I remember well the sunny Wembley afternoon of the Stephen Gerrard thunderstrike. It was the FA cup final in May 2006, and it was straight out of the Roy of the Rover comic books I fantasised over as a football obsessed kid.
I was watching the game on a television the size of a postage stamp in my maternal grandmother’s lounge, when the Liverpool captain wrapped his laces through the sweetest spot of the ball, thirty-five yards out, and watched the Hammer’s net bulge, unleashing the unadulterated manic celebration of grown adult hero worship.
Gerrard lifted the trophy that early summer’s day, but my trophy had already fallen from the crumbling mantlepiece of my life. The FA cup game came shortly before the summer of discontent. I was already on the rocky road to a very public breakdown, arrest, and eventual sectioning, at the trigger fingers of the Voices. The Voices who ambushed my mind, body, and soul, and slipped me a one-way ticket to a confrontation with the demons of my darkest nightmare’s.
It would be a long seven years till I watched Liverpool grace the pitch again, and my days and nights were being consumed with a dark shadow that would eventually engulf my whole being.
I found myself alone in a Worthing bed & breakfast room one night, popping out sleeping pills from their silver foil strips and swigging back vodka as life slipped into a deadly landslide. I woke from a coma days later in the local hospital ICU – raw, uncooked, and hurting – from a grave existential ache that would hang over my mortality like Death’s scythe.
Four years on from this brush with death, in the season of 2013/14, football saved my life. Investing in a cheap hacked streaming box, I chanced on a Liverpool game as the Red’s put five past a shellshocked Arsenal. An unlikely, improbable, and insane title quest was on, and I could feel the blood coursing through my veins again. The action on the pitch became a welcome distraction from the malaise of my mind. And that man Gerrard was leading the charge on the front foot.
I lived and breathed every crunching challenge, yellow card, ariel duel, counterattack and rampant goal assault like my life depended on it. The rollercoaster of the Roger’s campaign was destined to end in tears, however, and the jeopardy proved too much after the agonising Gerrard slip. The wheels came off in the tumultuous march to the elusive nineteenth title.
The football carried me through the lost years of sickness, angst, and bitter mental health. I immersed myself in the game, started going to the local Albion stadium, braving the mashed-up paranoid fears of crowds, and watched the Seagulls promoted to the Premier League.
Then, one inspired day in the 2020 Lockdown, the incumbent black clouds of thirteen years finally lifted, and I started writing up my story ‘The Soul Asylums’ – as an invigorated Liverpool, under the footballing blitzkrieg of Jurgen Klopp, broke the thirty-year drought in their quest for football’s Holy Grail.
And, even a global pandemic couldn’t stop the celebrations being uncorked, as Gerrard’s anointed successor Jordan Henderson finally lifted the Premier League trophy at Anfield. Never to walk alone again, the night blazes eternal, like a firework in my memory.
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