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Homepage Hughes Chronicles Site Map		(Autumn 2001)
This Is Anfield		What a wonderful world wide web it is. Last Monday morning I logged on and, there, among my "favourites" was the Liverpool FC bookmark, which, as usual, I clicked on and sat back to take a first sip of coffee and light my first fag of the day. Up came the window that says something about the address having changed and telling you to click here to go to the new site. I clicked. A few seconds later, with coffee half way to my mouth, I stopped. "Kerrr-ist!" The site has undergone a huge overhaul as hinted at in the new address: liverpoolfc.tv. It's flash fronted, state of the art with sound - and vision. I spent the next twenty minutes, with coffee going cold, just watching the groundsman motoring up and down the pitch on his roller. Fantastic. I've never had this kind of access to the club in my life. Well, I live 243 miles from the place for a start. And before anybody says anything, despite where I live, I support Liverpool because I was born there and all my family come from there. I saw them playing at Anfield in the second division for goodness sake. No, despite the love I have for the place where I live, when it comes to football, Liverpool Football Club is a blood relative. I fell in love with the myth many years ago. All my school holidays were spent in Liverpool with my grandparents. I was on the Kop in August 1963 when they were singing "Ee aye addio, Leicester lost the cup" (in 1963 that was bloody funny). It was a magic city for a boy brought up on the Essex coast. The skyline was full of Cunard funnels, the buses were full of people speaking the same lyrical accent as Lennon and McCartney. Sheer magic and a joyful time. My father was an Evertonian, I went to Goodison Park with him (they had a great team too). And then there were my other relatives and their neighbours. They were exotic people, my grand uncle was a steward on the liners, came back from New York with the first zoot suit in Orrell Park. And everybody was a comedian, then. Back home in Essex it seemed easy to celebrate the place of my birth when the new world of television was celebrating it too. There was Shankly, the Grand National and Bessie Braddock. Nearly every pop group in the charts were from Liverpool. I started going to matches in London when I was bit older. Cor, blimey, you could get a return on British Rail, get into White Hart Lane and still have change out of a quid. I saw Jimmy Tarbuck getting off the team bus with the players at Craven Cottage, me. Heady days. There was a big difference between Liverpool and Maldon, honestly. People in Liverpool loved showbiz, they loved theatre and they loved music (I saw the Shadows at the Liverpool Empire in their patent leather shoes). It was something I was innately at home with and understood. It wasn't the same in Maldon, just a bunch of Methodists it seemed to me. And then Liverpool got into Europe as Panorama (of all TV programmes) was shooting film of the Kop singing "She Loves You". It was the start of an oddysey of tears and of joy. So, why did I write this song? Well, I don't remember the exact moment when the rhythm of the names of the '66 champions first scanned the music but I think it probably had something to do with what I was watching on the tv. I wrote it in 1999, when, for the first time I had the horrendous realisation that, after a lifetime's devotion, suddenly I didn't instantly recognise who was playing. That had never happened before. There were some players on the pitch in Liverpool shirts whose movements I didn't know. (I don't know why they think you need names and numbers for tv viewers.) They weren't "real" Liverpool players (a phrase Bill Shankly often used). I know, it was easy to be nostalgic when your team was going through an indifferent period, a long period , stretching back to the 1990 FA Cup semi-final. We had no divine right to continue enjoying a dominance that had lasted the best part of thirty years. But there was something else going on which had started to worry me and still does. It was the apparent, and growing dominance of an alien entity imposing itself on the traditions of a beloved game. People with no right to have any connection with football, who don't understand it. Yes, life is change. And there is no way that football could have continued as it was. That money had to be found to bring football up to date was unquestionable but, what worries me is that, if you are prepared to invest in the game, you should at least preserve the best aspects of it. And, basically, not fuck it up. The Cup Final should be the season's finale and the FA cup draw should take place on a Monday lunchtime, all of that stuff. I have no qualms about corporate boxes and sponsor's names stuck all over the place. The only thing I hate are the bastards who don't know what they're dealing with. As far as the game is concerned "it was there long before all the movers and flakers." The rest are fine.