Saturday, January 26, 2008

Setting the bar lower each and every time

Havant & Waterlooville 1, self-respect 0
[Photo credit: BBC/Getty Images]



There are dreams, and then there are nightmares. Rafa Benitez understands this concept very well, although the brand of sleepy-time entertainment he prefers to peddle certainly falls into the "fever and terror" category.

Today, Rafa's understrength side [although "understrength" doesn't come into it when we play a fucking pub team] laboured through a first half that saw us trail twice to the part-timers of Havant & Waterlooville. A hat-trick from Yossi Benayoun and some spirited saves by backup Charles Itandje were needed before we could finally relax, but the 5-2 result is flattering. Simply put, the minnows deserved better.

I sat through most of that game, glued to the sopcast on my laptop instead of doing something more productive, and I sometimes wonder why I do this to myself.

I've been a Liverpool fan since before I could walk [although with the amount of alcohol you have to consume sometimes when we play like this, it's a miracle I can still walk], and while the last of averages dictates that your team will invariably play like shit from time-to-time, it doesn't matter. It still hurts.

This one, despite the eventual win, will hurt for a while, not just because I am good friends with several fans of the other Big 4 clubs, but because it's personal pride.

I'm going to need a lot of booze today to wash this one down. I look forward to all the colourful photoshops and opinions over the next week. We deserve them all.

2 comments:

Spectator said...

In the end, 5-2 doesn't sound like that terrible a result (if you ignore the fact that Liverpool twice had to come back from being a goal down). And at least the Liverpool fans were classy toward the pub team. Is it true one of their strikers drives a taxi by day?

MoonshineMike said...

5-2 does sounds better than it was. I think the shock of H&W being up not once, but twice, was enough to give the scousers the ability to bite their tongues.

6 divisions down.