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Today, every Liverpool supporter around the world will be forced into making a modification; a modification in a few sentences of pleasure, phrases of banter and records of pride. They’ll be making changes in their flags, scarfs, banners, posters; and perhaps, even repaint the ancient walls of their homes that had glorious words written for decades.
They will definitely take time in coming to terms with ‘it’; ‘it’ being a reality that seemed far from possible two decades ago, ‘it’ being the accelerated chopping down of what seemed like an unassailable lead and ‘it’ being the snatching of possibly their most proud record.
Like adjusting to life in a lesser town after living in the comfort of a metropolitan, or like learning a new language but inadvertently inserting words from English, there will be obstacles before you truly come to terms with your new situation.
They have all been reluctant to even consider this as a possibility for a long time, but it was bound to happen sooner or later.
And the burden is gone, now.
For our club’s sake, let’s be glad it has finally happened. For we have wasted too much time strolling around aimlessly. We have wasted too much time looking behind us and not ahead. We have wasted too much time safeguarding our precious crown; living in fear of losing what we’ve got rather than building on it.
More importantly, though, we have overloaded our players and managers with the burden of our glorious history and pressurized them into producing quick results, just so that we could savor our crown for a little while more.
Our most hated rival from Manchester has overtaken us. So, free up your shoulders, breathe and get used to it. Live and let our players live, as well. This is not to suggest that we shouldn’t mourn being knocked off the top of the English ladder; or not regret our decisions and not look back at our mistakes. This is not to suggest you stop hating them, either.
This is to suggest spending more energy and time supporting our own club rather than deriving greater pleasure from the failures of others. It is time we celebrate our victories first and their defeats later. It is time we move past that horrible feeling; the feeling of secretly wishing our team loses to Chelsea just so our hated rivals couldn’t reach their milestone. It is time we start focusing more on our own run-in than dissect their fixture list.
Let go, a little, of the obsession.
It is finally a time for a pit stop. Enough of racing on burnt tires just so that you could stay in the lead a little while longer even though you knew the inevitability of the future. Now, let’s rebuild, refocus and rework to put on those new tires and fuel up for a mighty charge.
We built an empire of dominance once, and we will do it again. It has taken ages for a team to surpass what we built and nobody is stopping you from hating their success. However, we must acknowledge it and appreciate it for it has been done by a string of great sides, under a great manager at a great club; a club that is obsessed with us as much as we are obsessed with them. Let’s be grateful, if one can try to, that the crown has been passed onto a club with a tradition to match ours and not handed over to one of the many money-pumping machines that are doing rounds these days.
It is gone, though. Now, we must look ahead and back our own club with all our energy. We must savor Luis Suarez and the flamboyance he brings that is rarely seen at the club. We must savor the last few years of our legendary captain, who’d rather not win a medal at Liverpool than win the medal with another club. And we must savor Carragher’s mistimed tackles with aging legs.
Let them take a lead, now. For great teams, like theirs, always win a sequence of many trophies at a canter. And a great team of ours will come along, soon.
Hopefully, to reclaim what we had happily made our own.
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Follow the author on twitter @Akarsh_LFC
