Why the gods will smile on Liverpool only as underdogs

May 23, 2007

Simon Barnes, Chief Sports Writer

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/columnists/simon_barnes/article1826792.ece

I had a fancy for Liverpool when I left Stansted, but when I got to Athens I began to have my doubts. Something to do with those old gods you encounter here. It’s not just that the gods of ancient Greece are radically different from the Judaeo-Christian gods, it’s also that they are radically similar to the gods who run football. Or even identical.

You get these thoughts in Greece. Football is not run by a vengeful accounting god, like the Old Testament; no one is ever actually repaid a goal for a goal, a foul for a foul.

There is never any question of justice: the team who “deserve to win” are as often as not the losers. Nor do football gods have any sense of benignity or forgiveness; they do as they damn well please.

The gods of ancient Greece are just the same – capricious, changeable, prone to favourites, equally prone to dropping favourites for some slight. Forget some sacrifice or libation and you are wafted straight over to the wrong end of the Mediterranean. They are tough on hubris, tough on the causes of hubris.

But above all, and unlike almost any other god in any other theology, they are possessed of a sense of humour. They love ironies, contradictions, paradoxes. Nothing gives them quite as as much pleasure as a human hero in the direst of straits, something he could have avoided if only he’d paid more attention.

This is not Christian, but it is deeply and irrefragably football. And that’s why I fear for Liverpool. They go into the final of the Champions League against the same opponents they played two years ago, but this time they go with something of a swagger. Last time they reached the final by a kind of glorious fluke; this time they have earned every step of their progress.

Last time I gave them no chance and yet they won one of the most improbable matches of recent times, coming back from 3-0 down at half-time to draw level and win on penalties. Perhaps the gods were rewarding their courage, or perhaps they were punishing the boys of AC Milan for their hubris.

Well, gods have nothing against a double whammy. Whammies in general – a whammy being technically a curse – are what they’re good at.

What a night it was. Jamie Carragher, Liverpool’s defensive rock, has spoken eloquently about his half-time fear that his team would lose by five or six. But a Herculean performance – I’m sorry, in Greek, one should call it a Heraklean performance from Steven Gerrard – gave the gods something to get excited about. All the rest followed from that.

And so, perversely, in the face of all sporting logic, Liverpool won. Liverpool, at best fourth among equals in the Barclays Premiership, a team still in love with their former glories, were again kings of Europe. Somehow, they pulled off the most surprising of all football victories and I have no doubt that the gods of football are laughing to this day.

But what do they think now? The fact is that Liverpool are much more of a team than they were two years ago – stronger in all positions, more tactically aware, more versatile. They will step out into the Olympic Stadium this evening like a team who have a right to be there, and that is exactly what troubles me.

They won two years ago because they had no right to be there, because they were utterly outplayed, because somewhere – mostly in Gerrard’s competitive heart – they found the spirit of defiance. At the crucial passage of the match, their weakness was their strength. That, by the way, is the sort of paradox that only really works in football, the most capricious of all sports.

Since then, Liverpool have grown in strength. Their manager, Rafael BenÍtez, is now recognised as rather more than a man who got lucky. Their new American owners, George Gillett Jr and Tom Hicks, are planning serious investment in players during the close season. Win this one for us, lads, and we’ll replace at least half of you.

This is a club seething with ambition, determined to make the Premiership a four-way race next season, determined to compete at the sharp end of the Champions League as a matter of inevitability, as a matter of right. Logically, then, Liverpool have a very good chance this evening.

But logic never takes you that far in football. That is the nature of the game and the insanely high value of its currency, the goal. In no other sport does David so often slay Goliath, does the underdog so often bite. Circumstance, emotions, spirit, a single moment of inspiration, a single moment of folly; a football match – any football match – can change forever in an instant of time.

That’s what I mean with this fancy talk about gods, that football doesn’t work in logical and predictable ways. It is more violently and perversely changeable than any other sport in the calendar. Do Liverpool need to be taken down a peg? Do Milan deserve a change of luck? Such ideas may not come from literal gods, but they are still the sort of thing that affects players and determines the course of football matches. I’ve seen too many football matches to believe otherwise.

If Liverpool wish to win, I suggest they make the appropriate sacrifices, wash themselves clean of expectation and clad themselves humbly in hope.