Victory for the Reds - But will the Empire strike Back?

After the euphoria of Liverpool’s incredible win over AC Milan last night dies down (that could take a while) and all the millions of words have been written, people will sit down and ask what it all meant.

It obviously means that Liverpool are the greatest English team in the history of European competition. There are a few grudging Man U fans who used to think their team was better because it wasn’t a “real” competition back in the 70’s and 80’s because “only” the best team from each country qualified. This may have meant that there were fewer quality clubs, but it meant that to qualify, a team had to win their domestic league or the trophy itself, unlike Man U, who qualified for their 1999 win in second place. The fact that Liverpool won the trophy after only coming 4th last year will take some of the sheen off their argument that United have a greater European pedigree.

It’s possible, of course, that with their millions of pounds Chelsea will be able to eventually win the Champions league 5 times, but of course that’s contingent on Roman Abramovich not losing interest or getting arrested for one of his many shady doings.

Which brings me to my point: isn’t it a remarkable coincidence that Liverpool’s magnificent win came out around the same time as the latest Star Wars movie?

Think about it. From 1977 to 1984, a small, family-run club from a fading industrial town in the North of England took on the might of Europe and won. When Bob Paisley arrived in Rome to take on Borrosia Munchengladbach in ’77 Italian journalists mocked his woolly cardigans but they were laughing on the other side of their faces when he took the trophy back to Anfield, a stadium that even then seemed old fashioned to many European visitors.

At the same time the world watched the Jedi take on the might of the evil empire and win though they had little other than a fearsome belief in their own ability.

Just as the end of the last Star Wars prequel looped right back to the glory days of 1977 with Cheweebaca and a young Luke, last night’s game brought memories of Keegan and Toshack flooding back for many on the red side of Anfield.

Unfortunately, much of football has gone over to the dark side in those intervening years, but Liverpool remain a beacon of traditional community values. Though the club have massive worldwide support from Ireland to Asia, most of the people who come to their games are actually from Liverpool and wouldn’t eat a prawn sandwich if they were starving to death.

Mind you, if you think Man U are too money-orientated right now, their “fans” haven’t seen anything yet. I hesitate to use the word “Evil” to describe a real human being, particularly an short, ugly, aging one, but anyone who thinks that the problem with Man U is that they don’t make enough money and that the club is too much about the sport. It’s like he’s Jerry Maguire in reverse.

I was reading a financial journalist in the Observer who said in the typically snotty way that they have that while he understands the offside rule quite well, none of us soccer heads can understand the arcane ways of the financial markets, and I’ve got to say that I don’t have a clue how a foreign millionaire can buy a club with someone else’s money and then burden the club with all his debts, but then, tragically for some of the genuine supporters in the city, it seems Martin Edwards didn’t either when he prostituted the club on the stock exchange.

Mind you, Glazer seems pretty innocent next to Abramovich, a man who used his massive power to get Russia’s sinister, imperialistic president Putin re-elected and was rewarded by having a state oil company sold to him for 1% of it’s market value and then shifted the profits to offshore tax havens.

And then there’s AC Milan, owned by Italy’s own Putin, Silvio Berlusconi, who also used a TV company to get a shady character elected as leader, this time his good, Burberry shirt wearing self. When Jean Baudrillard wrote that power gave football a diabolical responsibility for sedating the masses, he had sinister tycoons like these in mind.

In the documentaries about the 20th aniversery of the Heysel disaster, people argued that at the time there seemed to be no future for the game as it was being eaten alive from the inside by hooligans and faced with the irrational hatred of Margaret Thatcher, who must have thought that unemployed Liverpudlians would have been better off getting on their bikes and looking for the jobs that she’d taken away than watching the best football team in the world at the time, from the outside.

It could be argued that if money-men like Martin Edwards and Rupert Murdoch hadn’t injected so much dosh into the game then it might have died from glamour deficiency. And it’s true that there’s very few people want to go back to the era of the maximum wage, when players who didn’t have any skills other than playing soccer were only paid at most £100 a week.

But who, apart from swivel-eyed free marketers like the direction in which soccer is going right now, where a tiny number of clubs are able to vacuum up all the talent and players think loyalty is the name of a card they get from Tesco?

As many people were pointing out last night, the great thing about soccer is the sheer unpredictability, that it’s 11 men against 11 men on the night and it didn’t matter that either Chelsea or AC Milan had so much more in the way of financial resources in either of the last two rounds. So when Liverpool’s second half performance destroyed AC Milan’s hubris, it wasn’t hard to think of their character and heart as a millennium falcon destroying a death star that threatens to blow small, traditional clubs out of the water.

Lest you think I’m being hyberbolical, I’m aware that Liverpool were the second richest team in England before Abramovich bought Chelsea and that they have a big global fanbase, though around 3000 of the overseas supporters were from Ireland, a country from which much of the population of Liverpool city can claim descent. As I’ve pointed out before, Liverpool is a Celtic enclave in an Anglo-Saxon country which is why much of England has such an ambivalent attitude to the town, and it’s actually far more reasonable for us to take credit for their success than it is for the London Media to claim that Bono, Bob Geldof, Seamus Heaney or any other Irish person is “British” (Wankers!)

But this is no time for bitterness. It’s a time to celebrate Liverpool’s incredible achievement and I’m sure that even the loudest, most boorish, Man United fan might just have had the odd goose bump when Stevie G lifted the European cup last night.