Victory for the Catholic half of Liverpool?

Lots of bad news on the TV last Night. Our old friend George Bush is sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong, this time into a sensitive right-to-die case that he has no business interfering in. In Britain, the Tory party are planning to persecute Gypsies and cut back on abortion rights, leading me to think that they’re planning to become more like the US Republicans. In Doha, a bomb goes off and Osama Bin Laden gets the blame, though Doha has a reputation for being the most boring place in the world so that ought to spice things up there a little.

But then there’s some good news, even if we had to wait until the sports section to hear it. Victory for Liverpool in the Merseyside derby. I’m sure all impartial observers will agree that this is good news for football. I know that there’s a lot of Man United fans out there who resent Liverpool for being so much more successful than their team for so long, but how many of them were really looking forward to their Tuesday and Wednesday nights being enlivened by the spectacle of David Moyes’ poisinous anti-football?

There will, of course, be some Man U fans who’ll say that it’s a bad thing for football for the same 4 teams to qualify for the champions league every year, but then you expect them to come out with stuff like that.

Those of you who know me know that I’m a Liverpool fan and have been since I was growing up in the eighties when they were the best team in Europe, playing with a style and panache that was an anomaly in the rough-and-tumble English first division of the time. For a while in the late eighties, the two best teams in the country were both from Liverpool, though Everton achieved this success with a brand of football that was dour and workmanlike by comparison.

Plus ca change, many of the people who I watched yesterdays game with in Darby O Gills in Blackpool will have been thinking, as Everton’s dreary catanaccio strategy failed and was replaced by long-ball play reminiscent of Wimbledon or Ireland in the Jack Charlton era, though, to be fair, they weren’t all that more boring than Liverpool teams from the height of the Houllier dog years.

As I’ve hinted, RTE and TV3’s viewing figures will drop dramatically if they show any Everton games next season, and in spite of their defeat, they’re probably still favourites.

The easy explanation would be that Everton are boring and that Liverpool, now that they’ve got rid of Houllier (Best £10 Million they ever spent) are exciting, and that there’s a load of Liverpool supporters still around from their 80’s glory days.

But others will argue that their must be something more. Foreign visitors to Ireland are often bemused by our obsession with the premiership, considering how much lingering resentment there is at the way the British have treated us for so long that shows no signs of going away. What many of them fail to realise is that Ireland is a country which was forced to send many of it’s sons and daughters abroad for hundreds of years and that before the era of theme-park Irish pubs had to find some way of preserving their sense of identity.

A friend of mine who teaches in Trinity in Dublin told me that when Ireland qualified for the 1990 World Cup with a predominantly English-born team, his professor went on the radio saying how this symbolised Ireland’s diaspora, though the same professor hadn’t allowed students time off to watch Ireland play in the days before they were fashionable or Landsdowne Road had floodlights.

This was nothing new as Irish identity has often been expressed through sports teams like Basketball’s Boston Celtics, Rugby’s London Irish, and Soccer’s Celtic, Man United and Liverpool.

Or so I imagined, having been brought up in an era when all of Liverpool’s midfield could have played for Ireland if they wanted to. But then my two brothers insisted that this was a relatively recent phenomenon and that Everton were traditionally the Catholic club in the city. This seemed absurd to me as at any Liverpool game there’s a host of tricolours on display and when the team start are winning (which hasn’t been nearly as often as I’d like this season) the fans start singing the fields of Athenry, which presumably isn’t to remind them of all the people who were converted to Protestantism during the famine.

When Right-Wing ponce Boris Johnson insulted the people of Liverpool for accusing them of grieving excessively for Ken Bigley, someone advised him that football was very important in the city and that Liverpool were the Catholic team and Everton Protestant. That settled it for me until I started to do some research before writing this and found out that the truth is far more complicated than I Imagined.

Needless to mention, the most lively discussion was on www.foot.ie which is an Irish Website

It seems that the protestant/catholic division is far less clear-cut in Liverpool than in Manchester or Glasgow, even though the city is far more Irish and often referred to as the real capital of Ireland, and the only place in Britain to have Orange parades.

It seems that though Everton were founded by Methodist preachers in the nineteenth century and Goodison park is in a predominantly catholic area, in the 50’s 9 of Everton’s starting 11 were Republic of Ireland internationals and they still have sponsor the youth academy of Dublin side Home Farm. It seems that a lot of Everton fans were insulted when they were accused of being protestant, and I have to admit they do have more Irish players than Liverpool at the moment, by the same margin of yesterdays victory (2-1), though they’ve appointed one dour Scots protestant manager after another.

Then I read that at Dave Watson’s testimonial Everton fans were accused of being “Fenian bastards” by visiting Rangers fans, though it does beg the question of why Everton were playing Rangers if they’re the Catholic team.

This is clearly a complex issue that there’s only one way to resolve. The city of Liverpool, a Celtic Town in an Anglo-Saxon Island will have to become part of the Irish republic. There’s clearly a precedent for this as there’s a big British enclave in North-Eastern Ireland that’s caused one or two problems over the years, and if it’s the will of the people of Liverpool then the government should respect that. It would be a little costly at first as there’s a lot of unemployment in the city and welfare benefits are particularly generous here but on the other hand we’d also start to get royalties from Beatles records and in a while the city would be a shiny happy Celtic Tiger city.

It would be a bit of an ego blow for Cork as we’d no longer be the second biggest town in the country but then Liverpool would be in the Eircom league and we’d get to see them play at least once a year.

If it works out we can take Glasgow and Kilburn as well. And Stonehenge, which clearly pre-dates the Anglo-Saxon conquest.

I’m sure this is what Luis Garcia was planning when he headed Fernando Morientes shot into the Everton net yesterday.