Repetitive Playing Disorder

Pain motivates.  It's primary existence as a physical function is so that if you were to put your hand under a flame, there would be a message sent to your brain pretty fucking sharpish saying "don't do that."  Liverpool Football Club knows pain.  The problem lies within how it's registered.

First of all, there's the reaction.  The idea that any problem we have right now is *the worst*.  We're all guilty.  Right now I don't see how you can't  This Liverpool side might be the most infuriating in terms of the discrepancy between attack and defence, between what it does well and how it fails.  But that in of itself is a problem.  Because if every time you face something, it becomes the biggest obstacle anyone could ever face, then the tasks not only become ever daunting but your likelihood of overcoming them grow ever shorter.  Firefighting all the time makes it easy to get used to the idea that things should be on fire. Whisper it quietly, but they shouldn't.

After that come the brakes.  The supposed voice of reason.  What happens when you're panicking every time something happens that's not the way you planned is that the idea that there could be something wrong in the first place gets lost in a wave of fickle ideas.  No football manager or team is wrong all the time and so if you're accusing them of such then when it comes time to question their methods it's already been diluted.

What's worse, the natural predication of fandom is to stick up for those who are being seen to be unnecessarily challenged.  That in turn develops a defence mechanism that does not prepare for valid points.  We all draw our lines as fans, both for our own clubs and players and those beyond.  However researched or knowledgeable it may be, rarely do they move.  But they do move.

Once anyone has their mind made up these days, that's about as close to a cul de sac as one can get.  Such and such is world class.  Another - similar player - is living off his teammates ability.  Managers are both frauds and geniuses.  Could even be the same manager if you ask two different people.  The fact is that most of the time these opinions are left unchallenged.  It doesn't even matter if they're right or wrong.  The only way to really find out is when things are going wrong.

Comfort and change are strange bedfellows.  Why would a manager swap things around when everything is going well?  He can try to find that secret combination which will suddenly make everything "click" again.  Sometimes he can try too much.  But he has to try.  Liverpool are in a position to try things.  For the eternal pessimistic, their season is as over as Chelsea's was around this stage last year.  Perhaps for Dejan Lovren however, that might be a Stamford Bridge too far.  Which is to say he should not play for LFC again.

The problem is not the defeat in isolation.  It is in what it confirms about the summer.  What it says about a squad that is not as strong as those who are making decisions thought it was.  That's why hurting matters.  The likelihood is that it won't get much worse than this.  In terms of fixtures, there aren't many more [away] games to strike fear into our hearts.  The hope is that we get on a run.  The kind of roll that takes us as far away from our downtrodden minds.  If we do we need to bear in mind one thing.  The pain of right now.  If we do not learn from it in the present, we will be doomed to repeat it.

An Open Letter To LFC

I'd love to make sense right now.  To find quotes and platitudes that soothe.  If you're looking at this right now there's every chance you have made the same journey.  Questions and answers.  Questions and no answers.  This is a train of thought that first departed disbelief.  Visited anger.  Has arrived at acceptance.  No one person is to blame and as such any implications to the contrary are false.  Having said that, there are questions that need answers.  Things that need to change.  Soon.

Liverpool Football Club is not interested in winning things.  That's an absolute ludicrous statement to throw out there and of course everyone at the club wants to win everything forever etc.  But they don't.  It's the difference between theory and practice.  On paper and on the pitch.  Fantasy and reality.  If you want something, it doesn't matter what stands in your way.  It doesn't even matter if that obstacle is your own inadequacy.  Over the last two years I've mocked on numerous occasions two different incarnations of Manchester United.  They have a flawed squad, papered over by big money signings that don't even make sense and two separate managers for whom winning seems to come second to not losing.  In my head that fear is a fallacy.  A pothole which they cannot avoid.  Surely you can't hope to sustain any kind of long term with such short term thinking?  Two trophies in less than a year says otherwise.

Anyone that knows me would say that the following argument cuts me personally below the belt.  Liverpool have become so very Arsenal, in the sense that they're predictable to a fault and are unable to get over the line when it comes to anything resembling success.  In poker, it's not quite as important to have the eventual winning hand as it is to "get your chips in when you're ahead".  Essentially this boils down to the argument that it doesn't matter what the end result is so long as you did everything right beforehand.  I used to subscribe to this argument.  I think I still do.  But what LFC is doing right now is trying desperately to wait for the right hand rather than actively trying to make some luck for themselves.

Competing with the likes of Chelsea, Manchester's City and United on a financial level is beyond us.  That's just a fact.  Let us not forget that both Liverpool and Spurs had deals agreed in principle with Willian before Chelsea moved in.  How much of a difference he would make to both clubs right now is immeasurable.  In recent years however we've gone from acknowledging such deals to shying away from them outright in case a better suitor comes along.  The list of signings that Liverpool have missed out on in the last decade all over the sake of a relatively minuscule sum is the kind of thing that makes you want to have a cold shower in the dark.  We don't want to pay the extra money.  Which translates to we don't want to win.

If you ever want to see a Liverpool fan roll their eyes, there's a great trick.  Just mention the word Moneyball.  There's no better way to make someone fall into a vegetative state.  What (didn't) work in baseball rather surprisingly doesn't in football either.  It's boss in principle if you're Porto and don't have to worry about six other teams getting your Champions League revenue every year so you can afford to buy fifteen random people from Venezuela and then sell one for fifty million next year but in the Premier League it's never worked and it never will.  Buying good young players and also decent older players discarded for random reasons isn't the worst policy of all time.  A better policy is just to buy great players.  I absolutely loathe what Zlatan Ibrahmovic has done this season but it's part money part reputation.  Yeah you might get a Falcao every now and then but United aside look at his numbers.  It's no coincidence at all that those who pay more get more and the fact that Liverpool are on the opposite end of this scale not because of a lack of funds but by their own choice feels like an immediate admission of defeat.

Leicester 3-1 Liverpool.  A result that felt so unavoidable, I texted someone jokingly before the game and got the scoreline bang on.  Make no mistake.  This hurts.  This really hurts.  I've genuinely not felt this passive toward a season, toward a side and a manager for whom I really want to believe in for some time.  The worst part of it all is that it feels like a breaking point.  Like a realisation that things won't get better.  We've come close before but that extra mile seems too far away.  What hurts most of all is that it's all so self inflicted.  All the sarcasm, all the legitimacy in the world cannot mask what was an absolute joke of a performance against a side that was before tonight in the bottom three.  Why is it that we must offer hope to the hopeless so often? Provide respite for the relegation threatened that three points against Liverpool is not only feasible but all so achievable.  We don't believe it ourselves, mostly because we've seen it so many times before.  You win leagues by dispatching teams like this with ease.  But we're not going for that.  Or are we?