florian Wirtz blew us all away.
The type of purchase Liverpool just aren’t generally associated with, Wirtz’s capture was jaw-dropping and soon complemented by the less surprising transfers to Anfield of Milos Kerkez and Giorgi Mamardashvili.
Then came July 3, and the unimaginable loss of Diogo Jota and his brother Andre Silva.
League titles and heavy-hitting transfers no longer of importance, this unthinkable series of events stopped the clocks.
The right-minded world, across and even way beyond football’s borderlines and boundaries, put its arm around Jota’s family and the club as a whole, as they tried to absorb and make sense of the devastation.
From my perspective, I couldn’t even try to find the words to write about it at the time.
As eloquent as much of what was written a month or so ago was from many directions, there was never going to be an adequate way to express the sense of loss we all felt, especially when a wife and cluster of young children had lost their cherished husband and father, and parents mourned the deaths of their two sons.
Laying out Jota’s mosaic was what I needed
My small way of tribute to Jota and his brother was to be at Anfield on the morning of the Bournemouth game, to help lay out the mosaic. It is always an honour to take part in the mosaics, but there are occasions when it cuts deep.
Around 40 of us were there and we had it rattled off in not much more than two hours.
I hadn’t watched a single minute of a Liverpool game since that May afternoon against Crystal Palace, not even the Community Shield.
I’d kept half an eye on the results, and been watching the continuing revolving door of transfers, as out went Luis Diaz, Tyler Morton and Darwin Nunez, while in came Hugo Ekitike and Giovanni Leoni, with an ongoing flirtation with Marc Guehi and the kitchen-sink drama that is Alexander Isak rumbled on.
For me, I was in need of it all to feel real once again, after 12 weeks that had at times felt totally unreal. Doing the mosaic sorted that out, and even the row that was had between two women who were also taking part was an important element in being able to plug back in.
I walked away from Anfield, went and sat in the beer garden of the Cabbage Hall, messaged Matt Ladson to see if he wanted me to carry on writing this esoteric nonsense, and then had a chippy dinner.
Rather than go home, I stuck around Anfield and caught up with some familiar faces, as they started to tip up for the evening’s activities. It was great to see John Pearman and Jeff Goulding.
Adam Beattie did a bit of a drive-by handing over of his new book, which he magically delivered with table service. Me and Jeff were at table 33 in the Cabbage. Adam should invest in some QR codes for the tables in there. It’s the way forward.
A mad, entirely fitting night
Back into the ground I went, with my dad in tow.
He’d gone missing for a couple of hours on Friday, so it was extra special that he had turned out for an evening game – something he hasn’t done for a few seasons now, as he usually just opts for the daytime kickoffs.
A mosaic was raised, I took some snaps on my phone from the upper Main Stand, a silence occurred and then the boys in red got the new season underway in a suitably mad style. It all felt entirely fitting.
The temperature was as warm as the sentiments, and it had to be Federico Chiesa and Mo Salah with the grandstand finish, on a night when a shadow was thrown across the pride and joy by a crank in the crowd.
You can never have it all as a Red, but I wouldn’t swap it for the world.
* Steven Scragg is the author of the new book ‘There are Places I Remember: Liverpool FC and the Miracle of Istanbul’, which can be ordered through Pitch Publishing here.
His 1980s football podcast, ‘Your Boys Took A Hell Of A Beating’, can be found here.
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